Paul Fuzz Presents: Flew In From Miami Beach BOAC

Who owns 'Who?', or how scientific is science-fiction meant to be anyway?: Critical responses to The New Doctor Who

2008-05-18T01:56:00.000-07:00

So I'm talking to this theatrical sorta guy the other day, and I tell him how I just bought this old 60s wildlife record called "Bird Sounds In Close Up". Turns out this guy is a real sound effects nut, so we get to talking and his real super-geek specialist subject is "telephone rings and dial tones". The guy says that there's this whole community of people who are really into telephone rings and dial tones throughout telecommunication history, and if any of these cats are watching a period drama on TV, they totally know how historically accurate the telephone sound effects are. If they consider any of the telephone sound effects to be historically inaccurate, they write to the BBC or whoever and draw the mistake to their attention. This guy says - real serious - "oh, yeah, when they get the sounds right it's really great, but when they get them wrong it's kind of annoying. Audiences wouldn't put up with an actress wearing a 1960s mini-skirt in a World War 2 epic, so why should we put up with a 1960s dial tone? It doesn't spoil the whole show for me or anything, but you wish they'd just make an effort to be accurate." He actually quoted an "infamous" example of this from 'Schindlers List'. I mean, this was really an issue for this guy. Like "Yeah, Apocalypse Now was pretty good, but a standard-issue Tel-380 1968 US army field telephone which rings like a standard-issue Tel-381 1976 US army field telephone? Yeah, nice one, Coppola! You must think we're a bunch of idiots trying to get that blunder past us! Why doncha go the whole hog and use a Tel-382 model next time, huh?!"

The point of the story is, people are weird. When this guy sits down to watch a show, one of his criteria for judging it is how accurate the telephone sound effects are. Of course, historical accuracy is a criteria used by everybody to judge the quality of a period drama, and that includes telephone sound effects. If Mr Darcy's mobile goes off and fills the room with the sound of Rhianna's 'Umbrella', most people would consider this a major blunder. A standard period drama implicitly asks to be judged on it's historical accuracy. The difference between a regular joe's assessment of historical accuracy and the Telephone Guy's assessment is that the the regular joe is satisfied with a broad accuracy that avoids any major blunders, and the Telephone Guy is demanding precision from the position of a (self-appointed) expert in this particular field.

Similarly, Science Fiction, or at least a particular type of Science Fiction, can reasonably be judged on the scientific accuracy of the narrative, and similarly there will be regular joes who are satisfied with what appears to be a basic adherence to the fiction's internal logic, and those more seriously science-minded individuals who demand actual scientific accuracy. Over the past few months my mind has become increasingly frazzled by the number of reviewers who criticise Doctor Who on the basis of perceived minor scientific inaccuracies or inconsistencies. I will attempt to outline why I find this critical approach difficult to understand.

On a broad, fundamental level, Doctor Who is daft. Gloriously, magically daft, but daft nonetheless. It's about a guy who travels through time and space in a police box. Whatever theoretical science one chooses to apply to the show, it's still plain silly. Does this mean that the show should not adhere to it's own internal logic, however silly, once established? Of course it does not. But then attacking the shows failure to adhere to it's own internal logic is different to picking holes in the shows scientific accuracy. It would be a problem, or at the very least a head spinning left-turn, if the Doctor suddenly developed the ability to transform into a Volkswagen Beetle, because this would contradict 40 years of Who history. What wouldn't be a problem would be whatever pseudo-scientific explanation the writers gave for this ability, because no scientific explanation, however smart, could account for something so bonkers, and it would be ridiculous to base your criticism of this plot device on the quality of the explanation for it, rather than the plot device itself. "What? 'Synchro-DNA-Transformalisation?' Forget it. 'Trans-DNA Voltswagonalism' I mighta bought, but not this nonsense.' The problem would not be the science, but the fiction.

Sentences in Who reviews like "Are we really supposed to believe a giant man-wasp could hold some lead piping?" boggle the mind. You've successfully suspended your disbelief to the extent that you're willing to get on board with the giant man-wasp. But you're drawing the line at the giant man-wasp being able to hold a piece of metal? Clearly an audience should not be expected to accept incomprehensible, senseless plot twists, but criticisms like this, where the perceived 'problem' is based on the reviewers arbitrary decision about where they draw the line of believability, is sheer insanity. "I stopped believing this situation at the point the shadow of the giant man-wasp could be seen holding lead piping" is not valid criticism.

Doctor Who is famously the scary TV show which has children hiding behind the sofa. Children. Too many reviews I read just plain ignore the fact that this is a show built to some extent to be enjoyed by families and children, and that it is on the level of quality family / kids adventure telly that Who excels most consistently. While this does not mean older, bloggy types should disconnect their scientific critical faculties for the duration of the show, it does need to be factored into their criticism of it. I've always sort of thought if Doctor Who is owned by any demographic, then it is The Kids, not bloggers and sci-fi nuts, to whom it is ultimately answerable.

My Top 5 Predictions For 2008

2008-01-02T05:01:00.000-08:00

.1. Radiohead invent new music format: After singlehandedly inventing 'the internet' in 2007, wrongheaded overachievers and erstwhile pointlessly awkward bastards Radiohead will in 2008 release their next album on a brand new format they've been developng for the past two years called 'tape casette'. Details are sketchy, but early indications are that these 'tape casettes' will weigh 20 pounds each and resemble the head of Henry Kissinger. Those crazy Radio boys are confident they can eventually mass manufacture something called a 'tape casette' 'player' on which to 'play' these 'tape casettes'. Said Thom Yorke: "I'm all over the muvvafugger."

.2. All Music Will Be 'Quite Good': Seeing as Music was worse in 2007 than at any time since pre-Strokes 2000 or The Eighties, and has produced a worryingly high number of bands - Hadouken!, The Wombats - rated in the Guiness Book Of Hit Records as 'Possesing Terrible Brian Killing Powers', I summoned Music to the heavily fortified, Jonestown-style Electric Roulette compound for 'a little chat'...
So I was all like: "Yo, Music. Sit your ass down, and listen up. One year ago you were sat opposite me in this room, jus' like you are now, and you laid a whole buncha candycane, suger-pie jive on me 'bout how 2007 was gonna be a vintage year. Vintage. '1956, 1967, 1977, 2007." That's what you said. But guess what. 2007 stunk up the place like a malfunctioning skunk. And you're talking to a guy who remembers the woeful heap of garbage you came up with back in 2000. Oh, what, 2000 wasn't that bad? Two words for ya buddy: Papa. Roach. But now, after 2007, shit, I'd take a 2000 in a New York Minute. 2000 was Disneyland compared to 2007. I mean, Remi Nicole : are you kiddin' me?" So Music made me a promise that all Music in 2008 would be at least 'quite good', which I thought was fair.

.3. Hit Records-A-Mundo: Industry 'insiders' are already predicting that 2008's hottest chart trend will be the incedental music from 80s and 90s US Sitcoms, with Bob James's Fender Rhodes-tastic 'Taxi' score, the bar-piano jingles from 'Cheers' and The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air's pop-rap instrumentals leading the pack. Personally I like the slap-bass from Seinfeld. Composed by Jonathan Wolff. That's right.

.4. Mole People: When you're not 'getting down' to the slap-bass stylings of Seinfeld composer Jonathan Wolff, 2008 is gonna be all about The Mole People. You know The Mole People, right? You don't? Uh, they're hideous human-sized moles who walk on their hind legs...they've lived in the earth's core for billions of years...call us 'Surface Crawlers'...developed an entire mole civilisation down there which existed in in blisfully ignorant harmony with us until some kid in Florida dug a really big hole at the beach one day and accidently stumbled across it sparking a Mole People / Surface Crawlers diplomatic 'incident' which has now been resolved due to the efforts of Connie Rice and Grand Chief Marshall Xtishiik Taai Of The Vsritsh Taai Northern Mole Armies...organised last Summers LiveDirt concerts with Bono and Bob Geldof to raise awareness about the ever decreasing supplies of soil and gravel and stuff that Mole People need to claw away at with their massive spade-like hands in order to survive...no? Nothing? Anyway, Mole People. Look out for 'em in 2008, they're gonna be huge. They sorta sound like The Hoosiers, but with more relentless, thunderous banging on ancient tom-tom like Xdrivsnik Mole 'Drums Of War' and 'singing' in a 'language' consisting of brutal, gutteral grunts and piercing shrieks which are at best utterly incomprehensible to the human brain and at worst capable of inducing in human listeners violent bouts of vomiting, nose bleeds and 'fitting' which can last for up to two weeks after the performance, which will itself - on average - have lasted three weeks, with short breaks taken for clawing at dirt and rock with their massive spade like hands.

.5. Mojo Magazine 'Digs' John Lennon: Having finally written literally everything there is to be written about The Beatles, listed their 400 + songs in every possible mathmatical combination, twice, given away free CDs featuring Beatles covers by every single artist in the entire world who isn't The Beatles and printed every photograph ever taken of The Beatles, of everybody they ever met, of everybody they never met, of people who had just heard of them, of people who have never heard of them, of everything they ever sat on or maybe saw one time, the word on the steet is that Mojo Magazine's efforts to satisfy their readership's unquenchable thirst for Fabsploitation will in 2008 reach it's inevitable conclusion when they exhume the body of John Lennon, reanimate his corpse and interview Zombie Lennon for the year's biggest cover story. Paul McCartney is expected to make a statement shortly afterwards about how actually he had the idea of being zombified 'first'.

Kick-Ass Band Name Motherlode Discovered

2007-12-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows the first thing you need to do when forming a band is to come up with a KICK-ASS NAME. Before you write any songs, before you learn to play an instrument, shit, before you own an instrument, you need a kick-ass name. I mean, you get a bunch of mates together and say "Oh, it doesn't really matter what we're called at this point, let's just call ourselves Keane" - what have you got to aim for? You'll end up sounding like Keane! You need a name to inspire you, a name which demands you make music kick-ass enough to justify it! But coming up with a kick-ass name isn't easy. Infact, it's the hardest thing in the whole world. The junior band namer is facing down the barrel of 60 years of used up band names. I mean, are you really gonna come up with a better band name than The Grateful Dead? Or The Velvet Underground? Shit, whydoncha quit right now?

NO! DON'T quit right now! 'Cos I've discovered THE MOTHERLODE OF KICK-ASS NEVER-USED-BEFORE BAND NAMES. DOZENS of 'em. Suitable for any genre. Band names so incredible that the mind struggles to comprehend the overwhelming kick-assness of the 'em. And where did I discover this mythical haul? Why, dear reader...IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

Dig: I'm flicking through an A-Z Of Television type book this week and I'm reading about The Twilight Zone, a show which is unspeakably cool for a whole buncha reasons that I don't really have time to get into here, and I'm looking down the episode guide - thinking, 'gee, I wonder if there might be a good band name here, I mean, "We got it from an old episode of The Twilight Zone" is a pretty hip reason to give when explaining "how we came up with our name", but I suppose that would be too much to ask...OH MY GOD! THERE'S HUNDREDS OF 'EM!" Check 'em out! The hits don't stop coming!

The Best...

Deaths-Head Revisited (Season 3): I've baggsied this one, and you bastards'll have to have me buried in my cold, cold grave 'fore you get your dirty mits on it. This is an incredible band name; the Nazi / Hells Angels insignia reference, the Brian Jonestown Massacre styled slacker punk pun...when I get my Velvets / Warlocks drone rock outfit going, y'all better watch out for DEATHS-HEAD REVISITED.

Black Leather Jackets (Series 5): How great is that? The Black Leather Jackets. I'm thinking...scuzzy, dirty Hamburg-era Beatles styled Rock and Roll combo, all dressed in...y'know...and this wouldn't even be their actual name, it'd just be what the local German girls call 'em 'cos that'd be they can't translate their proper name (like the Japanese called The Beatles 'The Yeah Yeahs').

The Purple Testament (Season 1): S'gotta be prog. "Hello Wyoming! We are PURPLE TESTAMENT!" I hope you like our new direction..."

Ring-A-Ding Girl (Season 5): The Ring-A-Ding Girls. 50's hipster slang reference, with a femme twist. S'gotta be a Shangri-Las meets Etta James girl-group go RnB combo...like The Pipettes, but with more than one good song.

And the rest... (really good ones in bold) (Pluralisation added where appropriate)

Season 1: The Lonely / The Four Of Us Are Dying (emo) / The Hitch-Hiker (s) / The Last Flight / The Fever / The Big Tall Wish (US college rock) / The Chaser (s) (acid-jazz) / The After Hours / The Mighty Casey (Alt. Country)

Season 2: The Howling Man (Men) / The Lateness Of The Hour (emo) / The Trouble With Templeton / A Most Unusual Camera (post-punk) / The Whole Truth / The Invaders (already name of a legendary funk band) / The Odyssey Of Flight 33 (prog) / The Prime Mover (s) ('High Numbers' style Mod) / The Rip Van Winkle Caper / The Silence / Shadow Play (Joy Division tie-in) / The Obsolete Man (Men)

Season 3: The Shelter / The Passerby (s) / The Midnight Sun / (The) Dead Mans Shoes (Tom Waits / Nick Cave) / The Trade-Ins (Post Libs grot-rock) / The Gift (Velvets tie-in)

Season 4: The Thirty Fathom Grave (goth) / The Parallel / The New Exhibit (art rock) / The Incredible World Of Horace Ford (hands off, this ones mine too) / The Bard (Shakspeare rock)

Season 5: (The) Nightmare At 20,000 Feet / The Last Night Of A Jockey / The 7th Is Made Up Of Phantoms / The Long Morrow / The Self Improvement of Salvadore Ross / The Masks (art rock) / I Am The Night / The Jeopardy Room / The Encounter (s) (soul revue) / The Brain Centre At Whipples / The Fear / The Bewitchin' Pool

So at a rough count I figure The Twilight Zone is responsible for 45 kick-ass band names! Print off this page and stick a pin in it! I look forward to catching The Brain Centre At Whipples at Glasto next year...

The Worst Song I've Ever Heard #263

2007-12-08T10:57:00.000-08:00

The Wombats - Let's Dance To Joy Division

Music: Fast-Track Graduate Scheme Rock In The Contemporary Style. Jack Panate not enough of a dumb-headed posho for you? The Hoosiers not sickeningly desperate enough for mainstream Jo Whiley sponsored faux-indie success for you? Do you find Scouting For Girls just don't appeal to Sports Science students enough? Try The Wombats! They've got a crazeee name! They probably claim they make 'intelligent pop music'! But actually they hate pop music! It's post-modern double-thinkery of the most irritatingly pretentious kind! If they really liked pop music they'd be making exciting, fizzy, dance floor slaying records that sound like Girls Aloud instead of this wonky, humdrum, watered down sub-Young Knives chart alt. rock, and we'd all thank 'em for it! Climaxes in the deployment of a school choir, a pop music tactic which has become something of a cliche of late (see Jamie T), apparently thrown in because the air raid sirens, crowd sfx and kitchen sink couldn't be located.

Lyrics: The real kicker. Chorus: "Let's dance to Joy Division, and celebrate the i-ron-y." There are so many things wrong with this lyric that the mind reels at the kaleidoscopic awfulness of it all. I don't really care what point The Womats are making, I dunno if they're berating clueless hipsters for jiving to Joy Div, or applauding the recontexualisation of Joy Div as indie disco music, whatever, it's all pretty confused and of absolutely of no value to anyone either way. Referencing Joy Division is simply an act of artless clever-cleverness. I mean, come on guys! Joy Division? Is that the best canonised post-punk doomapalooza act you could come up with? Why not Gang Of Four? Caberet Voltaire? Aren't we all sorta over the whole Joy Div thing by now? Even The Killers don't care about 'em anymore! And word to the wise: when you're producing a song as drenched in irony as this, DON'T ACTUALLY USE THE WORD 'IRONY' IN THE LYRICS! It's sorta unnecessary don't ya think? It's like, WE GET IT! You're CONCEPTUAL!

Oh, and anuvva thang: you're from Liverpool. You should sound like The Las. That's the rule. If you don't like it, be from somewhere else.

Beyond The White Album: Top 10 Albums Named After A Colour (But Not, Like, 'Green' by REM, It's Gotta Be A 'The (insert colour) Album' Type Title

2007-10-15T06:10:00.000-07:00

.1. The White Album - The Beatles

AKA: The Daddy of colour coded albums. There ain't really nuffin more to say about this double LP, except that any fool who tries to lay the whole "oh, if they'd ditched some of the crap songs it woulda been a brilliant single LP" jive on you is a stone fool - the rummer ditties give the great songs (of which there are way more than on, say, Sgt Peppers) context. It's a collage. It's kaleidoscopic. It's a Fluxus art installation. As Paul McCartney himself says: "It was great, it sold - it's the bloody Beatles' 'White Album'! Shut up!"

.2. The Black Album - Jay Z

Features '99 Problems,' a Rick Rubin production, and by this writer's estimation the greatest Hip-Hop track of the Noughties. Sampling Billy Squier's 'The Big Beat,' Mountain's 'Long Red,' Ice-T's own '99 Problems' and uncredited portions of Wilson Pickett's 'Engine No 9' and - possibly - NWA's 'Straight Outta Compton', '99 Problems' represents the high watermark of Rubin's thundering, stripped down rock/rap sound, and is guaranteed to fill the dancefloor of any club. Despite claiming this would be his last LP J-Hova has of course returned to the mic, but he's yet to top the monsterous thump of '99 Problems'.

.3. The Grey Album - Danger Mouse

And whaddya get if you fuse the first two titles in our list together? You get The Grey Album, the mash-up LP which transcends the inherently gimmicky mash-up genre to become a truly great, coherent LP in its' own right, the vocals from Jay Z's 'Black Album' spat over 'White Album' Beatle Beats, to frequently astonishing ends. Pure pop-art, and sure to piss humourless so-called Beatles fans off while delighting real Fabs fanatics who recognise this as a concept Lennon at least woulda surely dug the most. Some tracks work better than others, and one could argue that it's a pretty one sided deal (the Beatles being cut and diced to fit the Jigga Man's rhymes rather than the other way around), but all this is small so much small beer when presented with the LP as a whole. The 99 Problems / Helter Skelter mix is a slam dunk, and the Encore / Glass Onion mix (check this brilliant mash-up video at youtube, featuring a breakdancing Lennon) is as groovy as they come. We all knew that Ringo was a funky muvva.

.4. The Pink Album - Tuscadero

One of the all-time shoulda-been-huge 90s bands, Washington DC's two girls / two boys Tuscadero (after 'Happy Days' leather bound hottie Pinkie Tuscadero) were indie-bubblegum-poppers par excellence, dealing in a hook heavy, girl-group informed trash racket unburdened of the cynicism of grunge or the sloganeering of Riot Grrrl. With goofy lyrics about boardgames, candy and Nancy Drew, the whole lip gloss and milkshakes thing might be sorta twee if the vibe weren't so damn infectious and, dammit, straight up cool. Guaranteed to give you a sugar rush like two bowls of Fruit Loops.

.5. The Yellow Album - The Simpsons

Seeing as The Simpsons reference The Beatles almost as frequently as it references Star Wars (in one instance dedicating an entire episode - 'Homers Barbershop Quartet - to a pastiche Beatles history), it makes sense that their second LP should be titled in their honour, and bare Sgt Pepper's aping cover art. While not in the league of 'Songs In The Key Of Spingfield', 'The Yellow Album' contains its' fair share of killer material, the highlights being Barts' 'Love' and Apu's '24 Hours A Day'. (Note: there's another cartoon 'Yellow Album' by Spongebob Squarepants. AVOID.)

.6. The Black Album - Spinal Tap

Nigel Tufnel: "It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black."

.7. The Off-White Album - Dennis Miller

With a title like that it's gotta be a comedy album, and sure enough that's exactly what it is. Released in 1988, 'The Off-White Album' captures Saturday Night Live alumini Dennis Miller on top form before he had turned into an obnoxious, ranting, right wing reactionary, and stopped being, y'know, funny. Dated somewhat by the source material, but packed with some really great gags (some about 'Smokey & The Bandit', brilliantly) this is a fine late 80s US standup LP, the reputation of which has suffered somewhat due to Miller now being a Bush supporting Republican jackass.

.8. The Blue Album - Weezer

Like The Fab's 'White Album', geek rocking Weezer's debut has become popularly referred to by it's primary sleeve colour as a consequence of it being an untitled / self titled ('Weezer' by Weezer) LP. Some come-as-absolutely-no-surprise-when-you-learn-them facts about this album: it was produced by new-wave legend Ric Ocasek from The Cars, the 'Happy Days' video for 'Buddy Holly' was directed by Spike Jonze, and the song "In The Garage" includes classic mid-90s slacker references to KISS and The X Men. Of course it does. Of it's type, a wonderful album, since co-opted by alt. rock kids as a key proto-Emo LP.

.9. The Red Album - Manchester United FC

Subtitle: "A Mancunian Fantasy," though perhaps 'nightmare' might be more accurate. Featuring the hits: "Cantona Superstar" by Her! "Ryan Giggs We Love You" by The Rainbow Choir! And many (Brian) Moore! From what I can glean (which ain't much) this is a 1993 LP which includes a mixture of spoken word from the likes of Bill Shankley, Bobby Charlton etc and a buncha random pop tunes with a Red theme, from the inevitable 'Belfast Boy' (a cover by 'Chocolate Barry' - any ideas?) to Manchester United Calypso by Edric Connor. Sounds like an 'own goal' to me. Ha ha.

.10. The Blue Album - The Beatles

And we'll finish back where we came in, with der Fabs. This choice suggests a debate all of it's own; The Beatles 'Red Album' collects the best (?) of their work released between 1962 and 1966, The Beatles 'Blue Album' gathers together their 1967-1970 output. The question, therefore, is: are you an early period (Red) Beatles fan, or a late period (Blue) Beatles fan? I'm gonna nail my blue flag to the post and go 67-70, for Strawberry Fields Forever, Come Together, I Am The Walrus, Don't Let Me Down and The Ballad Of John & Yoko, but I ain't gonna argue with anyone who'd plump for their early stuff.

With Red, White and Blue Albums to their name, The Beatles are the sho ' nuff masters of The (insert colour) Album, but who else has released awesome LPs in this micro-genre? I know that I've missed a bunch off this list (including a major heavy metal debut), so howsabout you make a few suggestions of your own. Come on guys, "Colour Me Bad!" (Sorry.)

And The Award For Most Pointless Awards Ceremony On The Music Biz Calender Goes To....

2007-10-12T02:29:00.000-07:00

THE Q AWARDS! I mean, who cares, right? Who even knew this celeb back-slappingpalooza was happening today? (Apparently it was held at "London’s" Grosvenor House Hotel.) The thing is: what does it matter in 2007 what Q Magazine thinks about anything? Back in the mid-90s Q was a reasonably entertaining rag, well written, funny, never cool per se, but had a certain sardonic charm and as long as there was a decent interview with Noel Gallagher you were pretty happy. In 2007 Q Magazine is basically one long advert for i-tunes, lazily churning out arbitrary ALL TIME TOP 100 GREATEST ROCK SONGS YOU MUST DOWNLOAD (from i-tunes) lists, endless Dave Grohl interviews and throwing Snow Patrol albums 5 star reviews. It is the Bible Of Bland. I don't even know who it's aimed at anymore. £50 Bloke buys Uncut. Klaxons Kid buys The NME. Still Buys Vinyl..uh...Guy reads Mojo. So who reads Q Magazine? Who cares what Q Magazine thinks? And what, therefore, is the value of a Q Award? A top musician getting a Q Award is like a top chef getting a Wimpy Award.

....so, Kylie won the Q Icon Award. With all due respect to Ms Minogue, this was a cynical exploitation of her tabloid column inches grabbing potential, and nothing to do with whatever baloney they span about Kylie's post-Cancer recovery determination to re-launch her career, or, y'know, her music, which has been brilliant on occasion (Slow, Confide In Me) and deserving of recognition in it's own right. As it happens I think Kylie deserves every award going, good luck to her, rather her than the relentlessly dull Manic Street Preachers (Q Magazine stalwarts) who - yawn - won Best Track for "Your Love Alone Is Not Enough," a song which said less about 2007 than the Beaux Tapestry, or The Enemy (Best New Act), who are just plain godawful, and ugly as sin to boot.

Elsewhere, The Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs, Damon Albarn and Ian Brown won awards for various contributions to mainstream indie-rock, Kate Nash & Amy Winehouse picked up awards for actually producing decent pop music ( I know I'm in a minority with this Kate Nash thing, all my mates hate her, but I think she's just fine), Paul McCartney was granted 'Icon' status, because it's a rule that Paul McCartney has to win something at every Q Awards, and Muse won Best Live Act, because it's a rule that Muse win Best Live Act at every awards show, even at non-music award shows like the Booker Prize or The Kings Lynn Annual Sunflower Growing Contest. (For the record, I hate Muse.)

Finally, dig this: The Q Classic Song Award went to...'Local Boy In The Photograph'. By The Stereophonics. I mean, you gotta be kidding me. They pick one song to be The Q Classic Song every year. ONE SONG. There's millions of great songs in the world. Billions. And they choose this, an average late 90s rock song by a band who have never been any good, ever. I mean, shit, why doncha just go ahead and pick The Verve's 'Urban Hymns' as the Q Classic Album and have done with it...oh. You already have. (For the record, I love their first two LPs.) This all gives you some idea of where Q are at in 2007; they're in 1998. And nobody likes 1998. (Paul Fuzz)

Essential Rock 'n' Roll Fashion # 328: The Fat Gold Chain

2007-09-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

It's 1984. The Hip-Hop bug has bitten you like a 10 pound cockroach. You've been honing your beat-boxing skillz all week, and your Mum's pissed 'cos you cut a piece of her living room carpet out so you could practise breakin' in the park. You've got a boom-box the size of a Shetland pony, and you're rockin' a fly box-fresh pair of Adidas Gazelles. And yet, despite all this, something's still missing...you're hangin' round the Arndale Centre droppin' some bad (that's bad meaning good, not bad meaning bad) lyrics in the cipher, your graf is on some next level shit, but you still ain't gettin' the props you so clearly deserve. Then it suddenly dawns on you. It don't matter what sort of game you got...if you don't got a Fat Gold Chain. The mighty Run-DMC, pictured here, knew the power of the Fat Gold Chain. This ain't no ordinary bling. This is a huge gold rope around your neck that says: "I'm takin' care of business."

To understand the history of the Fat Gold Chain (or 'Dookie' rope chain), we gotta go back, way back, to the days of Hot Buttered Soul. That's right, we're talkin' Issac Hayes, BLACK MOSES, who was known to 'floss' not just a single Fat Gold Chain, but an entire suit made of 'em. Well, not really a suit. But he wore a bunch of 'em, wrapped round his naked torso like a glittering string vest. Check his performance at Wattstax ("THE BLACK WOODSTOCK") in 1972: here's a dude who knows what's happenin'. For Isaac, the gold chain string vest was a symbol of black power, of in-your-face masculinity. It says: I SHALL FUNK YOUR WORLD.

