The Revolution Will be Televised

We went to see the excellent Mitch Benn at the Queen's Hall on Friday night. A brilliant time was had by all, and I somehow convinced him to sign my Proud of the BBC shirt while I was wearing it (not being allowed to take it off to make things easier). He has a real knack for musical comedy, and those of you who haven't heard his stuff should a) listen to the Now Show when it returns to Radio 4, and b) go to http://www.mitchbenn.com/ and buy some of his back catalogue.

Hell, if you are Proud of the BBC, why not get a t-shirt or hoodie?

By far the best thing is that Proud of the BBC is now on sale!

Amazon! iTunes! Play.com! MusicIsHere.com! And lots more at CompareDownload.com!

Go! The Icon of Niven compels you!

( And a reminder of what you're getting )

Just got turned on to Frank Turner, who fits my musical interests about as well as is possible: a bloke, a guitar, and the political will to burn the world. Glorious. Current highlight track is Try This At Home, on Poetry of the Deed, available on iTunes and possibly elsewhere.

( Lyrics )

Don't ask why, but I cannot listen to the Foo Fighters' The Pretender_[Youtube] without hearing Dave Grohl belting out

One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

during the chorus.

I blame Dead Ringers.

So it was father's day not long ago.

Having recently learned from my father that I'm actually contractually obliged to own a copy of Bachman Turner Overdrive's You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet⁰, I was trawling the local HMV looking at the "Father's Day Specials". You know the kind. 30 Rock Greats. The Top 50 Rock Songs. In the end, I found what optimistically called itself The Ultimate Rock Collection. 100 tracks for £6, including BTO. Safe. Also includes a lot of stuff that I've never actually owned, only enjoyed on the radio and from afar.

I'm a big fan of this collection. I think this is a sign of the aging process; I'm now in the segment that gets marketed to with "Dad Music". Then again, they were advertising Unknown Pleasures in the same section, so maybe the chain are just letting their employees with taste select what to put on discount, I dunno.

But this collection has two problems¹. The first is that it's a Rock collection. So what the unholy cunting fuck is Toploader's Dancing in the Moonlight doing within a hundred metres of the collection? But hey, maybe it's a brain-fart, or they could only come up with 99 tracks that they had rights to. Who can say?

The greater crime is Kula Shaker's Hey Dude. Don't click on that link if you have taste, by the way. It's the worst excess of the Band that Killed Britpop, a hideously self-indulgent pile of toss that drinks a toast to its own brilliance without actually being any good at all. Why yes, I do hate Kula Shaker. They're an entirely formulaic band. I'm certain that Satan sends Gød a copy of Kula Shaker's K every year, as a reminder of why no, Old Nick ain't coming home. And Gød has to admit that yeah, he fucked up because he let Uriel create a band and said archangel created the most bland, by-the-numbers atrocity that any consciousness could possibly conceive of. And Satan points out that it happened again when Gød let Gabriel create a band and the schizophrenic nutjob created Hansen.

Yeah.

Fortunately, it's two clicks to Ace of Spades followed directly by Screamager and Eton Rifles, a direct explosion of music that scours the crap away. So it's really not all bad.

⁰: I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say, but needless to say some nameless beings got involved and it was only through the timely intervention of the single on vinyl that my family still exists.
¹: I know that in theory musical taste is subjective. I'm sure that somebody, somewhere, might actually like that dur-chigga dur-chigga shite² and retain a functioning brain, but I haven't yet met them. Likewise, actually liking Kula Shaker is a sign that you should shut the fuck up when it comes to talking about music.
²: To quote Jimmy Nail. Don't judge me.

Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to Orchestra was on a couple of weeks ago, and was stupendously good.

It included an orchestral version of Insect Nation. Fortunately for the world, YouTube exists. I've embedded it below the cut.

( Read more... )

Across the road is a shrieking harpy, sat beside a sign saying "Cherry Smoke". She appears to belong to that specific genre of female American musicians who discover that they cannot play the acoustic guitar and then decide to mask this fact by singing songs that don't so much have words as excuses to voice a twenty-minute-long falsetto "ay-ay-ay-ay-ay" noise through a full octave of notes, never actually hitting one.

This particular example of American Hippie Music has a fucking amplifier. I've got iTunes blasting the Arctic Monkeys at me for writing music and I can't hear it. All I can hear is the girl on the other side of the road, explaining how she wrote this next song because "in the States, like, something really kinda bad happened, yeah? And I took a popular song? And this is how, like, that song relates, like, to that bad thing, yeah?" followed by yet another version of the same musical travesty.

It's too hot by far to close the windows. I'm considering a harpoon gun, but the council may complain when the sharpened tip bursts out of this harridan's back and lodges into the stonework of the building behind her. She's been going for an hour and a half without pause, despite nobody so much as throwing her a handful of coppers, much less applauding.

Where did I put that Insanity Sauce? Tip the harpoon in that stuff and she'd explode. Now that, I'd pay to see.

