You just can’t get a boat our of Israel it seems. Don’t get me wrong, I was enjoying all the chicken soup and the general hospitality, whilst clearly not necessarily approving of the socio-political situation. Decent oranges though, almost as nice as a Brazilian one. But I only had seven days to get back to London.
As much as I would have liked a trip to the Lebanon to put the boot in again with Phil Oakey I was clearly running out of time. Instead I had to get into Europe, not that as a band they were ostensibly any better than Asia, just slightly less prog and prone to wanky album covers. And so I caught a short plane trip to the place where East meets West. Not the East West record label (whose spewing out of Simply Red records hardly placates people on either continent, but Turkey. In particular Istanbul. A city which should have sued.
Istanbul (Not Constantinople) – THEY MIGHT BE SODDING GIANTS
I have already explored the musical misery that is They Might Be Giants at length. Though some They Might Be Giants fans (!!!) have complained to me that this is a bit unfair because none of the songs I mentioned there were actual TMBG songs. So for the benefit of the clearly most masochist music fans in history, here are ten reasons why Istanbul (Not Constantinople) is one of the worst records ever made.
1: Parenthesis.
2: Tempo change
3: Whiney voices
4: Supposedly clever retelling of fact that everyone knows and thus not clever
5: Lurch does not rhyme with Turks
6: Not very funny off the shelf Turkey flute playing
7: The presence of They Might Be Giants on the record
8: New York changed from New Amsterdam because of a change in colonial jurisdiction NOT because “People just liked it better that way”. Some people, the British, did. Lots of others (the Dutch) didn’t.
9: They didn’t even write it. They actively hunted out a song that sounded like they had written it, thus making it annoying squared.
10: It was a minor hit. Which may not make the record any words per se, but clearly does because it means it is more likely to turn up on the radio, or in the background of a film or just to annoy everyone forever.
I could give you another 91 if you ant 101 reasons but I think they would mostly be summer up by: Its They Might Be Cunting Giants.