So when yer back-in-the-day Hip-Hop legends were lookin' to bring some of that ol' funk flava to their style, the Black Moses approved Fat Gold Chain was an obvious accompaniment to a pair of shell-toes and a Kangol hat. The Fat Gold Chain became a status symbol, a statement of wealth, success, of how far you've come in The Game. It says: "I'm getting real paid." Widely popularised by the likes of Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick and Kurtis Blow, and with the look perfected by Run- DMC, in the mid 80s you weren't shit if you weren't rocking a 'dookie' rope chain.

The Fat Gold Chain has become synonymous with a more innocent age, of simpler Hip-Hop times, before shootings, gangsta rap, crack and big money dragged it into a darker place. Consequently The Fat Gold Chain is an item remembered fondly, evoked in lyrics by many contemporary rappers with an air of wistful nostalgia. Modern bling culture may have produced some wonderful accessories (Ghostface Killer's Golden Eagle amulet springs instantly to mind), but the definitive, original piece of Hip-Hop bling, shall forever be The Fat Gold Chain.

"fascinated by gold rope chains
looking back at my hood days
but things ain't changed." - Nas, 'Kids In The PJs'

George 'Shadow' Morton: The Trash Pop King Of New York

2007-09-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

George 'Shadow' Morton: This guy wrote wrote & produced, among other melodramatic teen-pop masterpieces, 'Walking In The Sand' and 'Leader Of The Pack' by The Shangri-Las. 'Leader Of The Pack' - featuring talky gossipy girl bits, motorcycle sound effects bits and lasting 2:53 minutes is: The Perfect Pop Song. Then the other day I learnt that he produced proto-heavy rock combo Vanilla Fudge's first two LPs, including their insane hammond powered psyche-soul version of 'You Keep Me Hanging On', and even though Der Fudge couldn't write a decent tune for toffee, I've always thought their SOUND was just incredible, massive drums, loadsa overdriven organ, fuzz guitar, I mean, it's like a PASTICHE of that sorta sound almost, it's a huge, OTT sound, and when I learnt 'Shadow' Morton was the architect of this sound I was like "Oh, MAN! This guy's A TOTAL GENIUS! Of COURSE he produced the first two Vanilla Fudge LPs! The Shangri-Las and Vanilla Fudge! WHAT ELSE DID HE DO?" Then I wikipedia the guy and find he produced 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' by Iron Butterfly! OF COURSE HE DID! I mean, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida is pretty much the shlockiest, dirgiest hunk of boneheaded hippyspoiltation psychedelia ever produced, even more so than der Fudge, I mean it's like, what, 17 minutes long or whatever, BUT - like Der Fudge's 'You Keep Me Hanging On' and 'Leader Of The Pack' - it is Pure A1 High Trash of the finest quality, has that ace, if incredibly over-repeated riff, and has earnt a special place in American Pop Culture. Then I read on a bit further and it turns out he produced THE SECOND NEW YORK DOLLS RECORD! Which, to be fair, pretty much sucked. But that wasn't George's fault. And producing The New York Dolls even if the album sucked is still really cool. George 'Shadow' Morton is The King Of The Really Great / Dead Trashy American Pop Record! AND his name is SHADOW MORTON! The COOLEST name EVER! I'm gonna start a Shangri-Las meets Vanilla Fudge garage-soul band and call 'em The Shadow Mortons! "THEY'RE LIKE THE SHANGR-LA'S...ON ACID!" I'd go and see a Shangri-Las meets Vanilla Fudge band called The Shadow Mortons! Wouldn't you?

The Grunge Noir Of 'Clerks'

2007-07-24T10:04:00.000-07:00

Clerks (Dir Kevin Smith, 1994, Miramax)

Ladies & Gentledudes, I present to you Kevin Smith's 'Clerks', the prototypical 90s slacker movie. Concept: two college drop-outs called Randal & Dante hang out at the New Jersey convenience store and neighbouring video store where they work, spend entire movie rapping about sex and Star Wars, playing roller hockey etc. Dialogue is generally wise-ass & garnished with all sortsa super-hip pop culture references. Supporting cast is made up of junkies & dope dealers, a couple of whom are weed tokin' grunge punks custom-bulit for instant cult status and Mtv pop cross-over success. Soundtrack consists of early 90s US alt rock desinged to really max those Generation X CD sales. 'Clerks': the prototypical 90s slacker movie.

When I first caught 'Clerks' at a friend's dorm room in first year Uni (shout out to my man Rob Laverick), I knew almost nothing about it, and so I understood it only instinctively as an art-house experiment in no-budget black comedy, a fairly high-brow (though generally unpretentious) movie characterised by naturalistic performances, a wildly creative script and a distinctive aesthetic all of it's own. Basically I just thought it was pretty damn cool. I mean, it's shot in black & white: it's gotta be art, right? I loved all the 'Star Wars' stuff, there were alot of genuine laugh-out-loud jokes, I dug the whole 'entire narrative based in one location' thing (being a 'Resevoir Dogs' / 'Die Hard' / '12 Angry Men' fan) plus it just looked so great and different, this heavily distressed, punk, B&W lo-fi aesthetic: grunge noir.

Much of my favourite art is art which was created with hugely limited resources, and the things I love about them are frequently the consequences of those limitations. 'Louie Louie' by The Kingsmen is an awesome all-time garage rock monster precisely because it is sloppy, rushed and amateurish, NOT in spite of those things. The same is true, say, of Ed Wood's 'Plan 9 From Outer Space', or the Velvet Underground's first three LPs. It is the falling short of perfection that is interesting. And the fact that a particular look or a particular sound is the result of something as protosaic as budget restraints as opposed to uncompromised artistic vision, is totally irrelevent. Those limited resources are what gives the art it's character, they enforce a strict aesthetic, impose themselves upon the tone & look of the whole piece, and consequently the piece begins to warp, it becomes something other, wierd, underground... cultish.

It says alot about Smith's own taste in cinema that every explicit movie reference in the 'Clerks' is not to avant garde film or even to the pulp/cult/alternative canon quoted in Tarantino's contemporary Miramax work, but to the super-mainstream 70s high-concept blockbuster cinema of Lucas & Spielberg, namely 'Star Wars', 'Jaws' and 'Indiana Jones'. The allusions to this supposedly 'low-brow' school of cinema are central to the Generation X, post-modern tone of 'Clerks' - the generation 'Clerks' represents was brought up on 'Star Wars', not Swedish art-house, and more-over they are a generation who refuse to acknowledge notions of high & low brow, of 'the canon.' So when Randal & Dante discuss the moral & political subtext of 'Return Of The Jedi', Gen Xers cheer them on 'cos it reflects their own belief that 'Star Wars' is just as worthy of critical debate as 'Citizen Kane'. Maybe more worthy.(For the record, they're right. 'Star Wars' is waaaay better than 'Citizen Kane'.)

So it comes to pass that a Gen X director with a George Lucas addiction makes a movie, but 'cos he don't got no bread or no Hollywood connections he can't make his movie look like 'Star Wars', it's gotta look all grungy and badly lit and roughly edited. It's gotta be black and white. And it looks amazing. Not only that, but the one thing which no budget can affect - the quality of the script - is brilliant from beginning to end. You're lucky this review wasn't just a list of memorable quotes.

"Look at you, you can't even play! Don't pass to this guy, he sucks. You suck!"

You had to allow me one.

Crazy Horses: The Osmonds Re-Evaluated

2007-07-15T04:27:00.001-07:00

As far as I can tell, almost everything The Osmonds ever did sucked beyond all reason. They were the living end, a buncha perma-grinning freaks in glitter flares whose emptyheaded sub-Jackson 5 bubblegummery was custom built solely to distract America from the Vietnam War, social breakdown, Watergate etc etc...and yet, somehow they managed to produce THIS MONSTER, 'Crazy Horses', one of my all time favourite singles, a wacked-out psychedelic-soul stomper which comes fully equipped with insane wailing vintage synths, crazy guitar breaks, thumping drums and a fat brass section. Amazingly, a brief Googling has revealed that this is far from The Osmonds only acid-soul nugget, but until I dig all those out the crate, here's the quite-good-sometimes Osmonds, with 'Crazy Horses'.

"Woah...Rock & Roll": The role of popular music in Back To The Future

2007-07-04T15:01:00.000-07:00

The following post started out as a simple 'Rock Encyclopedia' type entry for fictional Doo-Wop band, Back To The Future's 'Marvin Berry & The Starlighters'. It developed into a much broader look at the role pop-music plays in the movie, and how the differences between 50s and 80s pop music are used to reflect wider social changes.

.1. Marvin Berry & The Starlighters (Back To The Future 1 & 2)
A locally popular RnB combo who played juke joints & high school dances around the Hill Valley area of California during the mid to late 50s, and who earnt themselves a minor footnote in the rock history books by virtue of bandleader Marvin Berry being the cousin of rock and roll godfather Chuck Berry.

The Starlighters are a great example of the accurately drawn genre band, they are an archetype, representing every small-time, but locally successful, RnB / Doo-Wop group of the era, of which there were 100s. They are: The Mid 50s Californian Doo-Wop Band. Crucially, the rendering of The Starlighters is not just accurate in a broad sense - the attention to detail and joyful use of genre cliches are a treat for anybody with an affection for the music or the period, which is of course a trait common to the entire movie.

(Biff's gang dump Marty McFly in the trunk of The Starlighters car. The band emerge from the vehicle enveloped in huge clouds of marijuana smoke)

Starlighter: 'the hell you doin' to my car?
3-D: Hey beat it, spook, this don't concern you.
Marvin Berry: Who are you callin' spook, pecker-wood?
Skinhead: Hey, hey listen guys. Look, I don't wanna mess with no reefer addicts, okay?

Dig the hip 50s slang. Brilliant stuff.

Music plays a huge part in the BTTF Trilogy, and the evolution of pop music culture from the 50s to Marty's Mtv 80s is a central theme. The very first words Marty McFly says are: "Woah...Rock & Roll," having being blown backwards by the power of the worlds biggest electric guitar amplifier. The Starlighters are but one of three different bands we encounter during the trilogy. Marty, of course, dreams of being a rock star, and has his own band, The Pinheads (another awesome name). The Pinheads are kicked out of a Battle Of The Bands audition ("I'm afraid you're just too damn loud") by a judge played by... Huey Lewis, of Huey Lewis and The News, whose song "The Power Of Love" The Pinheads have just performed. Playfull postmodernism certainly, but it also speaks to how deeply embedded music is in the fabric of BTTF. The trick is repeated in BTTF III, where impressively bearded boogie rock band ZZ Top play an impressively bearded hillbilly band jamming an 1885 version of their song 'Double Back'.

On top of which, the most enduring and popularly remembered scene is Marty McFly pullin' all sortsa wild Hendrix/Chuck Berry/AC/DC electric rock god moves at a mid 50s high-school dance and freaking everybody out . The differences between 1950s Hill Valley & 1980s Hill Valley are explored through specific characters & images that are directly reflected in both eras, and when the differences are presented to us we are encouraged to think about not only how Hill Valley has changed, but how US pop culture as a whole has changed over that tumultuous period. Music is one example, but politics (in the form of Mayor Goldie Wilson - "I like the sound of that"), cinema & politics (Ronald Reagan's ascent from movie star to President) fashion (much is made of Marty's Nikes), science fiction itself (Marty's Darth Vader inspired performance as a spaceman, George's pulp comic books), how you order a coke, cars, amongst other themes are compared & contrasted. If this were a straight period drama set in th 50s, then period authenticity would be expected simply for historical accuracy & visual interest, but this is a time-traveling movie, they show you both eras, and that allows BTTF to directly comment on the differences between the two decades. It is a meditation on change.

BTTF is one way in which 80s Action Cinema adressed, re-evaluated, and re-imagined Classical Hollywood. The trilogy is littered with references to the history of cinema; Clint Eastwood, Taxi Driver, Jaws, Star Wars, Leone movies, among others, are all quoted. This sort of commentary on cinema is quite common to The 80s Action Cinema, but BTTF's heavy focus on popular music is something quite special, and is a huge factor in the popularity of the trilogy. The same is true of the Waynes World & Bill and Ted movies, both 'rock' movies in subject matter & sprit. Fans of BTTF tend to be Waynes World fans. Pop music fans like BTTF, because it is film just as in love with rock 'n' roll as they are.

(Fake Rock Band Encyclopedia entries for The Electric Mayhem [Muppets], Wyld Stallyns [Bill & Ted], Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes [Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope] and Jessica Rabbit [Who Framed Roger Rabbit] will follow shortly, and feel free to suggest any other great fictional bands from TV & Cinema, the more esoteric the better, so no 'Spinal Tap'. "No Spinal Tap? Denied!")

'He really is a groovy cat', or A Few Suggestions For A New Who Assistant

2007-07-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

Roger Rabbit: One of the problems with Martha is that she hasn't seemed very animated, so who better to replace her than a character who - check this - is LITERALLY ANIMATED. Yeah? And of all animated characters, who better than Roger Rabbit, a cartoon with a serious background in working with real life humans. Oh, it'd be the coolest. Judge Doom would make an AWESOME Who baddie, and even The Weasels who play Judge Doom's 'Toon Patrol' henchmen could cameo. You remember the 'Toon Patrol', doncha? I love those guys. Smart Ass, Greasy, Psycho, Wheezy, Stupid, the whole gang. "We godda reliable tip off that der rabbit was here. It was co-rob-eraded by sederal udders."

A couple of other possible cartoon Dr Who assistants with a background in working with real life humans up for your consideration -

Jerry from 'Tom & Jerry': dig his dance sequence with Gene Kelly in 'Anchors Aweigh'. That mouse can really dance. I mean, there's not an episode of 'Tom & Jerry' that goes by where I don't want my homeboy Tom to tear the smug little rodent bastard to bits, but man, can that mouse dance.

The Pink Panther: dig the 'real life' opening titles from 'The Pink Panther Show'. How great was the The Pink Panther? "Well here is: The Pink Panther! The Pink Panther! Everybody loves a panther that's pink!" Of course they do! "He really is a groovy cat! He's a gentleman, a scholar, he's an acrobat!" It's as plain as your nose! Awesome crime-jazz soundtrack, hipster animation style, great supporting cast - esp. The Ant & The Aadvark...I just read on Wikipedia that the original show ran for over 10 years between the mid 60s & late 70s, after which they experimented with a bunch of different Pink formats with names like "The Pink Panther Laugh and a Half Hour and a Half Show" (seriously) and "The Pink Panther & Sons", where our hero was given two sons called Pinky & Panky. It doesn't really bare worth thinking about. Did somebody say 'Scrappy Doo?'

...and that cat from Paula Abdul's 'Opposites Attract' video.

Paul Fuzz Avoids Being Terroised By 80s Movie Bad Guy Phantasms By Not Sleeping

2007-07-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

I think 'Last Of The Timelords' woulda been way better if instead of getting the entire human race to simultaneously think of 'DOCTOR!' in order to bring about the ressurection of their saviour, The Doctor had instructed Martha to have every living person simultaneously think of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and then the series coulda ended on a high with John Simm being stomped by 112 feet of Mr Stay Puft.

To explain...I've got a crazy fever, a thermometer busting temperature, a head-ache like there's a Mika concert in my skull, I'm wacked out of my mind on triple strength cold medicine...and last night when I when I was twisting & turning in an evil cold sweatin' delerium all I could focus on was the above scenerio, repeating on an endless loop...I think I've gone sorta insane..."I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something that could never destroy us. Something I loved from my childhood. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man!" As with Dan Ackroyd's Ray Stantz, I don't really know why I got stuck on Mr Stay Puft..."he just popped in there." I couldn't shake him. It was horrible. What if Mr Stay Puft haunts my fevered visions again tonight? Or what if Mr Stay Puft is just the beginning, and I'm plagued by visions of other 80s High Concept Action Comedy baddies? What if Biff from 'Back To The Future' turns up? Or that guy who says "The Quaterback IS TOAST!" in 'Die Hard'? I can't risk it. The only way I can ensure that I'm not terrorised by Dean Ed Rooney from 'Ferris Buellers Day Off' is by never going to sleep again. What the hell, right? I say sleep is overrated. Infact, sleep is for the weak. Join me next time, for Part Two of "Paul Fuzz Avoids Being Terroised By 80s Movie Bad Guy Phantasms By Not Sleeping."

The White Stripes' 'Icky Thump': Blues Rock in the post Hip-Hop Era

2007-06-17T02:29:00.000-07:00

"White Americans:
What, nothin' better to do?
Why don't you kick yourself out?
You're an immigrant too.

Who's usin' who?
What should we do?
Well you can't be a pimp
And a prostitute too."

The White Stripes - Icky Thump

I've got 99 Problems, and Meg ain't one. So my theory is this: 'Icky Thump' is Straight Outta Deetroit, late 60's blues rock (Cream, Sabbath, Led Zep) re-structured in a post-hip hop style. Not rap-metal, not funk-metal, not Run DMC vs Aerosmith, but something all together more natural, a great rock song by the world's best rock band built and delivered like a hip-hop track. The useful contemporary reference points for 'Icky Thump' are not Wolfmother or even Deetroit garage rock 45s, but 'Black Album' era Jay Z, Dizzee Rascal's 'Fix Up, Look Sharp' and the more rock orientated end of Eminem's work. It has been noted elsewhere that 'Icky Thump' owes something in terms of chord changes and groove to The Doors' 'Five To One'. The first time I heard 'Icky Thump' I thought it very reminiscient of Jay Z's 'Takeover - a song itself built by producer Kanye West around a huge thudding loop of...you guessed it: The Doors' 'Five To One' In it's overall construction & delivery, 'Icky Thump' is much closer to the Jay Z track than the Doors song it samples and thus the circle is complete; a contemporary blues-rock track constructed like a hip-hop track which itself is built around the sample of an old blues-rock track.

Production-wise "Icky Thump" is monsterously heavy and record, the drums are huge and funky a la John Bonham, the guitar solos are demented and frequent, and the whole thing just packs a mighty, mighty analogue THUMP the likes of which you don't really hear on the radio no more. The most unusual and memorable production twist, the sound which really defines the track, is the use of a B-3 Organ set to OBSCENELY LOUD FREAK OUT DISTORTO FUZZ; it is a sound unlike any other you will hear on day-time radio, a musical hook as arresting and exciting as Pharrel William's minimalist synth stabs, and one which certainly has one foot in the past (I guess there's a little ELP / Deep Purple in there) but has much more in common with something like DJ Shadow's 'Organ Donor'. Live, Jack plays over-amped, roaring, buzzing keyboard almost entirely to create ryhtym, texture, depth, and again, the sound is much closer to a DJ scratching (think the futuristic abstractions of prime Invisible Scratch Pickles) than a traditional rock keys player, especially as that jet-plane hammond noise is accompanied only by Meg's hammering drumbreaks.

Perhaps the aspect of 'Icky Thump' which is most strikingly hip-hop is Jack's delivery of the lyric, which is pure Beastie Boys. While there is a narrative of sorts (there's some sorta loose Mexican bandito vibe), largely the lyric consists of classic Jack White voodoo surrealism and the words appear to have been chosen primarily for their rhythmic qualities and dynamic punch, arranged in solid, 4 bar chunks. There are two successive verses which are of particular use to us here.

Firstly, the "White Americans" verse, which has already sparked critical debate owing to the fact that Jack's lyrics so rarely broach politics in such an explicit manner. Jack's views on US immigration law aside, this lyric strongly echoes the lyric of a song by fellow Detroit native; Eminem's 'White America." Like Jack, Eminem is a white artist trying to carve out an identity for himself in what is traditionally a black musical form; Eminem's hip-hop is Jack White's blues. Jack's delivery of this verse recalls nobody if not the angry-young man fury of Eminem at his most splenetic, and invokes the spirit of hip-hop (by directly adressing contemporay social issues) in a way almost no other White Stripes lyric does.

Also of interest is the verse which ends "You can't be a pimp and a prostitute too." In terms of my argument, this is a key line, the line which most eloquently expresses Jack's blues rock / hip-hop formula. On the one hand, pimp / prostitute imagery is classic blues stuff, the sorta dark sex 'n' sin imagery that blues guys have been working with from the Mississipi Delta to Chicago, and is perfectly in keeping with The White Stripe's vintage americana aesthetic. On the other hand, pimp / prostitute imagery is now almost exclusively associated with contemporary commercial hip-hop culture, the bling-bling, booty-shaking, big bucks world of Snoop Dog and 50 Cent, a world where the 'Superfly' styled 'Pimp' is a highly glamorised figure. Consequently Jack's use of 'Pimp' in a contemporary rock song must be understood at least partly as a conscious appropriation of modern hip-hop vernacular: it reads like a hip-hop lyric, and Jack's delivery is very much in a rap battle 'diss' style.

The great success of 'Icky Thump' is that its absorption of hip-hop techniques into 60's styled blues-rock is achieved 100% gimmick-free. No trendy 'scratching' pasted over heavy metal riffs or white-boy rapping grafted onto Funky Drummer beats here. This is NOT a 'cross-over' record. I don't suppose for a second that Jack went into the studio explicitly wanting to "do something like '99 Problems'/'Takeover'", but that isn't the point. The point is that he and Meg have effortlessly internalised the 'Takeover' sound and re-shaped it in their own image, creating something which approximates the power & structure of that sound, while managing to reclaim its heavy 'live band' rock roots. 'Icky Thump' is fundementally a superb psychedelic blues rock track, but it is one which could have only been produced in the post hip-hop era - and only a band as smart, tasteful and weird as the White Stripes could have pulled it off.

The Grunge Noir Of 'Clerks'.

2007-06-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

Clerks (Dir Kevin Smith, 1994, Miramax)

Ladies & Gentledudes, I present to you Kevin Smith's 'Clerks', the prototypical 90s slacker movie. Concept: two college drop-outs called Randal & Dante hang out at the New Jersey convenience store and neighbouring video store where they work, spend entire movie rapping about sex and Star Wars, playing roller hockey etc. Dialogue is generally wise-ass & garnished with all sortsa super-hip pop culture references. Supporting cast is made up of junkies & dope dealers, a couple of whom are weed tokin' grunge punks custom-bulit for instant cult status and Mtv pop cross-over success. Soundtrack consists of early 90s US alt rock desinged to really max those Generation X CD sales. 'Clerks': the prototypical 90s slacker movie.

When I first caught 'Clerks' at a friend's dorm room in first year Uni (shout out to my man Rob Laverick), I knew almost nothing about it, and so I understood it only instinctively as an art-house experiment in no-budget black comedy, a fairly high-brow (though generally unpretentious) movie characterised by naturalistic performances, a wildly creative script and a distinctive aesthetic all of it's own. Basically I just thought it was pretty damn cool. I mean, it's shot in black & white: it's gotta be art, right? I loved all the 'Star Wars' stuff, there were alot of genuine laugh-out-loud jokes, I dug the whole 'entire narrative based in one location' thing (being a 'Resevoir Dogs' / 'Die Hard' / '12 Angry Men' fan) plus it just looked so great and different, this heavily distressed, punk, B&W lo-fi aesthetic: grunge noir.

Much of my favourite art is art which was created with hugely limited resources, and the things I love about them are frequently the consequences of those limitations. 'Louie Louie' by The Kingsmen is an awesome all-time garage rock monster precisely because it is sloppy, rushed and amateurish, NOT in spite of those things. The same is true, say, of Ed Wood's 'Plan 9 From Outer Space', or the Velvet Underground's first three LPs. It is the falling short of perfection that is interesting. And the fact that a particular look or a particular sound is the result of something as protosaic as budget restraints as opposed to uncompromised artistic vision, is totally irrelevent. Those limited resources are what gives the art it's character, they enforce a strict aesthetic, impose themselves upon the tone & look of the whole piece, and consequently the piece begins to warp, it becomes something other, wierd, underground... cultish.

It says alot about Smith's own taste in cinema that every explicit movie reference in the 'Clerks' is not to avant garde film or even to the pulp/cult/alternative canon quoted in Tarantino's contemporary Miramax work, but to the super-mainstream 70s high-concept blockbuster cinema of Lucas & Spielberg, namely 'Star Wars', 'Jaws' and 'Indiana Jones'. The allusions to this supposedly 'low-brow' school of cinema are central to the Generation X, post-modern tone of 'Clerks' - the generation 'Clerks' represents was brought up on 'Star Wars', not Swedish art-house, and more-over they are a generation who refuse to acknowledge notions of high & low brow, of 'the canon.' So when Randal & Dante discuss the moral & political subtext of 'Return Of The Jedi', Gen Xers cheer them on 'cos it reflects their own belief that 'Star Wars' is just as worthy of critical debate as 'Citizen Kane'. Maybe more worthy.(For the record, they're right. 'Star Wars' is waaaay better than 'Citizen Kane'.)

So it comes to pass that a Gen X director with a George Lucas addiction makes a movie, but 'cos he don't got no bread or no Hollywood connections he can't make his movie look like 'Star Wars', it's gotta look all grungy and badly lit and roughly edited. It's gotta be black and white. And it looks amazing. Not only that, but the one thing which no budget can affect - the quality of the script - is brilliant from beginning to end. You're lucky this review wasn't just a list of memorable quotes.

"Look at you, you can't even play! Don't pass to this guy, he sucks. You suck!"

You had to allow me one.

A few thoughts on The Wu Tang Clan

2007-06-11T11:16:00.001-07:00

The Wu Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah; aka Ironman,Tony Stark, Monster Don, Theodore Deini, Phat Ghost, The Ghost With The Most (amongst various 30+ other aliases listed at Wikipedia), pictured here 'flossing' what can only be accurately descibed as the Greatest Item Of Bling In The Entire History Of Pop Music. I mean, you can keep your soverign rings, your fat gold chains, your personalised Air Force Ones - Ghost's got a MASSIVE GOLDEN EAGLE. He's gone there. While you were out pimping your ride, Ghost's been out Blowing Your Mind. If you're really looking for some serious props from your peeps, you gotta be rocking a huge bird of prey themed amulet on your arm: except no substitute. "Oh, I gotta crate of diamond encrusted Kristal" - get outta here! Where's your ridiculous golden eagle, huh? I mean, you coulda at least made an effort, even a golden Pied Wagtail or something, y'know? I've already ordered my golden bird amulet: a GOLDEN ALBATROSS. Yee-uhh boyyy. That's right. A full size Golden Albatross. 20 pounds of bling. A wingspan of 9 feet. "Oh, hey Paul, how are you...OH MY GOD! What the hell is that on your arm?" "Oh, what, this? It's my MASSIVE GOLDEN ALBATROSS."