It's half past eleven on a Wednesday night and I haven't done anything all evening. Sure, there was an org meeting, but beyond the new route there wasn't really anything that I haven't heard at innumerable org meetings previous. By the time I got back it was too late to start writing if I wanted to sleep at a sensible time, so my brain's not had any exercise all day. Bastards.

Hence, I might as well describe last Friday night. Last Friday was the night when, against much protestation, I was dragged to Citrus.

Citrus is an "80's" club. I know that some surveys have indicated that the population of my country thinks that the 1980s were a wonbderful time to live, what with the rampant unemployment, privatisation, and a psychotic in Number 10... Err... But they think things were better then. Perhaps this is what's behind the rise of such clubs. It hbas to be the same sort of effect, rose-tinted hindsight. Because let me tell you, I grew up singing along to Erasure and the Human League and you had better believe me that at any other point in history my four-year-old self would have been well within its rights to divorce my parents and have them shot into a handy star (Alpha Centauri, the Sun's too close).

When my first songs at bath time were "Karma Chameleon" and "Jitterbug", you will, I hope, understand that I have no desire at all to hear such music again. Once was quite enough.

Upon entering the club, I was not amused. The bar provided a choice between horse piss and frozen horse piss on tap, and a host of bottled urine fresh out of America. I drank water, because a bar that doesn't stock Newcastle Brown as a standby for emergencies does not deserve my currency.The khazis were worse. While not as bad as those at Studio 24, they still had an ambiance that said "We were trashed last night, and only black duct tape stops the door falling off." It was an expressive ambience.

For the fgirst half an hour, the music was dreadful. The DJ seemed to delight in playing all the extended versions of his favourite tracks without any care for when they would end. Once his self-indulgent little audio wankfest stopped, he noticed his audience. Given that our part made up the majority, we saw some decent trad goth (with token Bauhaus and Sisters tracks).

Once that half hour was over, I got a chance to look around. The majority of people there were young — certainly younger than I am. The general outfit involved some form of tight T-shirt and carefully bought-to-look-worn jeans for the men, hshowing off the stupidly short hair that I can only assume "fashion" demands of them. The women wore such garb as I only normally see in the window of H&M or Gap, along with the ludicrous form of shoe that costs five billion pounds but consists of three carbon nanotubes and a cheap sole with a ten-inch heel.

These are the average people. The workaday. Those who hold junior office jobs and frequent bars that put football before beer and price before ambiance. These children of the baby boomers are my generation, my brother's generation. They apparently enjoy getting wrecked on cheap chemical piss that calls itself "beer", music that was created before they were born, and clothes with no elegance or style. These are the people who watch Big Brother and vote on those terrible fame-contest television programs. They are the embodiment of conformity, any one of them an Everyman.

And here I was in a dingy nightclub full of the motherfuckers. All I could do was try to blend in, hope that they didn't smell their mortal enemy in their midst.

To this end, I found myself dancing a lot. Don't ask why or how, I just did. When the chance came, I leapt at it. Stay up, stay moving. Just as long as the music doesn't suck I could be another face in the crowd. But then, the unthinkable happened.

The bastard played both "Karma Chameleon" and "Jitterbug".

What kind of rat-bastard psychotic would do that to a room full of people? Unless he, like me, figured that they were actually Pod People, awaiting the day when they would control the World Builders and everyone would have their invading vision — but unlike me, he didn't realise that he was feeding them.

The majority of people dancing were younger than me. If they claim to remember these records from the first time around, they're lying. They actually like this regurgitated pap, this drooling nonsense that doesn't deserve the title of "music". They go beyond merely enmjoying it, it is their zenith. Without those two tracks, s night is not complete. With them, they can look back safe in the knowledge that it didn't suck. I fail to understand how anyone like them can exist. THey have to have found out about these records somehow, discovered that they liked music that came out just before they were born — a point in time when the British record industry appeared to have dosed up on an ecstacy/LSD cocktail and let rip with electronica and Wham. They had to find the music, discover that the liked it, and then become enough of a force in the world that there are nightclubs catering to just that taste.

As far as I can tell in Edinburgh, there's no Friday or Saturday that'll spin a mix of rock and metal and some semi-Goth and "nu-metal" — Guns'n'Roses to Bon Jovi, AC/DC to Aerosmith, Iron Maiden to Linkin Park, Judas Priest to Rammstein. Perhaps there is such a club, but I do not know of it. It certainly isn't as common a phenomenon over the country as the "80's club", and dedicated venues are few and far between. It's a freak of culture, something about the mass-market being easy to appease (and the obvious parallels between 2006 and 1986). It's also depressing, in a way.

In the actual 1980s, the club currently housing Citrus would have been a smash hit, likely playing the fake imports before they hit Radio 1, and new (for the time) American dance music. It'll have been cutting edge, in its day.

Not any more. Now, the only use we have for the club is to peddle worn old shit to the children of today, brainwashing them with the music of yesterday. 80s clubs are evil, not just for the music, but for what they represent; a regression in our musical culture rather than supporting where it's going now.