23 December 2004
The Pogues in Brixton
I was lying flat in a London Osteopathy clinic last night. The Doctor was manipulating a disc in my back, trying to stop the sciatic nerve shooting pain down my leg. He advised me to go home and take a bath. Instead I went to a Pogues concert.
I last saw the band about fifteen years ago. I remember reading an article suggesting now was the time to go as Shane was technically dead. Yet, here he is, 2004, dedicating songs to Joe Strummer and Kirsty MacColl.
OK, he’s forgotten most of the lyrics and his face is fat, but most of the audience looked worse. He covered his mistakes with some yee-has and a silly dance and this wasn’t an impress me crowd anyway.
There’s a kind of homoerotic air at Pogues concerts. Big beery guys with arms around each other. Occasionally they have human tower ideas that end in heaps and puddles. I’m sure some of them even enjoy rugby, but I forgave them last night and got caught up in it all.
Oddly, my back feels a little better this morning.
Mike in FT / New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
21 December 2004
Human After All
For many of you out there, there may be none more seismic a newsflash over the festive season. The prospect of a new Daft Punk album has excited me for some time, but hang on, it’s not been mentioned on The Raft, only NME from what I can tell. And, that title! Those track titles…it’s all rather fishy isn’t it? Risky to speculate either way if you want to avoid getting a plate, getting your words, putting those words on said plate, and eating your words…BUT if it IS true then it did bring to mind an interesting ‘tactic’ for bands as they bid to distinguish their new great work from the last. Supposedly, by denial or retraction they go forwards…almost too keen to convince everyone this one will be different from the previous effort, at least in concept and premise. Not that another Discovery or Homework would probably be a good idea, I think I just adhere to a rather ‘boyish’ (and both appealing yet disturbing) ideal about machines or indeed man-machines being superior to the human, an ethos that’s resulted in some of the most amazing, dynamic electronic pop music of the last 30 years or more. And I hope Thomas and Guy-Man still recognise that and don’t ’sell their turntables and buy guitars’ (to paraphrase ‘Losing My Edge’) as it were.
So I think I’d prefer ‘We Are Still Zer Robotz’ for the title…
Steve Mannion in FT / New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
5 December 2004
Quick ILXor.com update — just in case anyone’s been wondering (I’ve received a slew of e-mails asking!), Andrew G., who oversees the machine in Melbourne, Australia, is aware of the machine shutdown but won’t be able to investigate until Monday morning his time. Please hold tight until then and read all the FT blogs and comment instead. :-)
Ned Raggett in FT / New York London Paris Munich • 5 Comments
3 December 2004
It’s not worth it!: “Artists which could save a man from getting dumped by his girl are Damian Rice, Robbie Williams, Joss Stone, Westlife, Usher and Elton John.”
Tom in FT / New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
8 May 2002
DEMPSEY — “ODB on the run”
OK, so this is a novelty single. While Russell Tyrone Jones languishes in chokey the smart-arse undie-ground are partying up a storm on the back of another tragi-comic hip-hop legend in process. Like the recent Fog material, this is post-Beck slacker-hop: sirens wail for backing vocals, an acoustic guitar and garbage-can drums clatter away on top, and dubious homage is paid to Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s short-lived refuge from the lawmen. Like all good novelty singles, this is a curiously satisfying, and eminently catchy song.
But like all sugar-saturated confectionary it leaves you with a headache. As a career launch-pad record for Californian Geoff McIntire this seems like a cheap piggy-back ride on the notoriety of another. As a ‘tribute’, the record continues the pop-mythologisation of yet another anecdote for an NME fifty most bang-to-right musicmakers article or similar. Yet the ghastly self-parody that was ODB approaching police officers in a burger joint carpark to offer them an autograph haunts this single in its turn. As ODB consumed Russell Jones, so in turn Jones’ immolation consumes McIntire’s work. For just as we depend on myth to make sense of the world, so myth depends on our celebration and re-elaboration to survive. And as myth is inseparable from catastrophe, so a novelty single is the only way to stave off the acknowledgement of our complicity in what became of Jones.
byebyepride in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
7 May 2002
october symphonies – an excellent piece by the village voice’s dennis lim on two overlooked, autumnal british pop records, the pet shop boys’ release and pulp’s we love life — one released quietly in the u.s., the other, not at all. lim uses the word ‘threnody,’ takes on all of those whom equate “irony” with “not meaning it,” and gives a kicking to julia roberts and nick hornby all in the same article (and who hasn’t wanted to do that at least several times?).
fred in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
KATE BUSH — ‘This Woman’s Work’
What Isabel likes about Bush is her range — ‘lots of variety; most of your CDs get boring after a few tracks’ — and I kind of agree, though one Kate Bush song is more like another Kate Bush song than it is anything much else. What I like is her practicality. Which is to say, her best tracks are very compact and unfussy — she packs maximum drama (in the stage sense) into a short time. With ‘Wuthering Heights’ or ‘Breathing’ or ‘Babushka’ she pushes a story into a four-minute box and those tracks can seem a little flushed as a result. With ‘Cloudbusting’ or ‘The Hounds Of Love’ or this track she’s learnt the trick of implying a backstory and a resolution, so these songs feel like the moments of absolute importance within a wider, more mysterious narrative (a life, even).
But also practical in the sense that a Bush song can often be used flexibly — ‘Hounds Of Love’ you can drunkenly giggle about and leap around to and shiver at as the occasion suggests — or all at the same time if you like. Maybe that flexibility is missing from ‘This Woman’s Work’, which I think would hush a party or be defeated by one. The song and its singing is very beautiful — more so 13 years on as the backing synthesizers feel so awkward — and the opening sigh-swoon captures some of the delightful un-fixedness I want from a Bush record. But mostly this seems a different, more straightforward, kind of excellence.
Tom in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
6 May 2002
‘We can live in the
empty spaces of this life/my baby says ‘Far away/the STARS ARE COMING ALL UNDONE/oh but that’s far away, and we’re young!/If the Devil comes, we’ll just shoot him with a gun’
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
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