I've kept up a mild obsession with the Wu Tang Clan ever since I was first introduced to them 10 years ago as a skinny indie kid by a local hip-hop head called Matthew Brydon (shout out!) who also ran the local paper shop. Brydon never really dug The Stone Roses, and I was increasingly interested in discovering something funkier than Fools Gold, so one evening he was like 'check this shit out', and dropped The Wu Tang's Enter The Wu Tang (36 Chambers), the crew's debut LP. It hit me like an atom bomb. Lyrically it was like nothing I'd ever heard before, hip-hop or otherwise; martial arts, chess, blaxploitation, and Eastern philosopy re-mixed and spat out in wild, seemingly free-form spontaneous prose, delivered infact with such ferocity and so thick with obscure allusion and slang that I musta missed a good 50%. It was violent, certainly, but it was the vibe which threatened as much as the words. Where are "The Slums Of Shaolin?" What sort of drink is "Nighttrain?" (And where can I buy it?) I was pretty sure that I heard 'Chim chimmeny chim chim cherie' from Mary Poppins in there somewhere too...The music was super heavy - bassy, dark and deep -but peeking out of the grime were shards of great lost 60s soul 45s, Stax stuff in particular, sweet female vocals hanging like mist around the low-slung drumbreaks and ultra-obscure kung-fu movie samples. Where most bands I was listening to had 4 or 5 members, the Wu Tang had 9, each with many different aliases, and each bringing their unique styles and skills to the table - "coming together," as they say in one skit, "like Voltron." Method Man, Ol' Dirty Bastard, RZA, GZA, Ghostface Killah...I mean, it beat Graham Coxon, right? These guys were more like superheros than pop stars. The Wu Tang presented an entire alien culture...no, an entire universe, I actually learnt stuff from listening to them, stuff about the geography & psychology of New York, cult cinema, comic books, philosophy, and that's before you get to the crate digging education of being exposed to the canon from which they drew their beats, a history of dusty RnB 45s...sure, I could do without the 'torture' skit which pre-faces 'Method Man,' it's mildly ugly, video-nasty, childish stuff, but I figured then - as I do now - that the Wu Tang are not there to paint a pretty picture, and if I feel uncomftable listening to it then that's probably the point. You take from art what you want and leave the rest, and when the art is as rich and dense as the Wu Tang's '36 Chambers'; you can afford to leave a little.

Billy Shipton Is The Coolest Doctor Who Character Ever And I Think The BBC Should Give Him His Own Show

2007-06-10T12:29:00.000-07:00

I really dug Saturday's Doctor Who the mostest, but that's not important right now. I'm here to talk about Billy Shipton, aka The Coolest Doctor Who Minor Character Of All Time. Yessir. I'm here to campaign for a new BBC show following the high-octane, all guns blazing adventures of super-bad ass cop Billy Shipton (Micheal Obiora), trapped in 1969 by the Weeping Angels, as he hammers wildly around sleazy pre-gentrification Nottinghill in a cherry-red Dodge Challenger busting the head of pimps, revolutionaries and East-end Krays style gangsters all to a kick-ass soundtrack of late '60s psyche-rock; Hendrix, Cream, early Led Zep...imagine a car-chase conducted to the hammering funk of Led Zep's 'The Immigrant Song'. I could sell this show on that image alone. It'd be exactly like 'Life On Mars', only waaay cooler, and fully trashy, like a Roger Corman directing Performance, and every episode he'd hang out alla time in dingy burlesque clubs and gambling dens, and he go to a black-panther style informant dude who'd be all like 'Yo. I'ma give you the skinny on this dope-peddling piece of trash, but what's a brother gonna do for me', and he'd have a bumbling comedy hippy side-kick called, like, Bozo or something, and Bozo would just sorta stumble around in a haze of pot smoke inadvertently helping Billy out or narrowly avoiding bullets, falling anvils, jugganauts etc like a stoned Mr Magoo. But basically the show would just be Billy going around wearing hipster mod-threads being really cool and listening to Jimi Hendrix records.

ELVIS! The Late 60s Funk Of The Memphis Flash

2007-06-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

"The Original Elvis Presley Collection No. 29:
Live A Little, Love A Little / Charro! / The Trouble With Girls / Change Of Habit"

All logic suggests that this scrappy hodge-podge collection of late 60's Elvis odds 'n' ends should suck like nothing else on earth. For a start, it's No.29 in a series of god knows how many, and it ain't like this is a 'Now! That's What I Call Elvis' deal, I mean, the guy put out alotta good stuff, but you gotta figure that by No. 29 they're probably scraping the bottom of the jelly jar somewhat, the really top-draw stuff having been served up over the course of the first dozen or so LPs, though now I think of it the whole enterprise looks so damn cheap that I'm not sure any of the LPs in this particular series are likely to be Solid Gold All Killer No Filler 50000000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong sorta affairs. No, this whole thing stinks of the very worst sorta ultra-cheap mondo-exploito rip-off pile 'em high & sell 'em low quality-control free Presleydelia that has been churned out relentlessly ever since The Flash danced his last, shamelessly mugging Elvis freaks for their every nickle & dime and damaging their hero's reputation in the ugliest of manners. The Colonel would be proud. Just dig the luh-hame sleeve design; random, unsympathetic and entirely artless 80s 'graphics', ELVIS spelt out in some godawful 'wacky' font, pictures of a coupla original 7" sleeves (themselves pretty horrible)...I mean, it's the worst. And that's before you get to the track listing.

The soundtracks to 4 rubbish late-60s Elvis movies carelessly shoe-horned onto one CD, which I picked up the bargain bin for £3. Doesn't scream QUALITY, does it? And yet...against all odds, the 29th Elvis Collection actually contains Some Really Great Music. I mean, don't get me wrong; 80% of it is pure, unadulterated shlock. I'm talking garbage like you've never heard. 16 tracks of swill. But making up the 20-strong tracklisting are THREE (Count 'em!) bone-fide smashers and 1 runner-up which at least has the decency to open with an absolutely MONSTER drum break. In order of appearance...

.1. A Little Less Conversation (from Live A Little, Love A Little)
The JXL remix was a stinker, an example of lowest-common denominator big-beatery whose attempt to make 'update' Elvis for a generation of clubbers was entirely uneccessary due to the fact that the original 1968 'A Little Less Conversation' is pretty much a perfect pop/funk floorfiller already. Rehabilitated into the Elvis canon by David Holmes on his excellent Oceans 11 OST, this is a real gem, and it's only a shame that Elvis didn't get the chance to do more up-tempo, late 60's styled RnB like this.

.2. Clean Up Your Own Back Yard (undubbed) (from The Trouble With Girls)
Elvis does sizzling country-funk. An excellent low-slung Memphis groove, some sleazy slide-geetar and Elvis bitching about how he wishes alla these 'backporch preachers' and 'drugstore cowboys' would just stay the hell off The King's back, making it easily the hippest lyric he ever delivered, especially the 'You tend to your business, I'll tend to mine' refrain, which brings to mind Elvis's TCB: Takin' Care Of Business motto. Close in feel & spirit to Tony Joe White's swamp/country material, I've DJ'd this back-to-back with Aretha Franklin's version of The Weight and they go together aces. Would have fitted perfectly on those excellent 'Country Got Soul' comps they put out a coupla years back.

.3. Change Of Habit (from Change Of Habit)
It's a film about Nuns! Nuns wear smocks called 'habits'! Habit is another word for habitual behaviour! So it's like, Change of "Habit", yeah?! I've never caught the movie, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess it ain't exactly Black Narcissus in Nun Movie terms (Idea for future post: Top 10 Nun Movies). Inexcusable punnery aside, this Song From The Movie Of The Same Name opens with a huge, totally unexpected fuzz-bass riff, which is then joined by full-fat funky drums, and then...becomes a slightly better than average Elvis track. But while it lasts the break is killer, hands down the straight-up funkiest moment on any Elvis cut, and will be familiar to fans of DJ Format who looped it on 'Here Comes The Fuzz'.

.4. Rubberneckin' (from Change Of Habit)
More up-tempo pop/RnB in the late 60's style, wherein The Memphis Flash lays out his 'philosophy', which is to 'Stop, look and listen.' This sounds oddly like the Green Cross Code Man's philosopy, but that's not important right now. Paul Oakenfold remixed this a coupla years back, and inevitably it was utter pish, but the original - cut from the same cloth as 'A Little Less Conversation' - is stompin' floorfiller which rattles along excitedly with great gospel backing vocals and OTT brass. And it sounds like Elvis is getting a kick out of it too, which you can't say for most of the material on this CD.

All in all, well worth a punt, and proof if proof were needed that great music can be found in the most unlikeliest of places. The oddest thing about 'The Original Elvis Collection: No29' is that while 4 groovy tracks outta 20 might not sound like a great ratio, it's still about 4 tracks better than you could reasonably expect from it - it's something of a fluke, really, and there's no reason to assume that Collection No.30, fer instance, will contain any essential, and certainly no funk or 'break' orientated, Elvis music whatsoever...but on this evidence I might just give it a try.

More White Stripes Brilliance

2007-06-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

In addition to Anna Wait's recent White Stripes/Simpsons post, dig this great exhange recorded in the NME this week as Jack discusses the equestrian theme of their new 7" sleeve artwork, with the Jackster on fine tongue-in-cheek form -

NME: How involved were you with the vinyl design & artwork?

Jack: Meg wanted the vinyl to be white, I thought it should be red, we quarrelled. A compromise was made...Meg does love horses though, so I threw her a bone on that one.

NME: Can you ride horses?

Jack: Of course we can ride horses, we're from Detroit.

What a band.

Best News Day Ever!

2007-06-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

Aw, man, I just watched the Channel 4 News, and I'll be damned if it wasn't the most entertaining news day for months. Very light on distressing personal tragedy and death, but heavy on big political stories and Heat-style gossip, I dug June 7th the mostest. Here are the highlights...

.1. High-speed powerboat battles! James Bond-style Hollywood action comes to the G8, as the German military take on a maverick buncha Greenpeace anarchists and -dig this- actually RAM the peacenik's vessels to a halt in the water!

.2. Romance! Bush 'n' Blair cosy up for one last fling at the G8 Summit, where the two ol' buddys make like a Neo-Conservative Brokeback Mountain! Now watch this drive!

.3. Sleazy Tabloidism! Peaches Geldolf kicked out of Big Brother for bullying Jade Goody! Or Something! Paris Hilton released from jail with leg-clamp thing! Heat Magazine proclaims Leg-Clamp Things 'Hot'!

.4. International Political Intrigue! BEA Systems, The British Government, One Billion £££'s and a Saudi Prince! The only thing missing from this story's is a good speedboat battle! Infact, Speedboat Battles are the thing missing from MOST stories; I mean, I liked A Doll's House, but every so often you're like, 'where're the Speedboats at'?!

Now that's entertainment!

Also: how insanely cool is John Snow?

Top 5 Beatle Songs: My contribution to the Normblog Poll

2007-05-16T12:20:00.000-07:00

.1. Rain (B-Side of Paperback Writer')
.2. Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver)
.3. I Am The Walrus (Magical Mystery Tour)
.4. Helter Skelter (The Beatles, aka 'The White Album')
.5. Revolution 9 (The Beatles, aka 'The White Album')

Notes, justifications, ideas etc:

(a) I arrived at this Top 5 because it reflects the chronological arc of my favourite Beatles period, bookended by the super-heavy bronze hammer psyche-funk of Rain (1996) and the dark avant-garde cut 'n' paste-adelia of the White Album's Revolution 9 (1968). This self-imposed time frame made making my choices easier - I told myself I could only pick songs which fell between the recording of these two tracks, and I wanted to pick 5 songs which worked well together, back-to-back. As these lists are abitary anyway, (I'd probably pick 5 entirely different songs next week) it's fun to come up with a system like this.

(b) The list suffers from a predominance of what are largely Lennon authored tracks. With the exception of Helter Skelter, entirely McCartney's experiment, each of my choices are identified most closely with Lennon. Revolution 9 is almost exclusively a LenOno production, while Rain, Tomorrow Never Knows and I Am The Walrus are all quintessentially John, though of course each benefit from stunning contributions by the other Fabs - especially so in the case of Rain. (Lennon's dominance stretched even to my pre-Top 5 shortist, which included Strawberry Fields Forever (Anthology 2 Version) , Glass Onion, and I've Got A Feeling...but also Paul's Rocky Raccoon.)

(c) With due respect to I've Got A Feeling, Come Together, The Word, Sgt Pepper's Reprise, and Flying, two of my choices - Rain & Tomorrow Never Knows (both 1966) - are hands down the funkiest motherthumpers The Fabs ever laid down. Ringo excels on both tracks; Rain edges it for sheer heavy-bottomed fonk, while TNK's off-kilter groove has entranced dance producers for years (The Chemical Brothers having spent half their career trying to recreate it). Macca's bass on Rain is simply phenonemal, laying down the blueprint for every freakbeat group who bought wholesale into the Rain sound, and is still being ripped off regularly to this day. Both tracks are heavily lysergic, psyche masterpieces, but are included here to remind people that the hugely underrated McCartney/Starr rhthym section was capable of grooves as danceable and as influential as Clyde Stubblefield's break on James Brown's Funky Drummer.

(d) Helter Skelter has enjoyed something of a revival in recent years; when I was growing up, the general pop concensus was that Charles Manson's fave Fabs rave-up was an example of Macca over-reaching himself, attempting an unconvincing, uncharacteristic, Who-aping wig-out in the New Heavy Style, and not really pulling it off. Beatles scholar Ian MacDonald called it "ridiculous, McCartney shrieking weedily against a massively tape-echoed backdrop of out-of-tune thrashing." This critical attitude seems now to have been almost completely dropped, and Helter Skelter almost entirely rehabilitated, regarded as a White Album highlight, and a Macca live favourite.

(e) Wot, no Sgt Peppers? Sgt Pepper's Lonley Hearts Club Band has never been my favourite Beatles LP, and despite the fact that it falls slap-bang in the middle of my Top 5 chronology, I include no tracks from it here because I still think Peppers is a relatively weak collection when compared to Rubber Soul, Revolver and The White Album. I actively dislike With A Little Help From My Friends and Good Morning, Good Morning. The drumbreak at the beginning of '...Reprise' is pretty cool. And clearly A Day In The Life is a wonderful, wonderful song. But on the whole, I'm not a huge fan.

(f) I guess the most controversial choice here is Revolution 9. Partly I've included it because it worked in terms of my list, being the penultimate track on the White Album and thus bookending my self-imposed time-scale. Partly I've included it because I think it's a fascinating piece of music, and easily the the most extreme thing the Fabs ever put out. It's also pretentious, self-indulgent, silly and far less clever than it thinks it is...but nevertheless, the effort that went into its construction (Lennon said he spent more time on it than half the songs he wrote), its proto-hip-hop patchwork of samples and the fact that you can listen to it a million times and still hear something new make it, if not a favourite song, then certainly a highly rewarding listen.

Anyway, there you have it. I look forward to everybody else's lists...there are few things I enjoy more than a good ol' Beatles debate.

Monster Squad Vs Plan 9 From Outer Space: The 80's Teen Action Genre's relationship with Classical Hollywood

2007-05-13T08:55:00.000-07:00

'Monster Squad' (Dir. Fred Dekker, 1987) is part of a very identifiable cycle of teen adventure (sci-fi/horror)-comedy movies of the mid - late 80s, a cycle which includes among others Adventures In Babysitting, My Best Friend Is A Vampire, My Science Project, Weird Science, Flight Of The Navigator and Space Camp. Many of these 80s Teen Action Movies are characterised by a postmodern re-visiting of Classical Hollywood and TV genres - Monster Squad's 'Dracula' is not Bram Stoker's Dracula, but the B-Movie Hammer Horror charicature. Everything is seen through a thick fog of collective popular memory, but a collective popular memory consisting not of actual historical events, but one constructed purely from a mass consumption of pop culture images we share through television, cereal packets and drive-in movies.

If Monster Squad reminded me of any other Cult Classic, it was Ed Wood's all-time 1959 Mondo Shlocko Plan 9 From Outer Space, the so called 'Worst Movie Of All Time', and perhaps the Sci-Fi /Horror B-Movie Genre's definitive statement. One key similarity bewteen the two movies is how they both draw so heavily and - crucially - so clumsily on stock Hammer Horror and Sci-Fi images, cutting and pasting together a messy collage of quotations. In Monster Squad, this effect is very much played for laughs; one memorable scene has Frankenstein's coffin rise from a swamp, amazing enough, until it is revealed that he is being held aloft by The Gill Man - as Dracula and The Wolf Man look on in triumph. It's ridiculous, and it knows it, but there's still something gleefull about the way it's done, like 'Actually, all these monsters together, it is pretty cool.'

In Plan 9's case the Monster over-kill is much less deliberate, but it's certainly still pretty funny and genuinely bizarre, not to mention the fact that it is actually cut and pasted together from different movies, even different genres. Plan 9 includes some footage origionally shot for an Ed Wood project titled Tomb Of The Vampire, which from the look and title of it would have been pretty much a straight (or as straight as Ed Wood could do it) Hammer-styled Dracula flick, starring none other than Bela Lugosi. When Lugosi died during filming, Wood decided to use what little footage he had from Tomb Of The Vampire in his next project, origionally titled Graverobbers From Outer Space, suggesting something part Stock Hammer Horror and part Stock Sci-Fi - which is exactly what it is, in the clumsiest way possible. Plan 9 features scenes of Bela Lugosi looking like he's in a completely different movie: which he is.

Another similarity between Monster Squad and Plan 9 is simply that they are both low-budget, exploitation affairs, and even though Monster Squad is much more knowing about the way it treats the genre, it's very cheapness shines winningly through - this isn't a big bucks romp a la The Goonies or even Bill & Ted's. Wether it likes it or not, Monster Squad is just as much a Trashy B-Movie as the films it lampoons. While I'm generally prepared to give Monster Squad the benefit of the doubt vis a vis it's 'ironic detachment from the subject matter' (to paraphrase Waynes World), but reviews I've looked up are incredibly varied, some say 'Spoof', others 'good family entertainment' and others simply that it's badly acted, low bugdet cheap thrills, and not in the good way, seeing no irony contained therein at all, and instead seeing just A Bad Movie. I guess this sorta mixed reaction would be comparable to the reaction to Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop, relased the same year as Monster Squad, in 1987. Robocop is read by many as a partly being a satire on Ultra-Violent 80s Action Cinema, but was understood by others - by most, I imagine, on first viewing - as simply just another dumb, bloody shoot 'em up, very much in The Terminator tradition, with a potentially fascist subtext. This failure to reach a general critical consensus about RoboCop's position (not good/bad, but simply 'where it's coming from') is mirrored in muddled critical attitudes to Monster Squad. The suggested 'ironic detachment' of these movies makes it difficult to pin them down, and their inherent cheapness only confuses matters - however satirical the intent, their own trashiness undermines the message. (The key difference bewteen RoboCop and Monster Squad, is that if his intent is ironic - which it surely is - Verhoeven has serious issues with the films he pastciches, where as Dekker clearly has huge affection for his subject matter.) Verhoeven, of course, went on to direct the very idelogically similar Starship Troopers, which you might argue is a more successful example of his particular thang than even Robocop.

Ultimately, what Plan 9 and Monster Squad share is a punk, gonzoid DIY ethic. They are films aimed directly and unashamedly at The Kids, in Wood's case a generation of newly affluent Teens, High School rock and rollers digging Elvis & Cadillac cars, living under the threat of Communism and The Bomb, and in Dekker's case a suburban generation raised on a diet of McDonalds, Marvel Comic Books, Steven King novels and late-night B-Movie Re-Runs, the generation that produced The Ramones. This generation, I guess, would become what we now call Generation X, a generation defined in part by it's bored, 'Whatever, Nevermind' ironic relationship with Mass Pop Culture, and movies like Monster Squad laid the seeds for the relitively sophisticated Slacker postmodernism of Clerks (Dir. Mike Smith, 1994) the Scream series, the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV show and the wonderful Waynes World (Dir. Penelope Spheeris, 1992). The 80s Teen Action Cinema told its' audiences that stuff like Plan 9 From Outer Space was worth celebrating, or at the very thinking about - and ultimately however exploitative, Monster Squad was an honest attempt to re-evaluate and rehabilitate a genre maligned by the critics, but loved by The Kids. A worthy cause.

(You can read my over-excited review of Monster Squad below.)

(And I just checked: Monster Squad is gonna be available on DVD from July 27th. Plan 9 is already available on DVD.)

Monster Squad: The Review

2007-05-12T16:22:00.000-07:00

Oh, man. Did anybody see my new fave movie 'Monster Squad' (1987) on Channel 5 this afternoon? It was der greatest. The Monster Squad is like this buncha punk kids raised on Steven King novels and trashy comics and popcorn cinema who battle B-Movie Monsters like Dracula and The Mummy and - coolest of all - The Wolfman in mid 80s Nowheresville USA suburbia, they're sorta like The BMX Bandits but with less BMX's, or a junior Ghostbusters, or a budget Goonies, or a slightly friendlier Lost Boys, and there's one kid whose menna be a bad ass, 'cos he wears a leather jacket and smokes and wears fingerless gloves and has A Bad Attitude, and a geeky kid, a Fat Kid and The Leader,and they say stuff like 'Radical' and 'Bitchin', and the special effects are hella lame and I'm pretty sure it was A Spoof, only 'cos they don't have the skill or the money or the talent to actually pull off a classy job you can never really tell what Sucks Knowlingly, and what just SUCKS, (the latter being way more fun) and there's The Cute Little Sister who - dig this - befriends Frankenstein's Monster, and the film pretty much ends with Frankenstein being sucked into a vortex and Cute Girl screaming "Come back, Frankenstein! Come baaaaccck!", like it's the touching story of the friendship between A 7 year old Girl and A Reanimated Corpse Sown Together From Human Flesh, and the National Guard turn up and demand to know 'What The Hell Has Been Going On Here', and THEN, - get this- the last 5 minutes of the movie is literally just the music video (a compilation of random clips from the movie we've just watched) for the 'Monster Squad' Theme Song, (OH YES!) which was pretty much just Ray Parker Jr's 'Ghostbusters' theme but only REALLY CRAP. They just shamelessly stuck an advert at the end of the movie! I dug it the most.

Basically, the whole thing couldn't be more 80's if it featured an innapropriate hard-drugs sub-plot and Billy Idol. Somewhere in the darkest corners of my memory I think I remember seeing it advertised in the local video store when I was just a kid (I'm talking 10 or 11) and thinking that it looked THE COOLEST. I was right. I'm staking my claim on 'Monster Squad' as A Genuine Cult Movie, a movie so dated, so badly executed and so cheap looking that it has been completely and understandably ignored by everyone, ever. But also a movie which features many things (50s B-Movie references, kids wearing 'Steven King Rules' t-shirts, a Fat Kid who winds up taking out The Gill Man with a huge shotgun and a super-quoteable script, proper Laugh Out Loud moments plus bags of general mid 80s teenage exploitation fun) which scream CULT!

Wu Tang On The Culture Show

2007-05-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

Oh, man. Just watchin' The Culture Show, very hip item about 'Street Chess' - the US phenonema of ghetto kids playing Chess out in the parks, (a familiar image from US TV, though not an image I really knew the history and culture of until I watched this), and then they start talkin' 'bout the connection with Hip-Hop, the idea of 'battling', of intellectual karate, and how there are numerous examples of rappers recognising the similarities between the two disciplines. Que: 'Da Mystery Of Chessboxin' from the awesome debut LP by Staten Island's finest, the mighty Wu Tang Clan. I was v. excited by this.

Anyway, enjoy Doctor Who tonight, guys...oh...No. Hang on. Enjoy Scooch. Enjoy Scooch tonight.

Killjoy Radio

2007-05-06T06:17:00.000-07:00

Edith Bowman, Radio 1FM, Friday afternoon (I'm paraphrasing): "OK, we've had a text sent in from Jay and Kelly saying 'Having a great afternoon chilling out in the amazing sunshine on a beach in Cornwall, could you play us something summery to dance to?' Would be our pleasure - Jay and Kelly, this is for you, I think this is gonna sound great on the beach..."

At which point Edith played...'Intervention' by The Arcade Fire. I mean, good song and everything, but as far as sunny, good time, beer and a barbeque beach party material goes it ain't exactly Surfin' USA, is it? "Everybody! 'Working for the church while your family dies!' Yeah! Limbo!"

At first I thought this was just mildy amusing, just another 1 Eff Emm dumb disco-jockey blunder, the type of clueless gaff one can hear at pretty much any given time during their day-time schedule. But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Bowman has unconciously stumbled across a really great radio format: Killjoy Radio! Jarringly Innapropriate Song Selections To Ruin Your Every Mood! Bumming You Out and Stomping All Over Your Good Vibes Around The Clock! Get your sad on, with Killjoy Radio!

(In super-hyped late-night dance DJ 'stylee'): "BOOOM! DJ Spin in the area, taking you through 'till 2am, right outta the box, keeping it fresh, you know it's gonna be ab-so-lutely MASSIVE! Aww Yeeaah! Friday night, wanna hear all your shout-outs, what you're doing tonight, the parties, the raves, where it's all KICKING OFF BIG TIME, let us know on Text 1298! Gotta shout out to Baz, Mazza, Bazza, and all the Beer Monster Crew 'aving it triple large down in Southhampton this evening, just says 'Play us something to go absolutely mental to' - can do, boys, go absolutley mental: this is Jeff Buckley's Halleluja! BOOOM!"

How good would that be?

Doctor Whoapalooza: Jumping The Shark, Jumping The Gun, or Jumping On The Bandwagon

2007-04-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

Oh, man. You won't stop 'em now. They've tasted blood. The Great Blogosphere Gold Rush has begun. The Cannonball Run of I Knew It Sucked Before You Knew It Sucked. Everybody likes to shout 'Backlash!' in a crowded theatre. Like I said here before: the only thing better than liking something cool before other people, is not liking something cool before other people. You think I'm kidding? Aw, you oughta try it sometime. Yeah, do it! Take a random pot-shot a something! Pick a sacred cow...now slaughter it. Yeah, hack it down! With a vengence! Take that, The Simpsons! Take this, The Mighty Boosh! Suck on that, Lennon/McCartney! Personally I beat on Orson Welles every chance I get! "What, Citizen Kane? Suh-ucks. You wanna watch a real movie about a sledge, I got two words for you: Cool. Runnings." Yeah, you gotta get down with yo' bad self! You gotta get your backlash on! Feels good, don't it? But you gotta get in there fast. Second ain't nowhere, 'cos hitching a ride on the bandwagon is for squares, you dig? You gotta take a chance. Make a call, a split second decision: Has This Show Jumped The Shark?

Look, I'll straight with you. I don't know a damn thing about Doctor Who, 'cept my sister digs it the mostest, he wears nice baseball sneakers, the girl who did 'Because We Want To' used to be in it but then she split - which was some sorta big deal 'cos all you cats dug her so much and the Doctor loved her and 'Honey To The Bee' was actually an OK song, like a slighty more pop / less RnB All Saints etc - and she's like a serious acting talent now or whatever, and I've probably seen about, what, half a dozen episodes, half of which I thought were really neat and the other half of which - ie the new series that everybody's getting crazy about 'round these parts - just kinda wasted my precious time, to quote Bobby Dylan. I don't have much emotional investment in the Doctor Who thing. But what I'm really digging is Doctor Whoapalooza, the blogosphere debate surrounding the recent Dalek two-parter...momentary lapse, or...SHARK JUMP..the frenzied rush by some to be the first on their block to send up a "DOCTOR WHO HAS JUMPED THE S" distress flare, while other, more cautious, souls call for calm and restraint, keeping the faith, "it'll be ok, it's just a phase ..."

