Ancient civilizations have always appealed to me. Not just the orgies and debauchery – though they appeal enough to counter the fact that Gin will not have been invented for some considerable time. No, whilst ancient pottery and tales are full of harps, lyres and another musical instruments to torment me, they were not amplified. You could stand in a field in, say, Glastonbury and by virtue of being twenty five yards away NO HEAR ANY MUSIC AT ALL. And Caconfonix in Asterix looked really easy to beat up.
Modern day Greece is not like that. So I decided to make my next step across Europe on a short flight to that other seat of ancient power. Rome. And this was bearing in mind those Cornetto ad’s, a stereotype I thought only restricted to Venice. I was wrong. Almost the moment I stepped off of the plane La Dolce Vita stylee, some inbred loser with a bunch of roses serenaded me in the airport. O Sole E Mio? Arsehole E Mio more like. I soon put him straight.
Rome was very similar to Greece, with its taxis pumping out shed loads of poor music. But I took to the food, the wine and the fact that if – say – Starsailor had been walking down the street it would be really easy to kill them by pushing them under a car.
ROME – The B-52’s
Roam – Rome. It all sounds the same when a chipmunked voice, ultra-perky fifty five year old shouts it out of a transistor radio at you. As a younger woman I had a number of fantasies about the B-52’s. In particular replacing the proto-beehives of Cathy Wilson and Kate Pierson with real actual beehives containing real actual bees that would really, actually sting them to death.
Of course in many ways this single should be called Rome, as their brief existence as the hilariously monikered BC-52’s puts them into the right time period. And what joy it would be to find that they were actually not only from a different time period, but fictional too. Unfortunately some of us had to live through the horror that was Love Shack and its follow up: Roam.
The main lyrics of Roam: namely “Roam if you want to, roam around the world” clearly strikes a chord with me, that being exactly what I am doing. But without the key, “slagging off music in the process” line, we it is hard to sympathise with them. And especially as they tended to Roam to parts of the world where, coincidentally, they were also booked to play gigs. No roaming around Talliban Afghanistan I note where they would have broken more laws that even existed (there is a double jeopardy rule attached to being a band named after a drink named after a haircut named after a flying superfortress). There is little to add here from my previous attack on them except to note that Fred Schneider is such a twat, I am surprised he did not form They Might Be Giants. And Roaming without wings and without wheels might as well as been called WALK.