Joe Backlash Blog: (credits still rolling) "WORST WHO EVER! IT'S ALL OVER, PEOPLE! TIME OF DEATH: RIGHT NOW! I'M STATING IT HERE, FIRST, FOR PROSPERITY, AND HISTORY WILL BARE ME OUT: DOCTOR WHO HAS...JUMPED. THE. SHARK! BOOM! DID IT AGAIN! BOW BEFORE JOE BACKLASH, PROPHET OF COOL, HUMAN BAROMETER OF WHAT IS HOT AND WHAT IS NOT!"

Joe Apologist Blog: "This is perhaps somewhat rash. You've gotta give it a second chance. I think your assessment is a little premature."

Joe Backlash:"Premature...or MIND BOGGLINGLY ZEITGEISTY ?"

Joe Apologist: "Premature."

Joe Backlash: "Exactly the sort of thing somebody who's too slow to accurately assess the pop culture climate would say. ZING! Hey, loser! I got my bangwagon right here! Why doncha jump on it?! Oh, and another thing: The Arcade Fire? SUH-HUCK!"

(I don't know how to do 'links', I'm a writer not a scientist goddamit, but for what it's worth, I've been particularly enjoying Anna Waits, Rob Buckley, Marie 'Struggling Author', Lisa Rullsenberg and Mitch Benn's contributions to Doctor Whoapalooza.)

Things I Like # 1: The Velvet Underground

2007-04-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

The Velvet Underground

Forever and ever, The Velvet Underground. Art-rock kiddies, this is your bench mark. Listen to ‘Sister Ray’ or (my current fave rave) the bootleg instrumental mix of The Gift (unparalled dirge-funk, like a stoned Meters) and recognise you ain’t ever gonna beat this. (That’s a challenge. I know you can do it really!). This is The Gold Standard of dope fiend pop-art New York NOISE.

.1. The Velvet Underground & Nico
Phallic pop-art bananas! Germanic death-pop! Screeching Lamonte Young avant-garde viola insanity! What drugs sound like! The best debut LP of all time!

.2. White Light / White Heat
Not white at all! Black as hell! Like being crushed by a New York subway train! And loving it! Kill all hippies! The definitive anti-production production! Top 10 LP of all time!

.3. The Velvet Underground
The calm after the storm! Really quiet, muffled songs about Jesus and salvation and hope and all sortsa un-Velvety, but, like, TOTALLY VELEVTY stuff like that! Genuinely, heartbreakingly wonderful!

.4. Loaded
‘Cos, it’s like, LOADED with hits, yeah? Actual, ‘normal’ rock ‘n’ roll songs! Commercial, even! FM radio! Some stuff that sounds like Creedence Clearwayer Revival! Which is a good thing!

Currently reading: “All Yesterdays Parties: The VU in Print 1966-1971,” awesome collection of contemporary reviews, interviews, promotional material and wild theorising on The Velvets, including – Natch – The Man Who Based An Entire Journalistic School Around His Deathless Obession With The Velvet Underground – His Holy Saint Lester Of Bangs. Main attraction for my dollar is abundance of super-hip Warhol / Exploding Plastic Inevitable period stuff, the kinda stuff which all comes off like Tom Woolfe Sunday supplement-lite (a compliment), plus a v. cool song-ography at the back listing all sortsa super-obscurities like, ‘oh, yeah, you gotta hear the August 17th 1967 Max’s Kansas City version of Sister Ray, it’s 3 hours long yadda yadda yadda.’

An evening spent with the incredible, Ultimate Velvets Bible 5CD ‘Peel Slowly And See’ Boxset on your stereo and a copy of this (and maybe a copy of oral VU history ‘Uptight’) and you’ve got yourself a party, boy howdy!

Signs Of The End Days #1: That New Mika Song

2007-04-17T02:57:00.000-07:00

God knows I've heard some appalling records in my time, but this is really something else. I figured the worst consequence of the Scissor Sisters crossover camp pop/disco/credibility success would be Orson. Never in my darkest nightmares could I have forseen the horror of the new Mika record. I've heard modem dial up noise less abrasive than this mindless sub-Leo Sayer dirge. Note to record companies: Scissor Sisters sold a billion records 'cos they write good songs and have something of an off-Broadway edge to them. Replicating their success is not simply a case of paying some fool with an afro to screech over a re-heated disco beat like Freddie Mercury with his balls in a vice.

Channel Surfing: Paul Fuzz Has A Night In

2007-04-15T04:12:00.000-07:00

CHANNEL SURFING - What I Watched Last Night, In Order

Deal Or No Deal: The 'Pilgrims' (audience) gather once more in the 'Dream Factory' (Deal Or No Deal Studio) to witness another 'brave' (greedy) contestant come to the 'Crazy Chair' (Chair) via the 'Walk Of Wealth' (walk of wood) and hopefully 'Beat The Banker' (select boxes in arbitary manner). A format more flawed it it impossible to imagine - on so many levels, the show simply DOES NOT WORK - and yet despite it irritating me to distraction DOND remains compulsive, entertaining stuff. I actually think Noel is a pretty great presenter, worth a hundred Fern Cottons, and is someone who, for better or worse, clearly believes that being a good TV presenter (and not just a celeb) is a really important job.

Friends: Chachi, Richie, Joanie and Pinkie Tuscadero get out of their depth when Fonzie enlists the gang in a surfing contest.

The Simpsons: Chief Wiggum, with a rabbit - "Behold, the Esquilax: a horse, with the body of a rabbit...and the head...OF A RABBIT! ('Esquilax' escapes:) Oh look, he's galloping away!" Galloping away. The difference between a good gag and a great gag.

Futurama: Oh, man. Was very excited about this 'cos it starred The Harlem Globetrotters - who I've always dug the mostest - as basketball playing aliens from the Globetrotter homeworld. The Harlem Globetrotters had the coolest names in the world: Goose Tatum, Curly Neal, John 'Jumpin Johnny' Cline and MEADOWLARK LEMON, the most awesomest name ever...plus they had all sortsa sweet-ass skills.

News 24: Fatality count at Virginia Tech massacre rises from 22 to 32 as I peer at wobbly mobile phone footage of beseiged campus, listen to vague commentary, shake head at state of world etc...

University Challenge: THE FINAL! It's the Anti-Deal Or No Deal! Woo! Manchester (Defending champs!) vs Warwick (my old University!) The captain of Manchester looked like a character from Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels: "It's facking 'Romeo & Juliet,' you nonce!".
I got one question right (picture round: identified John Kerry). Warwick won, but I thought they pushed their luck with the whole 'we're in the lead so lets take as long as we can deliberating over each answer' thing. Anne Widecome presented them with a big piece of glass. These kids have soul crushing debts to pay off! They don't need glass. Hey, nerds! You shoulda gone on Deal Or No Deal! You can win tens of thousands of pounds in half an hour through sheer luck on that show! And you guys have been slogging it out for weeks just to get some piece of glass! You got stiffed!

The Daily Show - Global Edition: I watch The Daily Show for one reason: I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Yankophile, and The Daily Show offers me 20+ minutes of pure American comedy/political entertainment & news unfiltered & direct, featuring an ever changing cast of political figures & pop culture references which keeps me up to date on what's happening in that part of the world. The Daily Show -Global Edition is, as far as I'm concerned, an oxymoron - I don't want a version of the show which has been edited to be more palatable to non-US audiences. If I don't know who Scooter Libby is, that's my problem, I'm happy to pick it up as I go along. That said, while not happy with The Global Edition, very happy, as ever, to watch Mr Stewart Do His Thang, and the proper Daily Show will be on tomorrow.

The Day After Tomorrow: Oh, man! Now the Statue Of Liberty is under water! Now New York is flooded and there's a big ship floating down 5th Avenue! This is the greatest! Oh, man! Why won't the evil Cheney style Vice-President listen to the clever scientist guy? That Cheney guy is a dick! Now they're evacuating Americans INTO Mexico in some sorta supreme reverse immigration style irony! Now it's really snowy! How come that girl fancies that posh guy and not Jake Gyllenhall? Jake Gyllenhall is THE COOLEST! He's like Toby Maguire, only WAY COOLER! Oh, man! Now there's a buncha wolves or something!

...and to bed.

Reviews: Junior Parker's 'Tomorrow Never Knows' & CA Quintet's 'A Trip Thru Hell'

2007-03-04T11:32:00.000-08:00

Currently digging...

Junior Parker: Tomorrow Never Knows - from the underrated 'Love Ain't Nothin' But a Business Goin' On' LP. A great little record, featuring 3 - count 'em - funk-blues Beatles covers: Taxman, (very funky electric piano/drums break up-front), Lady Madonna and this, Revolver's almighty closing acid apocolypse 'Tomorrow Never Knows.' With a sparse, laidback, droning arrangement and simple guitar, electric piano & bass figures repeating throughout, Parker's take on Lennon's masterpiece comes on little like Spacemen 3's more chilled out moments or the Velvet Underground's third LP, and his measured, soulful vocal brings a warm, re-assuring quality to the lyric, stripping the Tim Leary inspired mumbo-jumbo of Lennon's peering-down-at -the-squares psychedelic sneer. Of all The Beatles material, one would assume that 'Tomorrow Never Knows' ranks pretty near the top of the 'Impossible To Cover In A Meaningful Way' league (just behind 'Revolution 9'), but Parker pulls it off beautifully, effortlessly making TNK - a song so closely identified with it's author- very much his own.

What is perhaps most unusual about the recording is that it's is achieved without an ounce of the over-the-top freaky-deaky fuzz-sploitation production excess that characterises many of the 'Bluesman Goes Psychedelic' hippy dollar chasing LPs of the late 60s/early 70s. As great as the best of those LPs are (MuddyWater's 'Electric Mud', Howlin' Wolf's ' This Is Howlin' Wolf's New Album' amongst others) there is something about the minmalist, stripped back execution of Parker's 'Tomorrow Never Knows' - arguably the DEFINITIVE BRITISH PSYCHE track - which is more impressive, and more geniunely psychedelic, than the afforementioned LPs, which are often a case of Howlin Wolfs in Psychedelic Sheeps clothing. A really magical recording, highly recommended.

CA Quintet: Trip Thru Hell LP - Wonderfully, a record that fullfills everything it's title and sleeve promises, as long as you except Hell as imagined by a buncha no-goodnik punk kids raised on cheap-ass B-Movie Horror flicks and dope. A smorgasboard of Hammer Horor gothic church organ, demented wah-wah fuzz guitar, wildly phased drum solos, un-earthly choirs, Spaghetti Western mariachi brass, tolling funeral bells, screaming, and occasional bursts of grungy garage rock, 'Trip Thru Hell' is one of those records which one imagines falls short of it's creators original weed-addled grand designs, but in falling short somehow far exceeds. It's a no-budget Ed Wood, Plan 9 From Outta Space of an LP, the kind of LP that with the 'right' producer and some fat record company dollars payrolling it probably woulda come off with a little more class and a little more style (I don't wanna say 'A little more Commercial Potential,' I don't suppose you'ld find a huge market for a concept garage rock LP about the desecent into hell if Timbaland or Dangermouse produced it) , but fer sure with alot less character and junkshop spirit. This ain't no easy ride, brothers and sisters. You're gonna get your finger nails dirty diggin' this grave.

That said, there are calmer, funkier moments here that could almost be Axelrod (who woulda done a great job on this, a la 'Mass In F Minor') or Morricone productions, especially the opening 9-minute 'Trip Thru Hell - Part 1,' but more importantly there's a wide-eyed naivety and gonzo gung-ho attitude that -despite it being a terrifying wig-out of post-death horror - makes it in an odd way a rather charming, loveable LP. 'Trip Thru Hell' is a cheap-ass exploitation type of affair, but there are so many ideas and so much ambition here that you begin to marvel at it, you begin to marvel at how the CA Quintet - whoever the hell they are, I'll Google 'em later - coulda just stuck to playing 'Wooly Bully' at local Frat Parties, but instead went for something much BRAVER, went for the ADVENTURE, despite the fact they clearly did so without the resources to pull an epic like this off. Fans of Axelrod-era Electric Prunes, psyche rock in general or just pure harum-scarum Halloween shlock should defiinately check it out.

Paul Fuzz Reviews "Pump Up The Volume," the 80s Gen X movie with Christian Slater that isn't 'Heathers' But Still Kicks Ass

2007-01-15T09:55:00.000-08:00

"All the great themes have been used up - and turned into theme parks."
- Christian Slater, 'Pump Up The Volume'

You ever seen 'Pump Up The Volume'? Oh, man. It's the greatest. You gotta see it. It's all about this ex-New York kid played by Christian Slater whose been forced to move with his folks to some middle of nowhere middle-America 'burb and he's all twisted up 'bout how he can't hang at CBGBs and watch Black Flag no more and Nowheresville USA sucks total ass 'cos he can't speak to the chicks there and nobody understands him anyway and his parents are a coupla dopey ineffectual hippy sell-outs with Grateful Dead posters in their study, so he racks up a CB Radio in his basement (his basement is awesome-cool, natch, piled high with of all sorta righteous records and mountains of discarded Gen X junk, like Marty McFly's garage decorated by a deranged dope-fiend) so he can get in touch with his punk bruvvas back on the Bowery, but soon realises he can't transmit over that distance, and instead starts broadcastin' his shlock-jock freakoid rants into the local ether across whatever jerkwater burg he's meant to be dumped in just to get some anonymous kicks and make some sense of the unknowable teenage jock ruled universe at 9 in the PM daily, which if you or me tried to do would almost certainly blow like John Coltrane, 'cos we'd be all self concious on the mic and "ohmygod!Myvoicedoesn'tsoundlikethat, doesit?" and after about 5 minutes we'd run outta crap to shoot and flick the OFF switch, hang up our headphones and fergeddaboudit, but 'course when Christan Slater does it he's an all-smokin', all ravin', all Beastie Boys playin', all parent baitin' teenage Bill Hicks of Suburbia, The Voice Of Dissafected Youth, a straight-up bad-ass punk who spits serious, scary ugly TRUTH in society's bewildered face, polluting the air-waves with goof-ball pranks and wise-acre anti-authoritarian stand-up raps he spins straight off the top of his dome, dropping killa slacker slogans like 'Sometimes being young is less fun than being dead' and ' Rise up in the cafeteria and stab them with your plastic forks' and 'Do you ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up?' and, oh boy, maybe the greatest of 'em all, the ultimate bummed-out Gen X-ism: 'I feel like killing myself, but luckily I'm too depressed to bother,' and the IRONY of the whole thing is that while on the radio he's a motor-mouth jerk off who won't shut the hell up for nobody no-how, in REAL LIFE he's - get this- RENDERED ALMOST COMPLETELY MUTE BY HIS CRIPPLING SHYNESS!!! Yeah!! And nobody at his High School (which is total drag-city, and - like - A Microcosm Of American Society) knows who this Secret DJ is, and nobody suspects Slater 'cos nobody notices him anyway, like I said, the cat don't talk to nobody, and kids start passing 'round tapes of his show and playin' them crazy-loud on ghetto-blasters in the yard and spraying his slogans on the school walls, and everybody digs what he's saying, the jocks are gettin' off on the toilet humour and the weirdo punkoids are gettin' off on the fuck-everything angle and the nerds are hip to the lonely outsider bit and even the cheerleaders are blowing up microwaves 'cos they get where Slater's at and their lives are so shallow and false and They're Mad As Hell And Won't Take It Anymore, it's all gettin' outta control and it's like Slater's opened up a Pandora's rucksack of mondo teen apocolypso and the teachers of Nazi High and various Federal Agents Of The Man are goin' nuts trying to track this sick Enemy Of All That Is Good And Pure In Amerikkka down so they can haul his ass off to juve hall and make an example of him yadda yadda yadda, and Slater's gettin' all freaked 'cos he's inadvertantly inspired all this REVOLUTION IN THE STREETS and SUBURBAN INSANITY, and he didn't wanna be a leader or nothin', he never asked to be Abby Hoffman fercryinoutloud, he's got problems of his own without any of this shit, so he just pulls the plug on the whole thang, right, and all the real hardcore freaks are out in this sports field with their car radios all tuned in ready for Slater's latest Message From The Edge, the great prophet's next instruction, like, 'Tell Us, Christian Slater, Tell Us What To Do Next!,' and they're all pissed 'cos he's let 'em down in their hour of greatest need, he's led 'em this far and now he's welched on the deal, maybe he's a phoney like everybody else, right, but then this gothy proto-gunge chick who Slater secretly digs WORKS OUT that Slater is the mystery DJ, and she convinces him to FINISH WHAT HE STARTED and GO OUT WITH A BANG, and the Feds are closin' in so they grab all his equipment and jack his parent's car or somebody's car I don't remember whose, and they take his broadcast out into the streets, transmitting from the road, sirens wailing behind 'em, cop car lights flashing in their rear view mirrors, and you've got this whole Bonnie & Clyde / Thelma & Louise thing with Slater and Goth Girl as Outlaw-Lovers-On-The-Run, and the whole thing is reaching boiling point in some awesome orgy violent teenage mania and lust and PUNK ROCK GO-TO-HELL HIGH SCHOOL MELTDOWN...

...oh, man, anyway, it' s pretty cool, I guess it's sort of cheap sorta exploitation affair in lottsa ways, and it sure hasn't made the alt. cinema canon like the similarly themed Slater- starring Heathers has, but as a slice of cultish 80s slacker cinema and an alternative to John Hughes's vision of era's high school experience, 'Pump Up The Volume' is a gas.

So, 2007. How's that workin' out for ya?

JAMES BROWN 1933-2006

Beatles: Love

2006-11-20T12:17:00.000-08:00

...I'm freaking out....George Martin has made the best Beatles mix tape ever...currently trying to get my head around it...mind slightly fried round the edges...the insane super heavy metal psychedelia of the Being For The Benefit of Mt Kite/I Want You (She's So Heavy)/Helter Skelter coda is stoned BBC Workshop perfection...sitars and backwards masked vocals buzz and swirl throughout...the flotsum and jetsum of the Beatles universe washing up on the cast iron shore...a dark kelidoscopic miasma of forgotten voices and lost chords...a thick, ghostly fog shrouds the entire LP...it is a curtain call for pop music...you have been listening to...it's like the moment 'She Loves You' appears in the 'All You Need Is Love' coda, stretched to an entire LP... I've just re-wound Strawberry Fields Forever a dozen times trying to spot every snatch of music which bubbles up from from it's crazed aural soup...oh, man...

Normal service will be resumed shortly. 'Proper' review to follow...

'Good Vibrations' Was The Shocking Super Creative Sound Of The New At One Time Too: Notes On York's Club Grammar and the New Wave Indie Scene

2006-10-22T05:36:00.000-07:00

So yeah, my girlfriend Rebecca is the cellist in exceptionally cool Leeds based post- Arcade Fire contemporary indie rock band Grammatics and the whole thing has stepped up a gear now alt. rock Phil Spectoresque guitarist/singer/songwriter Owen R has decided that the band have sufficiently mastered the infinite complexeties of HIS ART enough for them to GIG and generally, y'know, Be A Proper Band. What this basically translates as is: a whole buncha hassle for me. Just when I figure I'm ideally positioned to make the welcome transition from Melody Maker reading, Strokes worshipping, Ramones badge pinned to a suit jacket indie kid into Mojo reading, David Axelrod worshipping, Stax badge pinned to a fringed Buffalo Springfield jacket music snob crank...I suddenly find myself required by events beyond my control to seriously engage with a Contemporary Indie Rock Music Scene that has hitherto intruded on time I have specifically set aside for listening to Black Sabbath records only via reports I occasionally read and shake my head at disapprovingly in the New Musical Express. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

CLUB GRAMMAR: Paul Fuzz's Indie Heart Of Darkness

These kids represent The New Eclecticism: theirs is "a conceptual approach that does not hold rigidly to a single paridigm or set of assumptions, but instead draws upon multiple theories," they exist outside and beyond history, the true New Wave Of New Wave, their fashion a wild pop culture smash and grab of conflicting styles, girls dressed not like Debbie Harry doing punk trash 50's Hollywood Babylon but instaed like an army of Electrified Karen O's doing Debbie Harry doing punk trash 50's Hollywood Babylon, all polka dots and cheap plastic stage jewellery, infact all is cheap and plastic, they are the glorious Heat Magazine What's Hot & What's Not Generation realisation of Warhol's pop art Factory famefor15minutes dream, all is disposable, and oh, the poor girl need never worry again what she shall wear for all tomorrow's parties now that glamour is something you buy for £20 in H&M on a Saturday afternoon, all is pose and surface, junkie thin boys with thatkidfromBloc Party fringes, one dandy kid with a bright turquoise feather hanging from an ear stud like Adam Ant, ties and trousers thin like Joy Division but dancing to day glo acid house, they are a context-free explosion of quotations, a patchwork of half-remembered style mag references, they are Cold War post-punk revisited, the rehabilitation of the Never-Cool into the cool enough for now while I'm hopped up on cigarettes, shots-that-glo-in-the-dark and cheap amphetamines...the DJ is decked out in a lab coat, very Buggles, very New Wave Takes GCSE Chemistry, and they've even got a globe sat on the stage 'cos the whole thing's so CLEVER, like: If You Don't Know The Capital Of Every Eastern Bloc Country You're Too Dumb To Party Here, Dumb Ass, and the set list is pure democracy in action, a levelled playing field of pop which refuses to recognise genre or accepted rock n roll standards, it is an explosively irreverent smorgasboard of New Rave, Hip Hip, 80s wedding favourites, 'Good' Pop and Now! That's What I Call Indie Disco, from The Smiths to The Gossip to NWA, the canon has been toppeled and everything is up for grabs; it is the End Of History and all you can do is dance...Grammar represents the willfull, systematic destruction of Mojo Magazine orthadoxy, a Stalinist re-writing of history, may the records now state that The Year Zero of Rock Music was not 1956 0r 1966 but was infact the year of our Lydon 1976, No ElvisBeatlesRollingStones, infact nothing recorded pre-The Punk Revolution, thinkin' back 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' mighta slipped through the net as a sole acknowledgement of The -URGH- "Sixties" TM, but The Stooges don't really count as rock and roll Hall Of Famers on account of 'em bein' considered part of the alternative Velvets-punk-glam-sleaze-art school rather than the Serious White Macho Sexist Blues Musician School so Iggy get's spared while Jim Morrison & Led Zep are shoved up against a wall and machine gunned by The Slits, and I'm imagining this Cock Rock Massacre as I find myself a dark corner in the club in which to hole up for the next two hours for an evening of muttering darkly to myself and sneering at hipsters, and I begin to wonder about the extent to which irony plays a part in this whole scene; is this the democracy it appears to be? Do these cats really have no pop heiracrchy? Do they REALLY think the Top Gun Theme is 'AS GOOD' as I Wanna Be Your Dog, y'know, IN IT'S OWN WAY? Personally I don't buy it. I don't think these cats buy it either. A levelled playing field of pop might be an attractive concept, but it just ain't practical. The Grammar ideal is that of Anything Goes Anti-Snobbery, it is a space where Justin Timberlake and Gwen Stefani are played as a deliberate FUCK YOU to Rock Snob Mojo Magazine Orthodoxy, and the assembled fashonistas will merrily get on down safe in the knowledge that The New Pop Rulebook states that Justin & Gwen are GOOD POP and therefore OK TO LIKE, the sorta POP music you're supposed to quote when some old hippy gets all up in your face rantin' about how the Grateful Dead's Live In Europe '72 Triple Vinyl LP is the zenith of what can be achieved within the pop/rock milieu and how pop music just ain't what it used to be and you can be all like "Shut the hell up, Grandad! Put these fresh-ass sounds in your hash pipe smoke and smoke 'em! Pharell Williams is the new Phil Spector! Jay Z is the Hip Hop Sinatra! Girls Aloud are the ASBO Shangri Las! Just 'cos something was recorded 40 years ago doesn't make it better than something recorded last week! You wanna talk to me about Pet Sounds, old man? Dig this: Good Vibrations was the Shocking Super Creative Sound Of The New at one time too and a kick-ass POP RECORD to boot, y'know, just like the best Neptunes productions or Arctic Monkeys records are today, and presumably if you were around in 1966 you woulda been the sorta retrograde shlub bitchin' 'bout how Good Vibrations was too polished and overproduced and what's that wierd electronic "weee-eeee-eeee-oooo" sound and how it isn't as good as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or Howlin' Wolf yadda yadda yadda and WE'D NEVER HAVE ANY EXCITING NEW MUSIC AT ALL IF IT WAS UP TO HIPPY MUSIC FACISTS LIKE YOU" and that's neat an' all except it reveals the dark dirty little secret of the Post-Everything Set - namely that they haven't done away with the canon, or indeed the very idea of "The Canon", at all, they've just come up with a new one; fer sure there is a wider acceptance here of supposed outre pop 'guilty pleasures' like Hollar Back Girl, and sure this music is sometimes chosen deliberately because it isn't dull bozo macho rock stuff, but it would be wrong to suggest that all pop music has been given the Grammar nod; Justin and Gwen make it past the velvet rope but if the DJ's dropped Matt Willis from Busted's new joint they'd be stomped to death beneath a hundred blood stained pairs of Converse, and rightly so. I want these cats to be snobs, and for them to be honest about it, not snobs like "We don't believe in canons" but snobs like "You're canon sucks. Here's our new canon. It's better." And I want their new canon to in turns violently enrage and confuse me and MAYBE, JUST MAYBE introduce me me to something I hadn't heard before and really dig (see: The Gossip's new single). I like sneering and growling at hipsters. I like slumping myself in the corner of sexy/clever indie discos and cursing under my breath the trendy music. Infact, sometimes I'm more in the mood to to sneer and growl and curse than I am to listen to music I like. I listen to music I like all day. My Booker T & The MGs records ain't going anywhere. I wanna feel affronted, my sense jarred and my sensibilities offended. Two worlds colliding. Cultures clashing. That's where the real interest lies. I want to feel out of place and dissorientated. I want these cats to shove their ungodly music in my face with avengance, and I want them to mean it. That's all I ask. "Get the hell out of our club, you bum! What, you think just 'cos nobody here has heard Dennis Coffey & The Detroit Guitar Band's all time classic 1970 funk rock monster 'Hair and Thangs' you're BETTER than them? You think any of these cats would WANT to hear it? Or CARE that they've NOT heard it? You're delusional! You're an anachronism! Look at the incredible fun these kids are having! Are you gonna be having fun in your living room later tonight playing your Vertigo Records Box Set and mumbling 'bout how these kids would realise how lame their music is if only they could hear and compare it to the progressive groove rock majesty of Aphrodite's Child's 'Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse? You woulda hated that tune yourself 10 years ago! And you woulda been right! You've lost it! You're over, dude! You're washed up! Come on in, David Crosby, your time is up!"

It's Indie Rock And Roll For Me.....

2006-10-19T15:18:00.000-07:00

So I've downed a couple of what I believe the cool kids refer to as 'Buds' and I'm blaring out Miles Davis' 'Bitches Brew' at a reasonable volume (can one blare 'reasonably'?) and I figure it's time to Lay Some Blog On Y'All. What I wanna talk about is Contemporary Indie Rock Music. I mean: Indie, right? Who doesn't love indie? I sure as hell do! Oh boy. Indie, Indie, Indie. Oh yeah. I dig that whole, y'know, thing. People playing instuments, wearing clothes...uh...having hair...y'know: Indie! The Kaiser Monkeys! Panic! There's an Arcade Fire! Woo! I just can't get enough of that guitar orientated rock music released on an independant record label stuff!

The reason I'm hittin' y'all with some indie shizzle is that my girlfriend's band, the very excellent Grammatics, have just begun PLAYING GIGS after a year of rehearsing three nights a week in a cold ass basement in Leeds. The main Grammatics cat, Owen, is some sorta crazed post-emo Phil Spector perfectionist and wanted everything to be JUST RIGHT before they got on stage and performed His Art to anybody, and now everything is JUST RIGHT and His Art is ready to be unleashed on the Indie Masses for their consumption, enjoyment, etc. Now I don't know much about post-Arcade Fire, Echo & The Bunnymen referencing orchestral punk funk Neu-wavery but I know what I like, and fortunately for all concerned I knows I likes Grammatics very much thankyou kindly, and it sure is a stone groove to watch Rebecca (for it is she) producing My Bloody Valentine styled sheets of noise from her cello, while a gaggle of black clad skinny white boys get all early New Order around her and generally come on with a whole buncha heavy crunching grooves that are bound to get the skinny jeans and baseball sneakers set myspacing their asses off in approval. The York Music Scene as we've experienced it is pretty much 'roots' orientated; infact hop on a train sometime and visit our lovely city whydoncha, 'cos if you dig The Blues, The Country or The Rock and Roll, you'll fair flip your wig at the quality and sheer number of bands churnin' this sorta thing out on a nightly basis; Boss Caine, The Ventilators and Hijack Oscar are but three of the (very best) RnB/RnR bands currently making the scene, and of our friends the 'indiest' until recently have been Cardboard Radio, who on record do an excellent line in post-Libertines, Kinksy RnB/punk knock-aboutness, and live can spend 20 minutes or more ravaging Baby, Please Don't Go or a Led Zep tune of their choosing. But Grammatics are a whole other bag: Pure Mainline Hook It Straight To My Veins INDIE. Cool, hip, zeitgeisty, NOW, POP! The music ain't simple, infact it's almost willfully complex (I've heard a few cats mumbling about it being 'too much information'), but it's savvy as hell, totally on the money, everything the Modern Indie Kid could possibly want & reasonably expect out of a band, largely 'cos the main aforementioned perfectionist cat, Owen, knows What The Hell He's Doing. You might call this calculated, maybe even manipulative. I call it being a smart muvva fugger. Ain't no point playin' this game if you ain't gonna make a few bucks in the process, right? No crime in being clued in. So now I have a girlfriend in a Contemporary Indie Rock Band and I'm thinking about Indie and what Indie means and if I should get a hipper barnet and lose about 10 inches off the bottom of my jeans and drop a t-shirt size or two. I'm still an indie kid, in a broad sense...but when you read in the NME a description of Richard Ashcroft and his army jacket/flares/feather cut outfit as being the living definition of cool "10 years ago" and you peer from under your feather cut at your flares and army jacket and realise you ain't so 'with it' no more you gotta figure that maybe your collection of Stax records LPs ain't gonna cut it with The New Breed and now you're dating the cellist in a hip indie band you might wanna dumb up your style somewhat. Ain't gonna look too good turnin' up in my 'L' brown Flying Burritos t-shirt & a fringed Neil Young jacket now I'm hanging with the Beautiful Junkie Thin People, right? I'm a groupie now, right? I'm dating the cellist in Grammatics now! I gotta look the part! Get with the program! Can't swan about in back stage bars ripping off free Stella lookin' like asome shmuck off the street! I gotta get with it! I'm off to buy the new Klaxons 45! Do they call 'em 45s anymore?

Anyhoo, I guess I don't really have much of a point, but I figure you're used to that by now. I'll leave you with a few Things I've Been Enjoying This Week.

Things I've Been Enjoying This Week

The Empire Strikes Back / Return Of The Jedi (on video)
Miles Davis: Bitches Brew (on vinyl)
Old copies of Mojo (on paper)
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (on More4)
The Big Playback (awesome 80's block party hip-hop compilation. On CD)

And this wisdom from Friends:
Joey is attempting to open a locked cupboard door with a bobby pin. After a beat:
"By the way, I have no idea what I'm doing here. For all I know I could just be locking it more."
I think we all have times when for all we know we could just be locking it more

Intellectualising Personal Taste

2006-10-08T02:33:00.000-07:00

So I'm walking through some department store in Nottingham at the weekend and a display of chocolate advent calenders catches my eye. Amongst the various brands exploiting Jesus is Little Britain, the inevitable "I Want That One" calender.

Paul's internal monologue: "Little Britain, ferrchrissakes! Have you guys not made enough money yet? What the hell's wrong with you? Seriously! Is there no piece of merchandise you wouldn't agree to having your name plastered across? Don't you think the market is saturated enough with your tacky exploitative sell out crap? Don't you think the cool/honourable/smart thing to do would have been to leave us wanting more, to back away from this sort of insane dollar grabbing capitalist frenzy and disapeer for a year or so? Don't you think you're ripping off your fans? Don't you think you've compromised your artistic integrity and prostituted your talent for a deal with the devil? WHAT PRICE YOUR SOULS, LUCAS & WALLIAMS??!!! WHAT PRICE YOUR SOULS??!!!...........Oh, cool! A Homer Simpson calender! I'm gonna get that!"

Y'see? I could talk to you for hours (ask my girlfriend) about why/how Little Britain is a terrible capitalist evil, but as the above anecdote reveals, the reality of it is simply that: I Don't Really Think Little Britain Is Very Funny, It Isn't My Cup Of Tea And I Can't Understand Why It Is So Monsterously Successful. Everything that enrages me about Little Britain vis a vis merchandising etc is even more true for The Simpsons, but: I Really Like The Simpsons Alot And They Can Do What The Hell They Like As Far As I'm Concerned, Heck, They've Earnt It. Ergo, if I found Little Britain funny, I wouldn't have a problem with the merchandising etc. I guess this is pretty much a dictionary definition of hypocracy, on the other hand I think it's pretty much unavoidable and I don't think there's any shame in it; you are naturally more inclined to forgive the faults of someone you otherwise like than the faults of someone you don't like. I was talking last Christmas with an indie/alternative orientated friend about Girls Aloud, a group who I consider to have produced half a dozen genuinely excellent pop songs and, until they lost all the weight, were a pretty attractive bunch to boot. Joe Indie: "Girls Aloud? Are you kidding? Chav culture blah blah blah...production line pop blah blah blah...shameless sexploitation blah blah blah blah...X Factor Heat Magazine celeb culture blah blah blah." The truth of the matter was simply that he doesn't like commercially minded pop music and Girls Aloud aren't his cup of tea, but - and it's easily done - he unconciously felt the need to wrap this preference up in some sort of cultural critique. As the conversation went on it really started to bug me. The point isn't that sexploitation/celeb culture etc aren't serious, fundamental Girls Aloud issues, they most certainly are, and without question they should form part of any discussion about Girls Aloud you choose to have...BUT: I'm not sure if they are valid answers to the question "Why don't you like Biology by Girls Aloud," any more so than my Little Britain issues are valid answers to "Why don't you like Little Britain?"

Hmm. I don't know. What do you think? Are these valid answers to those questions? If not, what ARE the valid answers? Do we have a vocabulary for talking about 'taste'? Perhaps the reasons Joe Indie gave for not liking Girls Aloud are the type of things which make up one's 'taste.' I've begin to think & rethink this too much now. I really just wanted to tell you the funny advent calender story.

'Cabaret': An Anna Waits Tribute Review

2006-09-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

Anna was unable to attend last Saturday's performance of Cabaret at the Lyric Theatre in London's glitzy West End due to illness, so I took her place on the understanding that in her absence I write a review of it for her and y'all to 'enjoy.' Quite frankly what I know about musical theatre you could write on the back of a postage stamp, and what you'ld write is 'I've seen Bugsy Malone a buncha times and really dig the Jesus Christ Superstar Soundtrack which is a lost progressive funk rock masterpiece,' apart from that I'm pretty much clueless, but what the hell, you gotta write about summfin other than Lester Bangs and The White Album sometime, huh? Here you are, then: CABARET, AN ANNA WAITS TRIBUTE REVIEW.

So the whole show was pretty much a bust. I mean, I don't know much about super-camp decedent Berlin naked Nazi musicals, but I know what I like. There was a buncha stuff I thought was lame, but winning awards for lameness was Anna Maxwell Martin, in the Minelli Sally Bowles role. She stunk the place up like a skunk. Apparently she was really good in Bleak House, which I'm told was some sorta big deal, personally I never caught it, I mean, jeez, BLEAK House? C'mon. FUN House, with Pat Sharp, that was a good show. I don't wanna watch a show about a BLEAK house, fercryingoutloud. ATOMIC House I mighta watched. Or ZOMBIE House, something like that. Anyway, I'm told she was real good in Bleak House, I never caught it, whatever, she was just awful in Cabaret. Y'know Helen Baxendale as Emily in 'Friends'? (Y'see how highbrow my reference points are? Missing Anna's review much? There's a Gwen Stefani reference coming up soon.) Well, Maxwell Martin's Bowles was exactly like that. Not sexy, funny or likeable enough. Shelia Hancock was brilliant though, she sang a song about a Pineapple which was really good, I wished there woulda been more songs about exotic fruits in the show, infact I wish that in general, songs about exotic fruits are cool, like that bit at the end of 'Holler Back Girl' by Gwen Stefani (Told ya!) when she spells out BANANA. The old chap who played Hancock's would-be husband, I didn't catch his name, but he was awesome too, I generally dig older actors (like the guy who plays Max Cherry in 'Jackie Brown,' who is der coolest), this chap carried an emotional weight the younger cast members couldn't match even if they'd have wanted too, and I really cheered up when these two were on stage, infact they lit up a stage which in every other respect was both figuratively and physically dull dull dull.

Yeah, the staging was dull. They use three stripped wire beds in different ways (f'instance as cages) for just about every scene, and there were some big sliding screens, that was pretty much it, all very STARK and MINIMALIST and, y'know, GREY, Anna Waits tells me that a recent version of Guys and Dolls was done in a similar ANTI-MUSICAL MUSICAL way, the whole 'it's not a musical, it's a a play with music' bit, I guess this approach has it's advocates, personally I don't think it's unreasonable to go see Cabaret and expect a little glitz, glitter 'n' glamour from it, seeing as I thought that was pretty much The Whole Point, and if you wanna consider this an experiment then I'd have to consider it a failed one. The problem is that as a play it ain't really up to much, which ain't a problem unless it is made to be a problem, which staging it like this it is. You are forced to judge it on a criteria it was not built to be judged on.

The last two minutes were pretty cool, some Nazis came on and knocked over big 6ft high letters spelling KABARET, the music got all echo-y and evil psychedelic (like, THE PARTY'S OVER, right? It's A BAD TRIP), then it finished and so what. The only other thing I guess worth mentioning is that five minutes into the show some naked guy ran on stage with his Johnson flapping about, which was quite an unwelcome shock to my delicate constitution. In conclusion -Nazis knocking stuff over and Pinapple songs: good / the Bleak House lady and Johnsons flapping about: bad.

Next week: Paul Fuzz continues his series of reviews of things he knows nothing about as he travels to Brussels to investigate the Belgian Films About Goats Festival.

Extras: Good. Gervais: Shmuck

2006-09-15T10:09:00.000-07:00

'Extras' was pretty funny & Cheggers is the new Pacino. But.

I'm bored as hell with Gervais. Guess what? Here's why, y'all.

.1. Patronising attitude towards Cheggers / Les Dennis. Like, yeah, you've saved 'em, Gervais. Well done. Saved 'em from degrading themselves with light entertainment and making lots of people happy on popular shows. I mean, shit, these cats were nobody without you, huh? And now look at 'em! On a high-brow, artistically accomplished auteur vehicle prime time show beloved of critics around the world! They should be kissing your feet in thanks, right? Jeez.

.2. Bile directed at 'broad' comedy. Shit, did you see last night's show? That bit with Jensen kissing Orlando Bloom in front of her annoying friend (herself one of the most caricature-ish, unrealistic Gervais creations yet)? The Jensen /annoying friend bit with the 'hilarious misunderstanding' about which stage hand guy fancied her? If this ain't broad I don't know what it is. When the ugly stage hand guy turned round there shoulda been a trumpet parp.
Meeoo-wah! I mean, Gervais can mumble all he wants about how Extras is intentionally an exercise in broad-er comedy than The Office, but the truth is that he sweats hate for traditional sit-com techniques from every pore, and scenes like these can at the very least be decribed as Gervais having his cake & etaing it too.

.3. Bile directed at The BBC. Inexplicable. The BBC made Gervais an international star. Allowed him to do pretty much whatever the hell he wanted. And he paints the Head Of Comedy as some sorta Hitler-esque evil. Where is this anger coming from? Where does he get the nerve? I mean, just be grateful you didn't have to go through the sorta crap your character here has to. It must be nice being an auteur, huh? Enjoy it! Lighten up! You ain't got nothin' to be mad about!

.4. Bile directed at The Public. AKA: The Ugliest Glimpse Of Gervais' Soul We've Had So Far. The scene with the audience dressed in sit-com catchphrase T-shirts, (nice device, Gervais, real subtle) laughing unthinkingly like the dumbasses they are at Gervais' character's catchphrase. YEAH! These people are SCUM, right, Gervais? Chavvy automatons grovelling in the swill of light entertainment, right? You can feed 'em any old shit and they'll just keep on' eatin', right? These people don't DESERVE Extras and The Office do they? Holy crap. It's one thing to dump on the BBC and Cheggers. It's another to dump on us. Unbelievable snobbery, frightening loathing of the public. (You could argue of course that the people really dumping on the public are the people putting out low-brow Dinnerladies-type garbage he pastiches, but Gervais is kidding himself if he thinks his attitude is any better.)

.5. Obscene arrogent self-indulgence. If I wanted to watch 30 minutes of Gervais bitching and whining about sit-comology, I'd borrow a tape of that Gervais / Larry David Self Congratulatory Back Slapping Smug-In from last year. I mean, seriously. We're all perfectly aware of Gervais' opinion of mainstream gentle comedy. We don't need him to write an entire show about it. This idea that there is BAD comedy & GOOD comedy is just pure jive.

Fundementally I enjoyed Extras, I laughed a couple of times, I thought Cheggers and Barry and Orlando were excellent, and I really like Jensen. But there was much here I found unforgivably self-regarding, bitter and wromg-headed.

Also check out Anna Wait's blog for a wider overview of the whole evening's comedy viewing.

"They've bombed the f***king Pentagon too:" Incoherence of speech & emotion on 9/11

2006-09-12T09:18:00.000-07:00

Whenever the subject of '9/11 memories' comes up Anna Waits (my kid sister, for those who don't know) will often recall how it was the first time I swore seriously in her presence, and I guess if you're gonna use the f-word in front of your kid sister for the first time you may as well do it while describing the events of that day. She quotes me accurately: "They've bombed the f***king Pentagon too." Not my most eloquent moment, I'm not generally a sweary guy unless I've had bit to drink and even then I'm not one to use 'f**k' as an adjective much, but who sat in front ofCNN that afternoon had access to an appropriate vocabulary or presence of mind to eloquently express their thoughts on what was unfolding before them? There was nothing one could say. All one could do was watch. The time for discussion would come soon enough, but while the dust settled there was nothing very usefull we could add to the mounting statistics.

One man who did say something a few days later was The Daily Show's 'anchorman,' the very great Mr Jon Stewart. The first Daily Show aired after 9/11 was a clips show, but the first half consisted of nothing but a rambling to-camera monologue by Stewart, which had him in turns breaking down, sobbing, making half-hearted jokes, and ruminating messily on America Freedom, Democracy etc etc...I just caught it on youtube (put in 'Daily Show September 2001'), and it's remarkable, a heart breaking, unique piece of television, one man grappling honestly with his emotions, politics, and the weight of history...I've considered Stewart a minor hero of mine for some time, but this is something else - he hits the right note not because he says exactly the right thing, but precisely because he doesn't really know what to say, and what he does say is often muddled and muddied by gut reaction and a lack of hard facts...just like the rest of us at that time. It's a human reaction. It's a New Yorker's reaction. And I guess it's also the reaction of a man who knows his job has been rendered completely insignificant, and simultaneously perhaps more valuable than he ever thought it could be. Over the next 5 years, the Bush administration's reaction to 9/11 would make The Daily Show perhaps the most important show on American television.

(Thanks to Anna Waits for the tip off on this.)

Do Your Funky Thing

2006-09-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

LARRY ELLIS & BLACK HAMMER: FUNKY THING (PT. 1)
From 'The World's Rarest Funk 45s: sixteen heavyweight super-tough deep funk ultra rarities.'

Black Hammer. How awesome a name is that? The lost highway of rock 'n' soul music is littered with thousands of incredible bands Who Never Made The Big Time, and the re-issue industry is a busy one because - as the liner notes of this LP point out - "New Music Is Just Music You've Not Heard Before", and record freaks like me will happily spend the rest of our lives digging up and dusting off The Great Music That Time Forgot, which there appears to be an inexhaustable supply of. So calling your compilation 'The Worlds Rarest Funk 45s' is a pretty ballsy thing to do, specifically because no compilation can possibly live up to such a title: however rare the music contained on this LP may be you gotta figure that even as we speak, somebody scratching around their attic in Iowa has just uncovered a privately pressed one copy only acetate made by their uncle Doug in 1966 which is the Best Record You Never Heard.

That said, these records are certainly rare as hell, and if you wanted to get your hands on a copy of an original of any of 'em you'ld be looking at spending...1000s of pounds. Best of the lot - for my dollar - is Larry Ellis & Black Hammer's 'Funky Thing - pt 1.' It's an absolute monster: a super heavy psychedelic freak out which hits it & and quits in under 3 minutes...I've played it almost constantly for two days now. The first twenty seconds - an unaccompanied Hammond organ freaking out, some cat extolling us to "DO YOUR FUNKY THING" - is a Funk 45 intro in the elevated league of The Ebony Rythym Band's ' Soul Heart Transplant' ("I had a heart tansplant today...") and Mickey & The Soul Generation's 'Iron Leg' ("DUUURRRRR!"), and what follows - a churning groove tastier than momma's best fried chicken - is simply evil, in the best sense of the word.

I appreciate I'm posting into an indie vacuum here and ain't no cat gonna read this who could give two hoots 'bout some silly old funk record by a buncha guys they never heard of, but I'm digging the song so much I had to mention it. Maybe next time I'll review a Divine Comedy LP, huh?

TOP 10 TV CHARACTERS

2006-08-26T02:44:00.000-07:00

Yey! Lists RULE! Here is my contribution to the Joss Whedon inspired ' Favourite TV Characters' list-o-mania currently sweeping Blog World (dig Marie, Stu_N, Lisa R). You will notice in my list: a pre-dominance of American males. You will also notice: a lack of British people. And women. Apart from Terri Hatcher, who is included as an example of a 'hottie.' Which is appalling. Honorable mentions must also go to Jack Gellar (Friends), The Movie Geek Kid From Northern Exposure Who Looked Like One Of The Ramones (Northern Exposure), Earl Hickey (My Name Is Earl) and Zammo (Grange Hill), I could easily have included these and I know everybody else has chosen 20-25 characters but I got bored.

THIS LIST IS FILMED BEFORE A LIVE STUDIO AUDIENCE

.1. HOMER SIMPSON - The Simpsons
"Oh, yeah, but have you seen Family Guy?" Yes.

.2. COOKIE MONSTER - Sesame Street
Because stupid, compulsive, self defeating, habitual behaviour is the essence of so much great comedy- see above. And Monsterpiece Theatre was my earliest exposure to Anerican school of satire. (Could have also chosen from Sesame Street: the "Yup Yup Yup Yupyupyupyup!" aliens, Grover, Oscar The Grouch, that guy who made sound effects with his mouth and The Count. But not Elmo. Elmo's a dick.)

.3. DYLAN THE RABBIT -The Magic Roundabout
Only students and Justin Lee Collins think there is any value in the meanspirited, jaded, clever-clever activity of discussing the sex / drugs metaphors supposedly contained in 'retro' kids TV shows of a "Mr Ben was a CROSSDRESSING CRACK ADDICT! nature, and mostly this sort of thing is nothing but repulsive wrong-headedness. The Magic Roundabout, however, genuinely contained a counter-culture, subversive streak a mile wide, and remains the only childrens TV series which one can describe as 'like being ON ACID' without being a complete jerk. Dylan The Rabbit is the coolest TV character ever. He's a guitar playing rabbit. Based on Bob Dylan. He's a guitar playing rabbit based on Bob Dylan, who is stoned the entire time and communicates when not sleeping in a lazy beatnik vernacular punctuated by mumbled '...mans' and 'likes.' What a wonderful, smart show, and what a phenonemal character. "I'm a rabbit who sleeps. I'm not the hopping kind."

.4. Sam Beckett - Quantum Leap
Travelling from life to life, putting right what once went wrong. Fundementally Quantum Leap is a very sad show; Sam Beckett is a man destined to spend the rest of his days thanklessly correcting other people's lives for the better at the expense of his own, his memories of home and his loved ones are twisted and eroded, his identity & sense of self slowly being erased. By the end of the last series, Sam is beginning to understand that the only way out of this hell is probably just to WANT OUT with all his being - but Sam is a good man, the best of men, and while there are still wrongs to be righted, both Sam & we know that he will not find it in himself to let those people down. It is a painful irony. The final words of the final episode read simply: 'Sam Beckett never returned home'. And how sad is that?

.5. Lois Lane - New Adventures Of Superman
Uh, did someone say HOTTIE? (See also: Top 10 Hot Babes I Dug When I Was 17 - Agent Dana Scully, Kelly from Saved By The Bell, Jet from Gladiators, that woman from Buck Rogers, my English Lit teacher Miss Mitchell from who made me a tape cassette compilation of The Smiths, etc).

.6. Johnnie Chochran - The OJ Simpson Murder Trial
Charismatic defence lawyer type with a great line in Don King style bombast and a barrel full of snappy one liners. "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit." Great material. (Could have also have chosen from The OJ Simpson Murder Trail: Judge Lance Ito, Special Trials Unit District Attorney Marcia Clark or jury consultant to the Simpson defence team Jo-Ellan Dimitrius. Timeless characters.)

.7. Norm - Cheers (NORM!)
SAM: What'd you like, Norm?
NORM: A reason to live. Gimme another beer.
It's funny because his life is so devoid of meaning that he's going to kill himself if he doen't get a beer! Cheers was an exceptionally dark show, a show about losers, losing. Norm is the King Of Losers, the Sam Beckett of bar flies, trapped in a self imposed limbo, his brain 'swiss cheesed' by Boston's finest draught beer. On one hand highly complex, on the other pure zen simplicity: I Drink, Therefore I Am. I coulda chosen Cliff, Coach, Woody or Fraiser, but if I gotta pick one, I pick Norm, a character carrying an emotional weight heavier even than his substantial beer gut.

.8. Ross Gellar - Friends
Yeah, that's right. Ross from Friends. Pretentious hipsters can sneer at Friends all day long, and the really prerentious hipsters can sneer 'oh, uh, I mean, sure, I don't mind Friends, but of course the real star is Lisa Kudrow...' (which is a cliche of 'I like Empire Strikes Back best' proportions) all day long too, the fact is if you have any interest in US sit-coms and can't see Friends for the unqualified triumph of ensemble acting and ensemble writing that it so patently is then I'm sorry but you ain't nothing but a stone chump, fer sure if you wanna discuss nineties US comedy there are arguments to be made for Seinfeld, Larry Sanders & Fraiser, and I can understand that people get fed up with it being on telly so damn much, and that it represents to some the Ikea / Starbucks Globalised Blanding Of A Generation (something the show addresses on a number of occasions through Pheobe's wrestling with her lefty ideals), and there are cats who consider this very traditional US sit-com to be awful outdated in this post-Office / Curb 'gritty' 'natural' non-laughter track non-gag orientated world, and I'm sorry it isn't all angry & bitter & spiteful & non-mainstream like real comedy is, right...but, y'know, get over it, whydoncha?

The Genius Of David Schwimmer: it's a minor exchange, but it's one of my faves.
Ross enters a costume hire store. A young store hand greets him cheerfully.
Shop guy: Hello, sir! You here to return those pants?
Ross: (indignent, confused) No...these are my pants.

Tradition would dictate that you place the emphasis on 'my,' Schwimmer places it on 'pants.' Every member of the principle Friends cast (yes, perhaps especially Kudrow) was capable of doing unpredictable, vastly creative things with their lines without breaking a sweat as a matter of course, and ultimately it is this which sets them apart from most other sit-com casts. I've chosen Schwimmer because I think he's over-looked, and because of the six I identify with Ross closely - elder brother with younger sister as sibling, spent time in college making 'wordless sound poems' on his keyboard, has been in love with same girl since high school, likes dinosaurs, Fatboy Slim & comics...he can do the robot...a paleontologist who works out. He is, indeed, like Indiana Jones.

.9. Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce (M*A*S*H)
Alan Alda For President! Vote Alda in '08!

.10. Alex Reiger (Taxi)
Judd Hirsch For For Vice President! Vote Hirsch in 'o8! Imagine the Democrat Alda / Hirsch ticket! It can't fail!

YOU HAVE BEEN WATCHING (in order of appearence...)

Gimme Shelter, George Lucas, 'Cycle-Delic Sounds', etc etc

2006-08-22T10:58:00.000-07:00

So I guess the definitive Death Of The Sixties text has gotta be the Maysles Brother's 1969 Rolling Stones tour documentary Gimme Shelter, which I caught last night for the first time (courtesy of a ropey video copy my Dad taped off the telly a couple of weeks back) and I'm mighty pleased to report that it's pretty much everything one might hope for...fer the record, the movie features a ton of footage from the New York gig that was recorded and released as (maybe my fave Stones LP...no, not Fave live LP, Fave Stones LP period) Get Yer Ya Yas Out, (Jagger: "Aww, I think I just bust a button on my trousers...you don't want my trousers to fall down, now, do you?), the Stones mooching about looking imperiously cool, and of course the grim finale of Altamont, the free concert held on a cold San Fransico night at the Altamont Speedway which ended with the Hells Angels (acting as 'security') stabbing to death black teenager Meredith Hunter meters away from the stage as the Stones played on...it is a mighty depressing film, a bummer, and the final images - Hunter's girlfriend weeping as his body is wheeled into a helicopter, Jagger staring in stoned, numb incomprehension at the footage of the murder - tell you everything you need to know the about the true darkness of the Nixon, Nam and post-Woodstock era.

While there are plenty of places you can read about Altamont, I figured I'd put my two cents in. It's an event I've been fascinated by for years, and Gimme Shelter has given me much to mull over. Here are a few thoughts on the film...

.1. The sense of doom and violence which hangs over the Altamont Speedway is palpable from the moment we are introduced to the site...certainly there are many people present who have since reported things 'not feeling right' from the beginning. It is a cold, dull day, no 'West Coast Woodstock' as the promoters and organisers naively hoped it would be. As the Stones get out of their helicopter, Jagger has barely walked a dozen yards before some kid slugs him in his face, setting the tone for the rest of the day.

.2. The rumble of the Hells Angels Harleys as they first appear over the horizen is a trully terrifying, foreboding sound, like a squadren of Meshersmits emerging from the clouds...the counter-culture's (Grateful Dead, Ginsberg, Ken Kesey & The Merry Pranksters etc) infatuation with the Angels is easy to understand - they represented a real, hardcore, blue collar outlaw culture middle class hippies could only dream about , they rode kick ass bikes, the cops hated 'em just like they hated drop out kids with long hair yadda yadda yadda - but it is difficult to comprehend why - even in a haze of drugs & brotherly love - more hippy figureheads didn't recognise them for the unreconstructed violent thugs they so patently were, and see something like Altamont coming a mile off. The Angels are simply out of control in Gimme Shelter; they are seen clubbing dazed hippies with pool cues, dragging people from the stage who then disapeer under a barrage of kicks and fists and - in one of the most infamous scenes (in a film full of 'em) - knocking Jefferson Airplane guitarist Marty Balin unconcious mid-performance...

.3. Which brings me to my favourite scene in the film, a tragi-comic cameo by The Grateful Dead. Of all the West Coast groups, it was the Grateful Dead who were most closely affiliated with the Angels, and their relationship with the outlaw bikers was central to the counterculture's acceptance of them. Consequently The Dead must accept some responsibility, however small, for the Rolling Stone's decision to 'hire' the Angels as 'security' at Altamont...which didn't stop them from splitting the moment they learnt of the Marty Balin incident. The Dead were meant to play Altamont, but, spooked by bad vibes and reports of Angels violence, helicopter-ed off the site without leaving the backstage area. I'm a big fan of The Grateful Dead, and their cameo - which lasts less than a minute - is highly entertaining in it's dazed & confused comic Grateful Dead-ness.

Guitarist Bob Weir returns with tales of Hells Angels On Jefferson Airplane violence...the conversation, such as it is, is monotoned, stoned and blank throughout

Jerry Garcia "So that's the scene, huh?"

Bob Weir: "Yeah, they beat up Marty Balin."

Jerry Garcia: "Oh, bummer."

Bob Weir: "Beating musicians up like that...it doesn't seem right somehow."

(a) Describing events as 'the scene'. (b) Use of 'Bummer,' the most pathetic, inevitable hippy cliche one could possibly hope for. (c) Weir's laughable conclusion. Would it seem 'right' if the Angels were beating up punters? Or is it just musicians it isn't 'right' to beat up? And it isn't right 'somehow'? Like, somewhere in the back of your dope addled fogged up skull you have some niggling sense that it's wrong for liquored up scumbags to smash people about for kicks but you can't quite remember why it's wrong? Jeez. It's funny, because people playing to type is funny, but it's also shockingly lame.

Anyway, the Godfather is on Film Four now (the announcer lady said 'Now on Film Four, The Godfather - it's free!,' like she was just as excited about Film Four being free as I am), and I've been sat writing this for too long, so I'm gonna leave it there. One thing I will mention before I split is that I read today that one of the cameramen the Maysles Brothers hired to film at Altamont was...GEORGE LUCAS! Which is pretty crazy.

(OH! In other Late Sixties Oultlaw Biker Culture Related News: I was in Barcelona the other week and I picked up a copy of Davie Allen And The Arrows' late 60s 'Cycle-Delic Sounds' LP, which is an instrumental biker-sploitation fuzz-garage / acid rock freak out monster, the killer tracks being the very trippy 'Mind Transferral' & the very evil 'Grog's Hog.' It's got a really hip sleeve, with a blonde hippy chick reflected in the mirror of a motorcycle on the front and a picture of The Arrows posing like bad ass punks on the back. Some of the LP is pretty shlocky, infact it's all shlocky as hell, which is part of it's appeal, but some of it is just sorta cheesy with it...the stuff that's good is very good. Go dig.)

Big Brother, Celeb Culture, Heat etc

2006-08-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

Basically the whole point of what follows boils down to: Celebrity Culture Deserves To Be Recorded More Intelligently And Thoughtfully Than It Currently Is. If you can't be bothered to read the rest of this post, I'll understand.

....And so, another series of Big Brother grinds to a crashing halt, having taken ONE QUARTER of the year of our Lord 2006 to complete it's stuttering, over complicated and mildly unimpressive development, and to reach the fascinating resolution of this years grand narrative, namely -May: Pete Enters House, Everybody Says 'Oh, This Guy Is Definately Gonna Win' / August: Pete Wins.

Let me make a few things clear. I'm a fan of Big Brother, as much as one can be a 'fan' of something like Big Brother... it's sort of like saying you're a 'fan' of the Olympics...Big Brother is not a television show, it's a sporting event...one watches Deal Or No Deal, one follows Big Brother...I think it stands significantly apart from Love Island, I'm A Celebrity Get Me Outta Here etc etc, head & shoulders infact...it is the first & best of it's kind, it's impact on pop culture - for better or worse - on a scale unmatched by almost any TV show of the past...what...decade? I've watched every series. I've seen every First Night, and every Grand Final - counted 'em in, counted 'em out. Dig it; I've taken each series of Big Brother seriously, ranted & raved at the TV, developed highly complex mathmatical equations to predict voting trends, even Picked Up My Phone And Txted where I've thought it absolutely necessary. Admitting to following Big Brother is pretty much taboo amongst liberal lefty arty circles, certainly amongst my friends you may as well admit to enjoying the Bush administration's foreign policy, Starbucks or - god forbid - Friends. It stands for everything these cats hate - dumbing down, celeb culture, chaviness yadda yadda...which says much more about my friends petty prejudices than it does about any of those things...

...but I'm not here to defend Big Brother, or my interest in it. What I wanted to talk about was the lazy, disrespectful way BB is written about in the media which would claim to treat it with the most respect, ie Heat magazine et al...and when I say et al, I'm really just talking about Heat, it being the only Celeb rag I read regularly...and how these rags don't discuss BB in the terms it deserves.

To explain. This year's BB has been below average. Not terrible - see The Year Cameron Won - but nowhere near the exceptional entertainment of The Year Nadia Won, AKA The Best Big Brother Ever, not as good as last year...infact, now I think about it, perhaps the second worst series so far. The problems: the housemates were all a bit dull & thick, poor choices by Endemol, as a consequence Pete - relatively speaking the only real STAR - was destined to win from the beginning...it was too long, they were spreading themselves WAY too thin...(3 MONTHS fer chrissakes)...not enough happened, and consequently they relied more heavily than they have during any other year on gimmicks like SECRET SECOND HOUSE, PUTTING EVICTED HOUSEMATES BACK IN, GOLDEN TICKETS yadda yadda, none of which can by themselves make for great BB- only funny, volatile, interesting housemates can do this. Any self respecting BB fan (is there such a thing?) would tell you that after the successes of the last 2 years BB7 was a big dissapointment, and they could tell you exactly why.

So how come Heat Magazine (AKA The People Who Should Know More About BB Than Anybody And Take It Really Seriously) spent the last 3 months pretending it was really great? The answer, obviously, is that they're completely in the pocket of Endemol, they owe Endemol way too much, and it would be ridiculous to expect them to be heavily critical of a series which fills their pages for half the year, and when they've always been such dedicated cheerleaders for the show. Their hands are tied.

BUT!

That's a real shame. BB deserves to be written about intelligently, and at the most basic level this boils down to Heat being able to say: "We love BB, it continues to fascinate us, for those of us so inclined the bad years are in their own way just as interesting as the good years, this year hasn't blown us away, and here's why." You don't help something by blanketly saying everthing it does is brilliant. This BB wasn't brilliant. Heat should have said so. Heat owe it to BB, and to serious fans, to be honest and critical where necessary. After the Cameron debacle, Heat suggested softly that it was an underwhelming year, and the following series - Nadia - was The Best Ever.

Noughties Celebrity Culture is vacuous, dumb, shallow yadda yadda yadda...but it is REAL and HUGE and I THINK PRETTY INTERESTING & there must be a gap in the market for a publication which discusses it in on an intelligent level, acknowledges the shades of grey etc etc, recognises the reliative goods and bads thereof...and that's my whole point, really. I'd like to read about these subjects in a way which reflects the way I feel about them, but I recognise that perhaps I am asking too much of the publications dedicated to recording them to expect it. Infact, perhaps I am wrong, perhaps a phenonema gets the media it deserves, and if the writing about BB etc is poor then that is simply a reflection of the subject matter. Then again, perhaps there will be a critical u-turn on this sorta stuff in 10 years time and there will appear in Borders 100s of very high-brow books about BB written in very elevated language, and I'll be complaining that a vital, fun pop phenonema had been co-opted by acedemics who are seriously missing the point...told you you should just read the start of the post, huh?

Oh, and another thing. I hated Nikki.

Reduce THIS!

2006-08-10T09:28:00.000-07:00

Over at Anna's place Ms Waits is celebrating the news that one of the Reduced Theatre guys is doing a Reduced Star Wars. Hoorah, etc. May the 'Farce' be with him, a huh huh. All well and good. But check this for a solid gold million dollar idea:

REDUCED BEATLES!

Aw, man! It's a no-brainer! (OK, so it's sorta been done by The Rutles guys, but what the hell, that was a different sorta deal, and it ain't as good as people say it is anyway.) Reduced Shakespeare Company Do The Beatles! It's got the lot! They're revered as hell! They're iconic! The narrative arc is (almost) perfect! They wore all sortsa crazy clothes / beards! There're all sortsa famous 'moments' ripe for parody! It writes itself!

.1. Scouse art school rockabillys get together for Little Richard / Buddy Holly inspired kicks!
.2. Scouse art school rockabillys get manger / suits: become proper pop band!
.3. Pop band take over entire world! Take drugs / go to India: become hippy pop band!
.4. Hippies grow beards! Become dissalusioned with being pop band! Split up acrimoniously!

And before any of you Reduced guys start thinkin' this sounds like a good idea (which it is), and maybe you might rip me off without crediting me or paying me any cash money, just like the i-pod guys and the picnic blanket guys (yeah, that's right, I invented picnic blankets, for all the thanks I get) - well you cn just forget it, 'cos this baby's mine. I'm already working on the script. Dig it:

Scene 1

Paul: "Hello angry guitarist John Lennon, I'm over-sentimental bass player Paul McCartney. Wow, I like living in Liverpool! It's FAB! Hey, do you want to be in a pop band with me?"

John: "Yes! But there are only two of us. You need four people to be a pop band! Oh, who is this coming now? It's passive/ aggressive guitarist George Harrison and aimable drummer Ringo Starr! Let's all go to Hamburg!"

Dynamite stuff, huh?

Class question: What would you like to see 'Reduced?'

New / Old Music - a barely coherent rant

2006-07-31T08:37:00.000-07:00

So...a few weeks ago I posted a piece about OLD & NEW MUSIC, the basic theme being that I'm a big boring crank & I should get out more if only I could tear myself away from my Chicago Transit Authority records & I know there's plenty of great music being made today (I just heard the Black Mountain LP, which is just AWESOME... Sabbath-esque heavy rock) but basically I have a preference for music recorded before the late seventies because personally I dig the way records sounded back then, though of course there are exceptions and I also dig plenty of early hip-hop, 'Madchester' indie, shoe-gazing stuff ie My Bloody Valentine, Ride etc, some Big Beat stuff, the Dee-troit garage scene The White Stripe emerged from, New York punk (Ramones, Blondie, Heartbreakers etc), and anything else good that appears on my radar, and it also must be noted that I of course recognise the fact that THE SIXTIES produced utter shlock like any decade, and THE LSD SOAKED FREE LOVE SIXTIES as we understand it today was only experienced by a minority of the Western World whlist everybody else got on with their 9-5s & generally it stands as an OVER-HYPED decade that we all need to get over if we're ever gonna get anywhere ourselves.

BUT!! And I think this is the bottom line...the mid - late sixties were exceptional because the Top 40 was full of genuinely innovative, ground breaking pop records, and however much similarly experimental / exciting / original music has emerged since that period (ie: tons & tons of it, though most of it (at least guitar-wise) has it's roots here too...house & techno are pretty SHOCK OF THE NEW, I guess), it has rarely had an impact on the mainstream on the scale it did during this period. Here are THE STATS:

From the Cashbox US Top 100, this week in 1967

.2. The Doors - Light My Fire
.8. Procul Harum - A Whiter Shade Of Pale
.11. The Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit
.14. Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood - Jackson
.24. The Bar-Kays - Soul Finger
.27. The Beatles - All You Need Is Love
.37. The Parliaments - I Wanna Testify
.47. James Brown - Cold Sweat pt1
.55. Dave Allen & The Arrows - Blues Theme
.61. The Who - Pictures Of Lily
.66. Jr Walker & The All Stars - Shoot Your Shot
.67. Van Morrison - Brown Eyed Girl
.70. Moby Grape - Omaha
.72. The Kinks - Mr Pleasent
.85. Glen Campbell - Gentle On My Mind
.86. The Third Rail - Run, Run, Run
.87. Vanilla Fudge - You Keep Me Hanging On
.90. The Beatles - Baby Your A Rich Man
.93. Buffalo Springfield - Bluebird

So...in there we have 4 ALL TIME GREAT ROCK/POP SINGLES BY ANYBODY'S STANDARDS, REGARDLESS OF GENRE (Doors, Procul Harum, Jefferson Airplane & Van Morrison - 2 of which could be considered PRETTY WEIRD CHART HITS (Procul Harum, Jefferson Airplane, arguably the defining statements of UK & US psychedelia respectively), 4 ALL TIME GREAT SOUL/RNB SINGLES (Bar-Kays, Parliaments, James Brown, Jr Walker & The All Stars - 1 of which - James Brown's Cold Sweat - is a gen-u-ine-ly important record, one of the earliest bone fide FUNK records), 2 AWESOME GARAGE / PUNK SINGLES (Dave Allen, The Third Rail - both good enough to be included on the Nuggets box-set), 2 ALL TIME GREAT INSTRUMENTALS (Dave Allen & The Bar-Kays again, Soul Finger being 2nd perhaps only to Booker T & The MG's Green Onions in the canon of STAX instrumental hits), 2 showings by ALL TIME (non-Beatles) BRITISH ROCK BANDS (The Who, The Kinks) 1 DEFINITIVE US HEAVY / PSYCHE ROCK SINGLE (Vanilla Fudge), and thats before we mention Lee Hazelwood, Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape, Glen Campbell...and 2 songs by little known British beat combo called The Beatles, one of which - Baby You're A Rich Man - is certainly one of the weirder in their canon.

What you have just eyeballed are stone cold facts. Now, sure, there were plenty of great acts around not racking up sales - Velvets, Stooges, Beefheart, etc - and the charts were certainly full of alotta dross too, but that's really all by-the-by. It would be a remarkable Top 100 if it contained only had 'I Wanna Testify' by The Parliaments (proto-psychedelic soul from the band that would become Funkadelic) , or only 'Blues Theme' by Dave Allen & The Arrows (rampaging buzz-saw surf-punk instro) and every other one of the other 99 songs were a buncha garbage. But there's 20 ALL TIME SMASHES here. In ONE WEEK!!!! Thats, like a FITH of that entire weeks Top 100 being made up of records that history will (already does) record as being some of the best, most creative pop music ever made. The jury is in.

It's the sheer amount of good mainstream music I'm talking about here, facts & figures. I could list 20 great 80s acid house records or 20 great early 90s grunge records - BUT:

a) they wouldn't have sell as many copies as those listed above
b) they didn't have the same impact on the mainstream
c) they didn't all appear in the same chart on the same date, if they made it into the chart at all.

So...the point is not that there is no good music made today. Far from it. There's plenty of great music being made today, much of it the equal of what I've listed here...well, apart from the James Brown, Mar-Kays, Parliaments & Dave Allen songs, they don't get much better than those, but whatever, there's certainly stuff being made today as good as anything The Who ever did. The lack of mainstream success / impact by today's Moby Grapes & Van Morrisons speaks ill not for their music but ill for the time & culture in which they operate. And don't get me wrong, this isn't some snobby anti-pop thing. The very core of my argument is that 'White Rabbit' by Jefferson Airplane WAS POP MUSIC. And that's the difference. I'm a pop freak. I'm excited when something gen-u-inely great makes it into the charts...let's say 99 Problems by Jay-Z, or Maneater by Nelly Furtado, or I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor by The Arctic Monkeys or Biology by Girls Aloud or the new Christina Aguileria song...I dug that Eric Prydz remix of 'Call On Me' the mostest, which goes to show there's no accounting for taste because it's clearly the trashiest piece of trance crapolla ever produced but whatever, y'know, you only dig what you dig & there ain't nothing you can do about it. I'm no snob. Well, maybe I'm a bit of a snob. But my love of 50s-60s pop music has nothing to do with snobbery. Aw, jeez...I'm just defending my crankiness now. You don't need that. You're all busy people.

THE ACTUAL POINT: every decade produces good & bad music. The idea that music works in 'decades' is dumb. Any given late sixties Top 100 was more interesting, diverse and culturally significant than the current Top 100, but that is the industry's fault, not a reflection on the quality of music being made today. Radiohead's 'OK Computer' or Nirvana's 'Nevermind' are examples of LPs which could gen-u-inely be regarded as reflecting / shaping the times on the same level as, say, the first Hendrix LP. LPs are an entirely different kettle of monkeys to 45s, and we'll leave that subject to another time. Maybe. 'Jumping Jack Flash' by The Rolling Stones was a great song. So was 'Don't Look Back Into The Sun' by The Libertines. 'Louie Louie' by the Kingsmen was better than both. Pop music in general is the greatest thing in the world. Even 'Call On Me' by Eric Prydz.

The Revolutionary Freaked Out Fuzz Club Paul Fuzz DJ set list

2006-07-30T04:54:00.000-07:00

For the sake of my own sanity ( & and maybe one or two of you might be interested too) I've decided to record here my set list from last night's Revolutionary Freaked out Fuzz Club, the monthly 50s/60s psyche/blues/funk night I run with a couple of friends down at the City Screen Basement Bar in York...I drink too much Stella and my set is always a mixture of 'on the fly' making-it-up-as-I-go-along DJing and semi-planned stuff, ie the Beatles medley, so by the time the next Fuzz Club come 'round I've forgotten what I played, what worked & what didn't etc. So I figure if I collect my thought here it'll help me next time.

So...making their debut on the Fuzz set list were Black Sabbath's The Wizard (there's always one song that loads of people come & thank me for playing, and The Wizard was definately this Fuzz Club's HIT) , Can's Halleuwah (a phenonemal song, don't know why I've not 'spun' it before), Hawkwind's Hash Cake 77 (not really a floor filler to be honest, but groovy in a I'M FLYING THROUGH THE COSMOS way...sounds remarkably like early Verve...don't think I'll be playing it again), Chicago's I'm A Man & Augustus Pablo's East Of The River Nile (brooding oragn/vibes/melodica heavy dub reggae instrumental, one of my ALL TIME TOP 10 RECORDS). Noticeable by their absence were James Brown & Captain Beefheart (who I almost always play something by), and Booker T & The MG's Green Onions (possibly the first time I haven't included this in my set at the Fuzz Club, another ALL TIME TOP 10 RECORD).

Can - Halleuwah
Dave Hamilton - Soul Suite
David Axelrod - General Confessional
Funkadelic - I Bet You
Funkadelic - Free Your Mind (And Your Ass Will Follow)
Hawkwind - Hash Cake '77
Jimi Hendrix - Who Knows
Jimi Hendrix - If 6 Was 9
Augustus Pablo - East Of The River Nile
Shuggie Otis - Oxford Grey
The Mogol - Sunset In Golden Horn
The Electric Flag - M-23 (from 'The Trip ' OST)
Rex Garvin - Strange Happenings
Bad Boys - Black Olives
Rex Garvin - Strange Happenings
Black Sabbath - The Wizard
Bobby Franklin's Insanity - Bring It On Down
Blood, Sweat & Tears - Lucrecia McEvil
Ides Of March - Vehicle
Chicago - I'm A Man
Howlin' Wolf - Spoonful
Hound Dog Taylor - Let's Get Funky
The Bar-Kays - Knucklehead
Reno & The Chosen 3 - Soul Bagg
Bob Dylan - Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence
Aretha Franklin - The Weight
The Beatles - Paul Fuzz Mix: A Beginning (Anthology 3) into Helter Skelter (Anthology 3 version) into Strawberry Fields Forever (Anthology 2, Version 3 - from beginning of Ringo's drum coda) - over top of - first string crescendo from A Day In The Life into Glass Onion
The Kingsmen - Louie Louie
Neil Armstrong - "One small step" dialogue

Louie Louie is the greatest song in the whole world. The bit after the guitar break when they come in wrong and the drummer cobbles together a rubbish fill to get them back on track is possibly my favourite moment in the entire history of recorded popular music. A key text of 20th Century American-trash-pop culture.

Paul Fuzz: Boosh Widow

2006-07-28T11:48:00.000-07:00

BRIEF INTRODUCTION... Look. I don't know how to set up links to other people's pages. But if you wanna make sense of what follows, go find Anna Wait's blog. What?! I dunno! Google it or something! Jeez...Oh,man! I just remembered! Anna put a link to her page on here when we set it up! Use that! Enjoy the show!

...Oh, boy. Can we pur-lease get oh-ver Noel Fielding?

I mean, ok: he's a big Syd Barret freak, which is exceptionally cool. He's one-half of the Mighty Boosh, the greatest comedy duo this country has produced for over a decade. He has the best hair in the world (season two, folks - only girls like season one Noel hair). And he's drop dead gorgeous. But all that aside, what's the big deal, huh? You think I'm looking forward to spending an evening in Nottingham with my sister & my girlfriend reduced to wibbling drool-o-matons , hangin' 'round the stage door like a pair of love-struck jibber-monkeys hoping The Great Haired One may just lower himself to grace us with his point-nosed presence?

"NOOOOOOEEEELLLLL!!!! NOOOEEEEELLLLLL!!!! HERE HE COMES!!!! OMYGODOHMYDOOHMYGOD!!!!!NOOOOOEEEEELLLLLL!!!OVER HERE!! OVER HERE!! OHMYGODOHMYGOD!!D'YA SEE THAT???!! HE LOOKED RIGHT AT ME!! HE DEFINATELY LOOKED AT ME!!! WHAT??? HE LOOKED AT ME!! NOT YOU! NOEL WOULDN'T LOOK AT YOU!! WHY WOULD HE LOOK AT A TRAMP LIKE YOU??!! NOEL'S MINE!! MINE!!! I'LL KILL YA!!! I'LL KILL YA!!!"

Jeez. I'll be in the bar, ladies. Anyway, I gotta new comedy hero now, you dig? Demetri Martin! He's got cool hair too! And he's on the Daily Show, der greatest American export for a decade! He plays guitar & harmonica! He's like a young comedy emo Bob Dylan! Only good! Go look on youtube or something! Check out the 'TRENDSPOTTING' bits from The Daily Show! They're the greatest!

The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Record Collections etc

2006-07-25T11:13:00.000-07:00

Oh, man! It's one of those posts that invites a response from the blogging community! Like the 'Fave Beatles Song' thing! Hey, remember the 'Fave Beatles Song' thing?

..."I like Maxwell's Silver Hammer best!" "Maxwell's Silver Hammer sucks! I like 'Flying' best!" "Flying sucks! I like The Ballad Of John & Yoko best!" "The Ballad Of John & Yoko sucks!"... Good times.

When I returned home from work today my old lady was Having A Big Sort Out of all my records, reason being that due to post - DJing sloppiness on my part we are increasingly plagued by that most irritating of music geek phenonema:

That thing where you suddenly really wanna hear a particular song (let's say it's Dark Star by the Grateful Dead) you rush to your record collection, spend 20 minutes starring at row after row of LP spines muttering "I put it here...I know it was here...I just saw it the other day...oh, man...I swear to God these things move themselves....(shouting upstairs to girlfriend who has 'just got out of the shower') REBECCA! REBECCA! I'm trying to find Live/Dead! WHAT? NO! The one with the cartoon guy smashing an ice cream cone over his head is Live in Europe '73! This is just Live/Dead! Yeah, they're both live albums! They did quite a lot of 'em! They're the most widely bootlegged live act in rock history! I'm tying to find the one with the title in big medieval script on the front! Yeah, the one with 'Dark Star' at the start! WHAT? Dark Star is certainly not a dull hippy jambourie which at 18 minutes is about 17 minutes too long...OH, MAN! FOUND IT!" Only. To. Discover...that the record isn't in the sleeve. DUH DUH DUHHH!

So I was wondering if anybody has a system for filing their CDs / LPs / C90s / Wax Cylinders. I've 'genre-ised' my collection a couple of times after I've moved house, but I've only ever managed to keep it up for a week or so. I've NEVER alphabetised or chronologicised. Does anyone have a particularly interesting system? Or one which is super easy to maintain? Does anybody have any hilarious record collection related anecdotes they would like to share?

"So I said to him, 'uh, I think you'll find that 'Revolver' was released in the US a week later than it was in th UK, and yet here on your February 1966 - June 1966 shelf you've got the US version filed before the UK version?!' Yeah! Way to be chronologically accurate!"

Kate Bush, Mercury Prize, Billy Joel etc

2006-07-18T14:38:00.000-07:00

Mercury Music Prize Nominations
Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Ballad Of The Broken Seas Editors - The Back Room Guillemots - Through The Windowpane Richard Hawley - Coles Corner Hot Chip - The Warning Muse - Black Holes And Revelations Zoe Rahman - Melting Pot Lou Rhodes - Beloved One Scritti Politti - White Bread, Black Beer Sway - This Is My Demo Thom Yorke - The Eraser

....WHERE IS THE KATE BUSH LP? A glaring omission. I'm glaring as I write this. GLARE!!!!

It probably goes without saying that I haven't heard any of these LPs. I like the odd thing I've heard by Richard Hawley, other than that I'm utterly clueless or vaguely unimpressed. Editors have put out a couple of passable Joy Division pastiches. I thought the Hot Chip single about a monkey was a reasonable slice of new new-wavery, achieving a level of un-feeling, post-modern emotionally dis-connected blankness Blondie et al could only dream about about. Muse I don't dig at all. I think Thom Yorke is a fine lyricist but an irritating, wrong-headed human being who shoulda realised by now that ripping off ideas Aphex Twin had 10 years ago ain't no better or valid than an 'orthodox' rock band ripping off ideas Paul McCartney had 40 years ago. I heard a couple of tracks offa the Sway LP, I don't know jack about the current UK hip hop/grime scene but it sounded powerful enough stuff. Guillemots are named after a bird. And the Arctic Monkeys...jeez...I think their time has already past, hasn't it? It's July 2006 now. They're a February 2006 sorta band.

I enjoyed Anthony & The Johnsons winning last year, 'cos it shut the NME the hell up. "Oh, the Mercury Music Awards, they're everything we're not, boy oh boy, every year these corporate suck-balls compile a list of the lame garbage they've read about in Q Magazine plus a couple of half-way decent LPs they have no intention of giving it to, like f'instance the Anthony & The Johnsons LP this year, you think they're gonna give a wonderful little indie LP like that an award? You gotta be kidding us! If you wanna see an album like that get some recognition, you're gonna have to wait for the NME Awards, now THERE'S an award show that celebrates interesting new music...oh."

WHERE IS THE KATE BUSH LP? FEEL MY GLARE!!!!!

Oh, man. I heard Billy Joel being interviewed on the wireless today, and he said that when he was at school, he told his headmaster that "I'm not going to Columbia University. I'm going to Columbia Records." What a jerk.

New Music, The Pink Floyd, Muddy Waters etc

2006-07-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

So this bloggin' cat goin' by the name of Mouldy hits me with some rap about how I go on alot about 'old' music, but wants to know my opinion of 'new' music, and the deal brothers & sisters is this: I know alot about 'new' music (by which I guess we mean POST-LIBERTINES INDIE ROCK) but I don't really feel like I've got much of a handle on it, if you catch my etc. I rely on the indie-orientated cats & kittens I know to hip me to what's currently flipping wigs on the rock scene, and I hear CONTEMPOARY ROCK being played at parties or in people's cars or what haveyou, or maybe Joe Whiley'll play somethin', or I'll get a FREE CD with the NME, or I might have to review a NEW BAND for the paper, and I sorta ingest it that way, but I basically make absolutely no pro-active effort to know what's happenin' today, 'cept buying the NME, which is more outta habit than anything anyway. Like, Anna Waits digs The Arcade Fire (have they even got a 'The'? They should. They should be called The Arcade Fire..like, The Pink Floyd sounds way cooler than Pink Floyd, I've got an old John Peel session of Pink Floyd from '69 and he introduces 'em like - 'Ladies & Gentlemen...The Pink Floyd'. It's the coolest thing in the world...aw, jeez - this is OLD music, sorry) & I can see that it's all very dramatic high quality Waterboy's sorta stuff, and there's a million of 'em, and they play zithers and stuff, and it's obviously VERY GOOD music...but I just don't really, y'know, feel them particularly. Alot of this is down to production, (and I'm gonna sound like I'm a dull muso shmuck now, but I guess you'll have figured that much about me anyways) and it basically boils down to the simple fact that I Like How Records Recorded Between The Early 50s And The Mid 70s Sound. I ain't gonna lay a rap on you 'bout 'how drum miking techniques' changed or none of that boohockey, but it's enough to say that there's a vibe about the Muddy Waters - Early Led Zep (that'll do) era that I dig, and I guess that ain't no different to somebody sayin' they're a fan of a given era of literature, film, art yadda yadda yadda. The other big factor here is HISTORICAL CONTEXT, and my obsession with music from this period is part & parcel of a much wider fascination with mid-2oth centuary culture and history in gen, from Kennedy, Marilyn, beatniks the Bay Of Pigs to Nixon, Watergate, hippies & Vietnam. The music of this era is PART of the history, and that simply ain't the case now. Razorlight don't say anything about Iraq, Blair, Bush etc, and I find that sort of hard to get past, in terms of really liking them. Post mid 70s, the only stuff I really, truly dig is - ahem - old skool hip-hop (ie rough, badly recorded, very basic, very loud James Brown drum breaks being shouted over by a buncha school kids called something like The Incredible Disco 5) which I dig for the same reason I dig Jimi Hendrix, which is to say I dig it because it's so authentic a reflection of the desperate, fascinating climate in which it was produced -it's THE SOUND, THE SMELL of the drug / gang / Vietnam fallout that decimated the Bronx district of Manhattan circa 1977. I don't get that sorta feeling from much these days. Which means I'm missing out, fer sure. I envy young cats who dig the new scene. I like The White Stripes alot, infact I think they're utterly brilliant, but they're basically a garage/punk RnB band who got lucky, so they really don't count as New Music anymore than any Nuggets-revivalist band from Dee-troit does, ie The Mummies, The Greenhornes etc. I like & enjoy alot of new music, I think The Kooks write nice songs, I think The Arctic Monkeys are basically A Good Thing, I think Madonna is pretty great, I think The Flaming Lips are wonderful entertainment & very smart, I think Pete Doherty remains an interesting if pitiable figure and I think Lilly Allen is pretty NOW and good luck to her.

I while ago Keith Richards was interviewed in Q Magazine and they asked him what he thought about the 'NEW CROP' of BRITISH GUITAR BANDS; ie Razorlight, Franz etc. His reply was that he didn't really know much about them, and ended his response with the following question:

"I mean - are they as good as Muddy Waters?"

Q Magazine had to concede that no, of course they weren't. Keith thus considered the matter closed - if they're not as good as Muddy Waters then he's not really missing out, and he may as well stick with Muddy Waters. Keef's an old blues reactionary, possibly of the worst kind, and on one level his attitude sucks. But on another level, I sorta know what he's saying, and my attitude to NEW MUSIC basically boils down to: nobody has the time to Be Into Everything. If you're gonna devote your life to collecting all the great blues LPs in the world, you're never going to have the time, energy, money or inclination to really get into anything else. Things will appear on your radar, like a really great single by some great new band, but if it comes down to deciding whether your £10 is gonna go on an LP by A New Band That Sounds Like Black Sabbath or an LP by Black Sabbath, my money's always gonna go on Black Sabbath.

I run and DJ at a 60s funk/psyche/prog/RnB club called the Revolutionary Freaked Out Fuzz Club, and we have a motto, which I think I half- ripped off from Lester Bangs; "It's Not Retro, It's Just Good Taste." Whether it's good taste or not is up for debate, but I certainly don't think of it as retro.

Marilyn Monroe, The Rolling Stones & Muse

2006-07-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

So I'm sat outisde in my yard flickin' thru this real trashy Marilyn Monroe biog called 'Goddess' (I really only dig real sleazy, dirt raking biogs, like f'instance check out the hatchet job Albert Goldman did on Lennon, it's a blast, quite frankly I couldn't care less how accurate a portrait a biographer paints of their subject, jus' as long as they're imaginative and immoral enough to creates as many myths as they debunk) and I'm eyeballin' this story 'bought how she took LSD with Tim Leary in '62, and I'm sipping my cheap red, it's 6 in the pm & all's well in the world, & two doors down some cat sticks on 'Wild Horses' by der Stones real loud. Now it ain't my fave Stones track by any stretch, (for what it's worth, that dubious honour goes to the slide guitar white-boy funk of 'Ventilator Blues' from yer Exile on Main Street) but any vintage Stones on a sunny July evenin' is A-OK by me, especially as it's a nice enuff loping country ballad and the saintly Gram Parsons gave it 'em & it's just about right for my state of mind at that precise moment. So I'm a happy buckeroo. Then 'Wild Horses' trots to it's conclusion, an' I'm casually ponderin' wether this two-doors-down cat is gonna treat me to a whole evening of pleasent country rock, maybe some Flying Burritos, some CSN&Y, maybe if I'm real lucky he'll even spin some Sweetheart Of The Rodeo-era Byrds.

So it goes without sayin' that when my neighbourly DJ 'drops' some Muse LP I bum hard. Now, I ain't familar enough with contemporary indie rock to recognise der Muse instantly, but I figure pretty quickly it ain't David Crosby churnin' out the sub-Queen robo-metal dirge I'm being assaulted by, and even more depressin' still is that once I do recognise 'em I realise it ain't even their new LP, which at least woulda won my neighbour points for contemporaneousness (?) and woulda meant that if I were stopped in the street by the Indie Marketing Board and quizzed on my reactions to Supermassive Black Hole et al I coulda held forth with an INFORMED OPINION, insteada which I'm just gonna have to rely on my firmly held partially informed estimation that Muse suck, and their new LP probably sucks just as much as their last one and all the ones they did before that, and all this boohockey 'bout how the new single is some sorta big 'departure' for 'em, 'cos it's, like inspired by listenin' to cutting edge dance music in New York clubs, is just a PR exercise to disguise the fact that it actually just sounds like a Marilyn Manson b-side, and that if I were a cutting edge New York DJ I'd wanna tell Muse to shut the hell up and stop draggin' my good cutting edge name thru the mud, jeez, cutting edge New York DJs don't sit around mapping out the future of electronic drug music just so a buncha Jeff Buckley ripping off muvvafuggers can get their kicks in their club for a couple of hours and go home to tell the NME 'bout how the've had their horizens widened by hanging with drag queens an' listenin' to 'banging' Franz Ferdiand remixes in der Upper East Side.

Anyway, if you wanna hear something really good, check out 'Chicago: Live At Carnegie Hall'. It's a quadruple LP brass blues funk rock monster. That's quadruple LP. 4 LPs. 8 sides of vinyl. Two posters. A colour booklet. A nice cream box. That's called value for money, brother.

Black Sabbath, Beards, The Flaming Lips etc

2006-07-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

So after my last experiment in streamofconciousness blogging, I figured I'd sit down tonight with anuvva glass of the cheap red and artificially replicate a semi-successful formula. I don't know how many of you are Black Sabbath fans, I just bought a cheap-ass Best Of CD at the weekend & I gotta say while half a dozen or so cuts are righteous downer blues fug most of it is pure bunk, especially as it's a double set arranged chronologically and they didn't record a thing I wanna hear ever again after about 1974, I sorta bought it 'cos I know Mr Coyne from der Flaming Lips is a monster Sabbath freak & they do War Pigs live yadda yadda 'cos it's, y'know just as relevent today yadda yadda & seein' as Wayne's near as dammit the hippest cat on this or any other planet, (I mean, just check out the cat's beard, just his beard is better than most bands entire back catologue - see also Macca circa Let It Be, whose beard alone justifies The Beatles as der greatest, beards are very important, Jim Morrison had a groovy beard too, which is why hipsters hatin' on The Doors need forget obsessin' 'bout the whole Bonzo Dionysis Lizard King thing and give the guy a break) so I figured they've gotta have summfin', which most certainly do, just not as much as I woulda hoped, but I guess if you were some Romilar cough syrup glugging street punk kid from Nowhere USA in 1970 who, y'know, likes Led Zep 1, but is pissed 'cos it doesn't really bug his folks as much as he'd like, even when he's playin' it real loud at 3am, these buncha satan worshippin' black magik Hammer Horror dirge churnin' muvvas musta seemed like the greatest thing in the whole world, way better at least than Alice Cooper which is just Barnum Pantomine Circus freakery and not really the real deal at all, so it makes sense that Wayne digs 'em so much 'cos he was a Romilar cough syrup glugging street punk one time too, even if now he's like a benign, Father Christmas style The Man 8 out of 10 Indie Kids Would Choose To Be Their Dad, anyhoo, Black Sabbath recorded, y'know, some stomping tunes, The Wizard is a harmonica crazed monster...like the mighty MC5, I sorta dig the the idea of Black Sabbath ("Ladies and Gentlefreaks! Come have your heads stomped by the world's evilest scuzz shovelling horror-show B-Movie super heavy goat sacrificin', bat chompin' friends of Satan rock and roll 3D gore-o-vision shlock merchants!") more than that actual band, and ain't nothing wrong with that. Rock music is bunk, but the idea of it is potent as hell.

Lester Bangs, The Velvet Underground, Making Movies etc

2006-07-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

I'm the worlds least prolific blogger. The last thing I stuck on here was a link to a Beatles video at youtube, was has gotta rate as pretty much the lamest post ever, and even that was two weeks ago. I check out alotta your blogs most days, and the sheer volume of verbiage you cats manage to churn out makes me wanna weep. I figure you must be a buncha speed freaks or summfin. So I figured I'd just sit down with a glass of the cheap red and write about whatever the dickens wanders into my mindspace. I've been re-reading the Lester Bangs anthology 'Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung.' Now there's a cat who could really churn it out. There's a review of 'Astral Weeks' 9 pages long. I dig Lester alot, I mean, the guy was a
Dee-troit bum and he wasted his talent like a shmuck, but at least the cat realised that the important thing 'bout being a rock and roll writer ain't the rock and roll but the writing, and I wish he were still around, he'd be kicking Fall Out Boy's lillywhite MTV Corpro-punk ass all over the parking lot, ranting magnificantly 'bout how Iggy Pop didn't roll around in glass and get beaten up by Hells Angels so this buncha jerks could turn up 30 years later and buy a house in the Hamptons with their Million Dollar advance from Geffen or whoever the hell it is they sold their Mothers to in exchange for drugsmoneygirls. Plus, he loved The Velvet Underground, who I dig the mostest 'cos I've always sorta figured they're like....The Anti-Beatles, mutant Noo Yoik beatnik pop-art wraparoundshades street punk metaphetamine reflections of The Fabs, deepest dark where The Beatles were (gen-er-ally) dazzelingly bright, the distorto-Fabs, influential as hell but didn't sell squat, and, man, were they ever the greatest - jeez, I was just listenin' to The Gift (from White Light / White Heat, der numero uno DEFINITIVE Velvets LP in my humble etc) the other night, and I remembered reading that the lyrics (John Cale recites monotone exitentialist bizzaro short pulp fiction) were recorded on one channel and the music on the other, so you can listen to them both, or just one of them, so I pilled a wire, cut out the lyrics and just sat digging the music, which is pretty much the funkiest the Velvets ever got, (I mean it ain't James Brown but it ain't a million miles away from early Funkadelic neither) - a huge monster heavy fuzz bass riff from hell, Mo Tucker cavewoman stomp drums and, after a fashion, yer standard Velvets freak-out feedback guitar auto-destruction. Check it out, pop-pickaroos: IT'S A HIT!

So I've been listening to der Velvets and readin' Lester Bangs, which I guess makes sense. The other thing I've been doin' is making a film, summfin I've wanted to do ever since I saw Apocolypse Now (I'm a barrel of terrible cliches) back in...I wanna say high school...sixth form (I ain't ashamed of my Yankophilia, but you gotta draw your own line somewhere) and, y'know, turns out making a film is a whole lotta work. I wasn't really expecting that. I write music reviews for a local paper, that ain't work. I DJ at and organise a club (The Revolutionary Freaked Out Fuzz Club, check out our myspace etc) - that's some work, but mainly it gives me a chance to play David Axelrod and Howling Wolf records real loud, so that ain't really work neither. I work, that's some work, but it's work, so that's pretty much parta the deal. I figured Making A Film would probably fall somewhere near the Club Organising level of Work, But Not Really Work. Turns out it's actually just Work. The film I'm involved with (storyboarding, filming, setting up scenes, shifting boxes of props around town like a shmuck yadda yadda yadda) is summfin we're doing for three local bands (Cardboard Radio: post Libertines indie rock'n' roll, Hijack Oscar: heavy blues Carnival music & Boss Caine: Rolling Stones-styled alt. country) who have a big-deal one day festival thing coming up soon and wanted a video to project behind them, so 'cos they all think they're such a big buncha badass rock 'n' roll outlaws we've watched a ton of Leone movies and 'The Cincinnati Kid' and made a 15 minute film noir black and white cowboy poker movie, with 'em all sat round a dingy bar swigging Jack Daniels, smoking fat cigars, talking trash, playing cards, hustling each other outta dollars and chips yadda yadda, all real cliched but it looks super-cool and that's all that really matters anyway (check out the Midsummer Movie myspace, etc). So essentially I've had my first taste of making a music video. I thought it was a lot of hard, slow, frequently dull work. The finished thing's gonna be a stone wig flipper, but the process itself I haven't dug nearly as much as I always thought I would. I studied Film Theory at Warwick University, and the whole experience of making a film (however amateur, low budget, badly organised it's been) has forced me to accept something pretty down-heartening, which is I think a Film Theory course which contains absolutely no practical film making...is completely bunk. You cannot understand film unless you've been exposed on a least some level to how a film is ACTUALLY MADE. I knew alot about film before doing this, (not as much as I should perhaps, but enough), but I was shocked as to how naive I was about the reality of film-making, both the nature of a shoot and the post-production, editing process. "So...it looks like they were in the room together at the same time...but actually the shot of him and the shot of her were filmed on...what...totally seperate occasions?" I'm playing for effect, but it's not so far from the truth.

Which brings us nicely back to Lester Bangs. Lester was essentially a student of music theory, he played harmonica a bit and he wrote lyrics and sang der blues a little, but was basically not a musician, ('cept of course anybody who can bang a cooking pot is a musician, but that's a seperate issue.) In the late 70s he went into the recording studio with a band he'd put together, I guess figurin' 'Hey, if the chumps I bin writin' 'bout all these years can do it, I sure as hell can', and I remeber a quote I read once from his producer which basically went along the lines of "I couldn't believe LESTER BANGS, the man who understands rock and roll more than anyone on the planet, could be so naive about the recording process. He was shocked that not everything- bass, drums etc- were done together, live. He was sort of disapointed."

And that's the end of that chapter.

THE BEATLES AT SHEA STADIUM!!!!!

2006-06-21T11:18:00.000-07:00

Aw!!! It's The Beatles! At Shea Stadium! With John playing the Organ! If this don't make you smile, ain't nuffin gonna shake dem blues. This just makes me really, really happy. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv6RRBeR0Ko

Billy Preston 1946-2006: The Fifth Beatle

2006-06-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago I bought a very ropey bootleg video of The Beatles infamous 'Let It Be' documentary from a record fair in Doncaster. Most people I meet, even Beatles fans, tell me they don't really think much of the LP, but since watching the film that day I've always replied 'Ah. But you've gotta see the film to really understand it.' 'Cos I'm a pretentious jerk. But I'm also right.

An old friend of The Beatles since their Hamburg days, black American keys player Billy Preston was invited to play with the band during the tense and fractious Let It Be sessions at George Harrison's behest, the Quiet One believing that the laid back organist's presence would force everybody to be on their best behaviour - the same had worked during the White Album sessions when George drafted Eric Clapton in for 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps.' I loved watching Billy in the documentary, 'cos he just seemed to be so damned happy to be playing funky RnB music with the Fabs, at a time when the Fabs themselves had long forgotten how to do the same. I identified with him - this, you felt, was exactly how you would feel if you'ld been invited to jam with the Beatles. You couldn't even imagine being Paul or John. But you could easily imagine how it might feel to be Billy; a little nervous maybe, not wanting to take sides or step on anybodys toes, wary of Paul's snake charmer charm, warier still of John's violent temper...but also quietly confident, desperate to help the Beatles make some great soul music, your music, and if possible just have a good time, drink some wine, play your piano and JAM WITH THE BEATLES!

'Let It Be' is a flawed LP (like The White Album, that's a huge part of it's charm for advocates of it like myself), but it also contains some of their greatest RnB groovers, notably 'Get Back' and 'I've Got A Feeling,' the latter being one of my all time fave raves. Preston is integral to the dry, laidback funk they nailed on these tracks, and was awarded for his wonderful electric piano break on 'Get Back' by being only artist ever to recieve a co-credit with the Beatles, the single baring the legend: 'The Beatles with Billy Preston.' Pretty cool, huh? From the same sessions, his playing on 'Don't Let Me Down' (another fave) - heard on Anthology 3 - is magnificent. And he played with them during their last ever live performance on top of the Apple building. Pretty cool, huh?

There's a scene in 'High Fidelity' when Rob has made his 'Top 5 jobs', and lists 'Musician' at No1 - with the caveat that he would be happy being 'one of the Memphis Horns - not asking to be Hendrix.' That's how I felt about Billy when I watched 'Let It Be.' I'm not asking to be Macca, but it must have been nice, even preferable, to have been Billy Preston during those few weeks. Many have their claims to Fifth Beatle status, Billy deserved it more than most. He passed the audition.

IN PRAISE OF THE MIGHTY BOOSH

2006-06-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

"Comedy Is The New Rock & Roll," or so the NME claimed during a particularly bad dry-spell in the post-baggy Pop Will Eat Itself/Wonderstuff early 90s era. Jeez. The Mary Whitehouse Experience was selling out Wembley. "You know the guys who performed postmodern irony drenched anti-comedy comedy to a stadium full of students? That's you that is." How we laughed. Of course, Comedy wasn't the New Rock & Roll at all. Izzard came close; big tours of plastic ice-hockey palaces. Loud techno music. I saw the guy a couple of years ago at Sheffield Arena, I though I'd wandered into a 'Zoo' era U2 gig. The Bowie of comedy...allmost. But The Boosh have nailed it. Someone finally did it. Noel Fielding is WAY more rock 'n' roll than mosta the rock 'n' rollers out there; better lookin', better dressed, better hair...and Julian, shit, he's justabout the coolest cat in Shoreditch, a John Coltrane diggin' muvva with a moustache. They are the Zappas of Comedy, a jazz-freak and an indie kid who have Keith Richards' messed up blood runnin' thru their veins. So far ahead of the pack it's almost a joke. I don't even know how much I LOVE the Boosh, summfin' 'bout 'em still sorta niggles at me (ie: second series...too much adventure, too few laughs, p'raps?)...but I know they're untouchably good. Stupidly good. There are moments of banter between the two of 'em that are easily the equal of Python, Cook & Moore, yadda yadda yadda, The Boosh is the best comedy we've produced since Spaced (better than Spaced? Tricky...) and I'll happily stand on Ricky Gervais' coffee table and shout that claim with all my heart & soul. I've come to the Boosh party late, but that's sorta par for the. I only heard the first Libertines LP last week. The Mighty Boosh deserves everything everybody says about it & more. Mr Ben + Captain Beefheart + Spaced = Boosh. That's the sorta math I like to do.

Paul Fuzz Threatened By Hells Angels

2006-05-31T15:58:00.000-07:00

Or, more accurately, the Hells Angel's lawyers. Yessir, earlier this week I recieved an official e-mailed notification from a Norse- looking man-mountain on a motorbike demanding that I cease using the Hells Angels 'Deaths Head' insignia on my myspace profile (I'm sorta obsessed with the early Jack Nicholson 'Hells Angels On Wheels' 60s biker movie at the moment) , or face the wrath of the club's legal department. Guys, guys, guys. Has it really come to this? What's happened to you? You should be responding to this outrage with mindless, chain swinging violence, not calling in Johnny Q Law to do yer dirty work for ya! Burn my house down! Stomp my head you muvvas! What, you're menna be some sorta legitimate organisation now, huh? I suppose you don't smuggle narcotics or run numbers any more neither? Jeez louise. Your lawyers? You ought be ashamed of yourselves. Did Stinky Pete and Kiny Joe die in vain? What would Big Murderous Psycho Dave think? It used to be a guy would just look at one of you wrong and you'ld be all over him like a pack o' greasy grizzly bears. Hard to rev a Harley in a Paul Smith suit, huh guys? So anyway, I was real dissapointed that I wasn't subject to a bone fide 'STOMPING' (Just think! The ultimate Gonzo Journalist induction - a biker boot to the face, just like ol' Hunter S!), but not so dissapointed that I didn't remove the image instantly like the cowerdly whitebread liberal I so obviously I am. Still, made my week. I'm on some sorta list, apparently. Now I just need Apple to sue me for this blog and George Lucas to sue me for my handcrafted Star Wars thimbles, and I'll be all set.

For Pete's Sake

2006-05-11T11:53:00.000-07:00

NME HEROES #2: Pete Doherty

"OK, so we're a bit surprised by your choice on this one...yes, there was a time when Peter Doherty lived his life with unrivalled romantic zest, when he represented a truly anti-establishment voice...but is he still your hero?... Surely he's no longer anti-establishment, surely he's just a worn-out drug addict who needs help again if he's ever going to make decent music again. Don't you deserve better?"

While the block-headed opinions of the NME's readership (expressed in illiterate, bile-spewing, incoherent, ill-thought out diatribes weekly in the letters pages) must frequently depress & frustrate the staff of that paper (who are constantly reminded that they are writing for a bunch of shmucks) , it is almost unheard of for the NME to openly lambast and despair at them in print. Pete Doherty was voted this week by NME readers as their #2 ALL TIME HERO OF ROCK & ROLL, (A Mr K Cobain of Seattle, Washington, was first) beating off competition from arguably more deserving artists like Bob Dylan, Elvis, that kid from The Arctic Monkeys etc etc.

I certainly shared the surprise expressed by the NME. Like; 'Doherty? Still? Really?' Even if they had chosen not to respond in the exasperated way that they did, I would have strongly suspected that behind the scenes they were throwing their hands up in disbelief that their readers were that dumb. But to have that image confirmed by a lengthy, sustained rant at their expense...jeez, that was quite a shock. I don't doubt for a moment that the diatribe was penned with some intention of provoking venomous death threats from Pete-o-philes, but the overall feeling I got from the piece was something much more than simple button-pressing - ie a genuine desire to HAMMER HOME how much the NME disagrees with it's readers continued deification of a character that they themselves have recognised for some time as the washed up, sad, junkie scumbag that any right-thinking person knows he is.

In NME world this is, I think, a pretty big deal. This was a poll voted for by thousands of readers. The NME didn't treat any other rock star it's readers voted for with anything but the sort of un-blinking reverence you would expect from this sort of exercise. It wasn't like the whole thing was like:

#6 - Thom Yorke
Thom York? That whiney guy from Radiohead? Are you frikking kidding us here? We bring you exciting new bands every week and you're still voting for this chump? What the hell's wrong with you people?

#24 - Bono
Bono?

I mean, Bono, fercryingoutloud. Y'know, if the NME had wanted to make a point of disagreeing in print with all the reader's choices they considered ill judged, they woulda been there all week. But they didn't. Which is why the 'WHY THE HELL DO YOU GUYS STILL LIKE THIS JERK' Doherty thing is so remarkable. However...at Number One is none other than Kurt Cobain, the BIGGEST HERO OF NME READERS TODAY, who of course was a smack addled rock star so messed up that he shot himself, making him arguably a man even less deserving of our reverence that Doherty, and therefore even more deserving of the NME's frustration at it's readers reverence of him...

And Captain Beefheart didn't even place. Shocking.

Bring On The Backlash

2006-05-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

'The Backlash.' The hipster's revenge. The method by which The Cooler Than Thou re-establish their credentials as real down cats who know where it's at. The art of Being Bored. You think liking stuff is important? Fergeddit, grandad. If you really wanna get with it, you gotta not like stuff. Specifically, you gotta not like stuff two weeks before everybody stops liking it. Every cultural phenonemon has a sell-by-date. But it ain't like The Arctic Monkeys have got it stamped on their asses, no sir. You gotta figure it out for yourself. You gotta get that Backlash sense tingling.

I'm all for a good backlash. Pre-empting a backlash is a sweet feeling. "Aw, yeah, I dug some of that first Arctic Monkeys LP, some of the lyrics are pretty good, but, I mean, the music ain't all that special, couple of good tunes I guess, but I'm really just sorta bored of the whole thing now." Liking something first has nothing on not liking something first.

BUT!!!

Not everything needs a backlash.

I've been disturbed recently by a number of people, often people younger than myself but occasionally peers, who when the subject of The Simpsons has come up have adopted the classic hipster sneer & asked 'aw, yeah, but have you seen 'Family Guy?' I'm sorry: HUH??!! HAVE I 'SEEN' 'FAMILY GUY?' WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? WHY ARE YOU EVEN SUGGESTING AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE SIMPSONS? Are you suggesting some sort of...SIMPSONS BACKLASH?? I mean, seriously. This is backlash madness. Not everything demands a backlash. Dig this: SOME THINGS ARE JUST GOOD. The world does not want a Simpsons backlash. The Simpsons does in NO WAY deserve a backlash. These people are so crazed by their desperate, insatiable lust for Backlash Cool that they'll slander anything. I'm not a reverent guy, and I'm pretty happy to hear constructive criticism of even those icons I consider personal holy cows, but this "I'm So Cool I Don't Even Like The Simpsons" attitude...jeez. Who needs it? What sort of cred obsessed, mean-spritited, wrong-headed fool would think they're impressing me with with this foolishness?

Anyway, everybody knows the real US comedy hangin' for a backlash is 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'. THE NOT AS GOOD AS 'SEINFELD' SNEER, anyone?

The Paul Fuzz E-Z Do-It-Yourself Gig Review

2006-05-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

There was a time (late sixties-mid /late seventies) when rock music journalism was taken very seriously. This is because journalists like Greil Marcus & Lester Bangs took rock music seriously, and wrote about it with the intelligence & respect it deserves, whilst developing, experimenting & grappling with a form of free-wheeling post-beat literature which they hoped would reflect the innovation, vitality, energy and newness of the subject about which they were writing. Bangs in particular was determined to re-shape the restless speed freak prose of Kerouac et al into a meaningful way of writing about The Stooges. Reviews could be 20 pages, they could be a paragraph. They could barely mention the LP they were ostensibly meant to be about, or they could be intricate, detailed song by song dissections. Sadly, Bang's legacy is almost nowhere to be seen. Rock journalism has become formulaic, indistinct from writing about movies or books, & generally saying nothing in it's form or tone about it's subject matter. I was reading the live music reviews in Sandman magazine yesterday and was utterly depressed; every review was around 400 words, there were no 'think pieces,' every review has a basic three act structure & every review was incredibly bland...every review was exactly the same. And suddenly it dawned on me: why are all these kids bustin' their humps churning out slight variations on a theme, when all they need is a simple tick-box gig review template that they can complete and submit for every review? AND HERE IT IS!!!

THE PAUL FUZZ E-Z DIY GIG REVIEW: CIRCLE THE RELEVENT OPTION AND E-MAIL TO THE NME FOR INSTANT SUPER COOL ROCK JOURNO STATUS! LITERALLY ANYONE CAN DO IT!!

I arrived at (insert venue)
(a) wearing a hat
(b) on camel
(c) really drunk, man, like, I’m a bad ass rock journalist, I could be in a band if I wanted but I'm TOO CRAZY
(d) a bit late.

The first band were called:
(a) The Sheffields (from Croydon)
(b) !HEY, THOSE ARE MY SHOES!
(c) Hitler’s Reanimated Brain
(d) Definitely Indie: Classic Indie Covers inc. Oasis & Blink 182.

And they played a song called:
(a) That Tramp Who Sits Outside The Job Centre Plus In Town’s A Right Smelly Tramp
(b) Panic! At Clarks
(c) Hitlers Reanimated Brain Vs Platypus Man
(d) Wonderwall.

And I thought they were:
(a) whatever current NME editorial policy says they are
(b) not as good as my mate’s band The Retarded Snakes, check out retardedsnakes.myspace
(c) a bit like The Beatles
(d) fat.

Then I had to go home because I:
(a) was forcibly removed from the premises following a pepper spray related ‘incident’
(b) had to pick my Mum up from her Pilates class
(c) was actually trying to find a Starbucks & had wandered into the wrong place
(d) took a good, long hard look at my life & realised that hangin’ round rock music venues writing about rock music is sort of a waste of everybody’s time, specifically mine. If you wanna find out about a band go check out their myspace whydoncha.

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU'RE A ROCK JOURNALIST!

Paul Fuzz Thinks Way Too Much About The NME

2006-04-23T03:17:00.001-07:00

I don't know how long it has been since the NME put a mega-platinum selling US pop-punk/emo band who aren't Green Day on the front cover, but keen followers of the indie weekly's ebbs & flows cannot of failed to recognise the significance of the 'soft-core' stadium swallowers Fall Out Boy's appearence on the front cover this week. There are have been countless hints in the past few months that the NME is seriously unsure of it's direction & editorial policy in the post Libertines era (Anna blogged a piece about the cover CD from a couple of weeks back, noting that it was not only wildly ecelectic in the messiest sense, but also larely sub-standard) and here we have the final and most damning evidence of all - a paper which for two years hasn't had to wander any further than it's local crack dealer's house to find THE NEXT BIG THING is once again wading in the murky waters of big-bucks, owning-you-own-skateware empire MTV US punk, looking slightly embaressed, trying very hard to convince us and themselves that they, like, REALLY BELIEVE in the story, and that anybody who started reading the NME during the Franz/Kaisers/Libs Nu-Wave of Brit Pop 'golden age' has the slightest interest in the corporate, Hollywood, hanging out with Jay Z, baseball cap & shorts wearing post-Linkin Park culture that passes for mainsteam alt. rock 'stateside'.

Perhaps most significant of all was that during the course of the interview there were numerous flashbacks to the nu-metal horrorshow of the early Bush administration era; rock bands chilling with rappers, rock bands listening to Justin Timberlake on their i-pods, talk of being produced by ring-a-ding bling RnB cats, talk of breaking down divisions bewteen genres, owning skate-wear lines & record companies, a devotion to 80's indie, especially the Smiths, but evidently misunderstanding anything the Smiths were about on the most fundemental level...

...none of which bothers me particularly; I'm a Jay Z fan, I think pop genres should absolutely be blurred as frequently as possible, and it bothers me in this country how little cross over there is bewteen hip/hop & rock cultures...

...but the discussion here is not of good or bad, right or wrong, rather it is of a paper returning to heavy coverage of a genre/culture that for the past 2/3 years it has been able to totally ignore, and often mock outright, because of an abundance of local traditional NME fare - druggy, white-boy Brit rock 'n' roll. MTV punk pop is not what the NME does best, and they know it. But in uncertain times you must throw as much mud against as many wall as you can, in the hope that some of it sticks. They even mentioned Fred Durst, fer chrissakes, and how Fall Out Boy know they need to be more 'Jay Z' than 'Durst.' One imagines Carl Barat doesn't have the same problem. The very fact that Durst's name was mentioned at all, that FOB are a band actively having to avoid becoming increasingly Durst-like, is evidence enough of the paper's editorial policy shifting wildly.

The biggest problem is simply that the NME doesn't really care about Fall Out Boy, and when they cover these sortsa bands it's like they're grinning through gritted teeth. (Robo-automaton-voice:) 'No. Really. We really like Fall Out Boy. We like that whole, uh, thing. They are as important as The Libertines. We listen to mainstream US pop-punk in the office all the time. Seriously. Go Fall Out Boy. ' What I'd really like is a front cover that says 'HEY! WE DON'T KNOW WHAT THE HELL WE'RE DOING AT THE MOMENT! HAVEN'T DONE FOR MONTHS! SERIOUSLY: WE GOT NOTHIN'! I MEAN, YOU GUYS KEPT ON AT US ABOUT THE ARCTIC MONKEYS, SO EVENTUALLY WE GOT ON BOARD WITH THEM, BUT ACTUALLY WE'RE NOT REALLY SURE ANYMORE IF THEY'RE AS GOOD AS YOU THINK THEY ARE, I MEAN, THAT NEW EP, 'WHO THE FUCK ARE ARCTIC MONKEYS?,' WHAT THE HELL IS THAT ABOUT? IF YOU DON'T LIKE BEING IN A POPULAR INDIE POP BAND WHY DONCHA TRY NOT RELEASING EPS WITH SELF-REFERENTIAL TITLES & LYRICS ABOUT 'THE BACKLASH,' HUH? GEEZ! SORRY WE HELPED YOU BECOME RICH & SAID LOTS OF NICE THINGS ABOUT YOU! OUR BAD! AND APART FROM THAT BUNCH OF NORTHERN JERK-OFFS WE'VE GOT...WHAT? ZOMBIE MARCHING BANDS WHO SOUND LIKE THE WATER BOYS FROM CANADA AND THE GO! TEAM. I MEAN, ARE YOU FRIKKIN' KIDDING US? THIS IS WHAT WE'VE GOT TO WORK WITH? CAN SOMEBODY FORM A DECENT BAND PLEASE? OR, OF PETE DOHERTY'S READING, CAN YOU HURRY UP & DIE? THOSE MEMORIAL TRIBUTE EDITIONS ALWAYS SELL LIKE HOTCAKES.'

Psychedelic Soul Band At #1 ! Paul Fuzz decides internet "not all bad!"

2006-04-13T00:33:00.000-07:00

With the rolling gait of a Harlem pimp loaded on high-balls, Gnarls Barkley's low-slung neo-psyche soul hit 'Crazy' has loped hazily & lazily up to the #1 spot of the Top 40 on the back of a gazillion down loads, and then again this week on the back of huge sales clocked up by some retrograde 20th century confection they used to call the 'CD single.' What's great about Gnarls Barkley's wonderful funk 'n' strings smasheroo topping the charts on downloads alone is that it completely puts knuckle draggin' luddites & .com cynics like me to shame. While I don't imagine for a second that every big internet hit will be of this quality (I mean, how could it be, right?) it sure as heck is nice to have my neanderthal fear (that an mp3 dominated Top 40 would consist of nothing but novelty junk, lowest common denominator trash & fad-driven tweenager pap) totally debunked. Instead, i-tunes et al have produced one of best #1's of this decade....I'll still be buying vinyl for the forseeable, but I'm pleasently surprised to learn that download culture isn't the death-knell for quality Top 40 pop music I thought it might be.

Being Hoodwinked By 'My Name Is Earl'

2006-03-11T02:15:00.002-08:00

Not that I don't dig 'My Name Is...', 'fact is it's one of the few thangs I actively look forward to on the box, but I gotta say when I'm watching it I sorta get the feeling that I'm being hoodwinked, albeit in a very gentle, Earl-y type way. The show's lovely an all, a thoroughly enjoyable half hour, probably racks up maybe half a dozen really good gags an episode, but the writers & cast are awful adept at convincing you that it's way better than it actually is, and the tactic goes like this: "It doesn't matter what the content of the show is, 'cos EARL IS THE COOLEST TV CHARACTER EVER, and as long as we have Earl rocking an awesome Smokey & The Bandit '70s 'tash and pulling that beguiling wonky grin evey five minutes and styling his super-trailer trash redneck chic and sitting around his apartment drinking beer & watching buildings being demolished on TV and driving his hipster automobile around we can pretty much do whatever the hell we like, 'cos who's gonna argue with that? Nobody." And they're absolutely right; I could happily watch Earl wander round being cool all day. Like, there was an episode a couple of weeks back where his ex-wife got married to Crab Man, the whole episode was pretty much a bust, but with less than 30 seconds of the programme left they pull A MIND RE-WIRING 'EARL MOMENT' out of the bag and totally re-adjust your memory of the show; "Jeez, didn't think too much to this week's show, might give it a miss next wee...OH MY GOD! EARL IS DOING 'THE ROBOT'! THAT'S THE COOLEST THING I'VE EVER SEEN IN THE HISTORY OF TELEVISION! AND NOW HE'S ACTUALLY BREAKDANCING! THIS WAS THE BEST EPISODE OF EARL YET!"

There really isn't much of a point to this post except to make the thoroughly obvious observation that the success of the show rests almost solely with it's central protagonist, p'raps more than any show I've ever seen. (Interestingly, this bucks the general trend of 'main characters' being the worst thing about the show, otherwise known as The Dawson Theory.)

Any suggestions for more 'TV Characters Better Than The Show They're In' ?

DESERT ISLAND DISCS

2006-03-02T11:16:00.000-08:00

MY ALL TIME 8 DESERT ISLAND DISCS...
Aw, jeez, if this ain't a head scratcher. For those interested, here goes...in no particular order, I must add - this is hard enough as it is. These ain't my favourite all time songs or nothin', but they all mean something to me. Dig.

.1. The Beatles: A Day In The Life
What's that siren? Oh, that'll be your CLICHE ALARM. But whaddya gonna do, huh? You don't choose these songs, they choose you, right? Fact is, this song had a profound effect on me. The final orchestral freak out which brings 'A Day..' to a close DESTROYED MY MIND as a young boy. Jesus, if it wasn't the most terrifying thing I'd ever heard in my life. I thought The Beatles had travelled to the end of time (they can do that, right?) & recorded the sound of universe imploding. I remember as a 9 yr old taping it onto a C90 cassette and playing it at full blast in the garden on sunny afternoons, trying to scare the wits outta my best friend Peter - 'Hey! Peter! What's that! I think a plane must be about to land on our house!' My head-space was altered on a fundamental level by this song, and I'd be far better adjusted without it.

.2. Huey Lewis & The News: The Power Of Love
Because I wanted to be Marty McFly more than anything in the world. You don't need no credit card to ride this train.

.3. The Bizzie Boys: Droppin' It
Fer the record: obscure early 80's block party hip-hop. I'm unemployed, 21 years old, living in 'trendy' North London's Crouch End with three friends from 'up North,' trying to 'make it' in 'media', and every day is sunny & cool & everyday me & my very good friend Stu get up, fill in some application forms, send off some CVs, play rubbish demos on my Playstation, watch day time telly, watch the squirrels in our garden, walk to Woolworths and look at the Spiderman toys, wander down to the dole office, walk back, 'do the washing up' and dance around like idiots to this, stoopid-fresh hip hop from the golden era of good-time rap music. Makes me smile, makes me do THE ROBOT, makes me happy.

.4. Jimi Hendrix: All Along The Watchtower
It's 1970, I'm 19 from San Fransisco, and my helicoper is soaring over rice paddies in Vietnam, 'To Hell & Back' scrawled on my helmet, sniper fire peppering the sky, and this is blasting from a dansette record player. Forever. In my mind. Can always be relied on in times of trouble to take me to a different place.

.5. Theme From Cheers
I don't know who wrote this, but goddamn if it doesn't bring a tear to my eye every time. I'm a sucker for sentimental telly, especially 70s/80s US sitcoms, fact is MASH, Cheers etc mean way too much to me, I figure I use them as a release for actual problems I'm probably not dealing with. This is the national anthem of my youth, a song I identify with being safe, happy & hanging out with my family. Sometimes you do wanna go where everybody knows your name.

.6. My Bloody Valentine: To Here Knows When
Insane white-noise feedback loop frenzy; also known as 'Our Song.' Back when we were super-intense, us-against-the-world, Bonnie & Clyde sixth form sweethearts, me & my old lady dug the 'Loveless' album the most, and if we were cutting classes & hangin' around at my house on a sunny autumn afternoon most likely this was spinning on my record player. Not perhaps the most romantic song in the world (the LP's called Loveless, fer chrissakes), but it certainly evokes something of the heady, crazy, lost-in-your-own world, this is gonna be for ever & ever experience of first love.

.7. The Honey Drippers: Impeach The President
The song that saved me from Joy Division. I'm 18. I'm in a out-of-town shopping place, with Xmas money to burn. There's one CD shop, like a sub-HMV style joint, a real wasteland of culture. I figure I'll blow my cash on a boxset. I pick up the Joy Division set. I've been depressing myself with 'Closer' for a year, I'm real into angst & being sad & yadda yadda yadda, I'm real pretentious & 'deep' and 'interesting.' Then I see this; THE BIG PAYBACK: 4 CDS of rare, gritty early seventies soul-funk with a picture of a pimp holding a shot gun on the front. I don't recognise a single thing on it, but it's only £12 for 4 CDs and it looks cool. I put down Joy Division, and it was the best decision I ever made. This is the first track, and it woke me up to something important: I can't handle sad music. I don't like wallowing. It isn't healthy for me. I was putting myself through misery listening to Joy Division. 'Impeach The President' made me a better, fitter, happier person more prepared to enagage with a complicated world. The funk saved me.

.8. Oasis: Champagne Supernova
As un-cool as they are now in this punk-funk world, these cats meant the world to me at the time. This song tastes like cheap cider, and is respectfully dedicated to Peter Marshall, Lee Gregory & Stephen Ward, with whom I spent many school boy Friday evenings during the mid-90s hanging around in our bedrooms watching golden age Friday night comedy; Friends, Frasier, The Fast Show, Lee & Herring, TFI Friday & Fantasy Football, drinking White Lightning & Stella & talking about girls we'd never get.

That's just taken two hours of my life I'm never gonna get back. I missed The Daily Show. I've revealed too much about myself. Look forward to reading everybody else's responses...

Money

2006-02-28T13:23:00.000-08:00

Don't know if this has bugged anybody else, but I've found the police response to THE BIGGEST UK HEIST EVER a little OTT/odd; at the risk of sounding naive....it's only money. I appreciate the scale of the crime & the kidnapping element demand a strong response, but I found the quote 'We're dealing with this like a murder investigation' -like they were real proud, & felt this was the right way to go about it- insulting, insensitive & insane.
WHY ARE THEY DEALING WITH IT LIKE A MURDER INVESTIGATION?
Nobody died. Nobody was physically hurt. It must have been a harrowing ordeal for those involved, fer sure, but it's still far, far from being a crime comparable with murder, or a drunk hit & run, or rape etc. This crime does not warrant the same response that, say, Soham did, surely. £50 million ain't all that important in the big scheme.

2006-02-21T10:55:00.000-08:00

From a proposed ad campaign for the 'individually numbered' White Album.

"You're eating breakfast and in exactly forty-nine hours you could be the proud owner of Beatles' album number 1. Or, of course, you might get number 3972, but that's pretty good too".

Show Me The Magic Of Your Hollywood Song

2006-02-20T11:41:00.000-08:00

The Baftas. Bit sniffy.
"I say, darlings. I've had a fabulous idea. Why don't we give those loutish Yanks a jolly good hiding and give every bally award to Brokeback Mountain! When they hear about our delightful ruse those redneck Hollywood homophobes will probably choke on their burger and fries! And while we're at it, let's get that fabulous Steven F in to create an atmosphere of open hostility towards LA film culture & an intolerable theatrical loviness which has absolutely nothing to do with MOVIES, and everthing to do with a West End superiority complex which only the most pretentious Anglophile Hollywood star buys into! Invade that, Uncle Sam!"

Steven Fry the Baftas are about 'films that make you think, not films that make you go out and buy the video game...' YO! GEORGE LUCAS! STEVE FRIZZLE JUST DISSED YOU ON LIVE TV LIKE A BITCH! YOU'VE BEEN PUNKED!

Shows how much Fry knows. The Brokeback Mountain X-Box game kicks ass. I just got to Zone 3: Copy The American Beauty Approach To Generating Slow-Burn Oscar Buzz For Vastly Overrated Pseudo-'Art House' Movie Zone.

(While I'm here...hiding behind our theatre heritage is really cowardly. WE ARE BAD AT FILMS. They wheeled on Patrick Stewart, as per, and we're all meant to applaud 'cos the dude's such a great British actor an' all, as long as we ignore the fact he's been payin' the bills for the last 15 years playing Picard & Prof Xavier in the most mainstream Hollywood movies imaginable, which is absolutely what he should be doin' mind you, hell, he ain't gonna make any bread hanging 'round this rain sodden country's jerkwater 'film industry...' what a snobby, hypocritcal, superior, self-deluded tone the Baftas takes.)

A GIANT CRAB COMES FORTH

2006-02-19T05:49:00.000-08:00

GIANT CRAB -
A GIANT CRAB COMES FORTH (1968)

Is this the greatest LP title ever?

.1. Not just a Crab, but a GIANT CRAB! A crab, for crying out loud. "From the people who brought you ECONOMY SIZED MOLLUSC : GIANT CRAB!"
.2. The portentous, comically grim tone of the title -
Booming, James Earl Jones style voice-of-God: 'Cower in fear, puny mortals! From the darkest depths of Atlantis... A GIANT CRAB COMES FORTH!.' "Oh my god! This Giant Crab will devour us all!"

Prog-rock genius. Giant things are so much better than their normal sized equivilent, aren't they? Perhaps all bands should 'go large.' "At number one, with 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor': Giant Monkey!"

2006-02-18T05:27:00.000-08:00

Reverend David A. Noebel
"Lets make sure four mop-headed anti-Christ beatniks don't destroy America."

Dean of the Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Youth University, and author of classic 1965 pamplhlet 'Communism, Hypnotism And The Beatles' (see right). Not a big Fabs fan. Was quoted in Newsweek as saying that the Beatles "were propelling U.S. youngsters into an excited state in which they would do whatever they were told, and that when the revolution was ripe, the Communists would put the Beatles on television on order to hypnotise U.S. youth." Noebel was certain that the Beatles were planting subliminal satanic message in their music, citing Ob Li Di Ob Li Da (wherein Macca can be heard to intone "I devil, he devil" if played backwards) and paranoid psychotic's fave Helter Skelter, which supposedly includes the line 'I like Satan, yeah.'

Noebel's most famous work was The Marxist Minstrels, which was later developed into a spoken word LP, itself now something of a cult item.

"This book proves that the riots in Berkely... the insurrection at Watts... were in part inspired by the jungle beat Communist planned music, and personally directed by the "generals" of this ungodly "communist music" crowd."

The issue of Noebel's pamphlet and their part in a red plot was raised at a number of press conferences in the US, with the Beatles responding with typical dry humour:

Paul "How could we be communists? We're the four biggest capitalists in the world!"

I give the right-on Rev Noebel a fruit & nut bar rating of: 8

He's Beautiful

2006-02-17T13:23:00.000-08:00

Listening to National Radio 1 post-Brits I've been struck by the number of dee-jays (esp. black hole of comedy Chris Moyles & The Blandtons aka Colin & Edith) who've 'dropped' a track by Brigadeer General James Horatio Blunt and commented afterwards 'well, you know we're not the biggest fans of James, but after meeting him at the Brits (and here it comes) YOU GOTTA SAY HE'S ACTUALLY A REALLY NICE GUY.'

Like they're surprised. What did they expect? 'Well, jeez, I went to interview him and I thought he was gonna maybe stab me or mug me or start murdering kittens or yell obscene racial slurs or something, but, hey, turns out James Blunt is ACTUALLY A REALLY NICE GUY.'

James Blunt: A Nice Guy. Shocking. I would have presumed from his post-London bombings don't worry-everythings-ok pop as pot pourri baige-o-rama music desinged with the implicit intention of offending absolutely nobody anywhere that he would be some sort of insane monster. I mean, I could understand it if they were talking about somebody whose reputation for evil preceeds them; 'Was interviewing Hitler after the Brits, never been a big fan, but he was a actually nice guy' or something, but Blunt? The guy's all about the nice. He's Joe Nice. Being nice is is whole thing. He holidays in Nice. His favourite biscuit is the Nice biscuit. His favourite progressive rock band are The Nice. And so on.

There is also the implication that his being 'nice' goes some way to excusing his awful music. It doesn't. He could be Mother freakin' Teresa, it still wouldn't matter. Infact, I saw Mother Teresa play at Guildfest in 1992, and she sucked too.

2006-02-17T12:23:00.000-08:00

2006-02-17T09:52:00.000-08:00

Apple Free Think Space

"Here's Another Place You Can Go..."

2006-02-17T08:01:00.000-08:00

A brief explanation of what the hell I'm doing...

On May 14th 1968 The Beatles launched Apple Corps Ltd, a typically late 60's experiment in what McCartney described at the New York Press launch as "hippie capitalism." By 1967 The Beatles' financial situation was such that any further money they made would be instantly subtracted in tax. They were advised that they had around £2,000,000 to play with, and that if it was not to end up in the Taxman's pocket it would have to be invested. Thus Beatles Ltd became Apple Corps Ltd.

Paul: "We want to be able to help other people but without doing it like charity and without seeming like patrons of the arts. We always had to go to the big man on our knees...and most of these companies are so big, and so out of touch with people like us who just want to sing or make films, that everyone has a bad time. We are just trying to set up a good organisation, not some great fat institution that doesn't care."

All four Beatles became company Presidents. Apple operated out of 3 Savile Row, and incorporated at various times Apple Electronics, Apple Films Ltd, Apple Music Publishing, Apple Retail, Apple Tailoring, Apple Television, Apple Wholesale and Apple Records. An avant garde/spoken word label, Zapple, was scrapped after only two releases. In addition to these subsiduaries there were many Apple-branded enterprises, such as Apple School, which never developed beyond the conceptual stage. Perhaps their most famous enterprise was the ill-fated Apple Boutique of 94 Baker Street, a 'head' shop which lost £200,000 in under a year.

'Flew in ftom Miami Beach BOAC' is the first lyric of 'Back In The USSR,' the first track of the first LP released on the Apple label - The Beatles 'The Beatles' - known to the world thereafter as The White Album. My blog will not concern itself purely with Apple/White Album/Altamont-Hells Angels-Vietnam-Nixon-Kent State-Manson dark 'n' dangerous end of '60s related ramalama, but I needed a theme to orientate my blog around and you gotta go with what you know; for better or worse, in my case this means late-period Beatles & Death Of The Sixties. While I'm fascinated by The Beatles entire career, over time I have become particularly obsessed with the post-Peppers unravelling of the group, and the troubled historical context in which it was played out and in many ways reflected. I figured it might be cool if I presented my blog as yet another Apple subsiduary - Blapple, if you will - which I could produce in the Apple spirit. Seeing as Apple is the most litigious company ever this may prove to be a rather foolish exercise, but at least if they bring legal action against me it'll mean I've written myself a little part in The Beatles story.

Aside from the Apple angle the blog's gonna cover all sortsa wooly liberal cultural boohockey; film, telly, music, politics, Bush-baiting yadda yadda yadda, same garbage you get everywhere. Anyhoo, thanks for listening, I'm still getting the hang of this blogging thang and it's probably gonna be a while 'fore I get it all running smoothly...a little like Apple.

2006-02-17T07:47:00.000-08:00

Apple Free Think Space

THE BEATLES - THE BEATLES

2006-02-16T13:26:00.002-08:00

The Beatles -The Beatles (aka The White Album)
Parlophone 7067-8
Released 22/11/68

The first Beatles LP to be released on the Apple label.

Recorded at Abbey Road Studios, 3 Abbey Road, St John's Wood, London, NW8.

32 tracks were recorded between 30/5/06 and 17/10/06; all but two - 'What's The New Mary Jane' and 'Not Guilty'- feature on the double LP.

SIDE 1: Back In The USSR, Dear Prudence / Glass Onion / Ob-Li-Di Ob-Li-Da, /Wild Honey Pie / The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill / While My Guitar Gently Weeps / Happiness Is A Warm Gun.

SIDE 2: Martha My Dear / I'm So Tired / Blackbird / Piggies / Rocky Raccoon / Don't Pass Me By / Why Don't We Do It In The Road / I Will, Julia.

SIDE 3: Birthday / Yer Blues / Mother Nature's Son / Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey / Sexy Sadie / Helter Skelter / Long, Long, Long.

SIDE4: Revolution 1 / Honey Pie / Savoy Truffle / Cry, Baby, Cry, / Revolution 9 / Goodnight

It is The Beatles only double LP.

No singles were released from it at the time.

Charles Manson didn't get it.

But this blog does.