Four Weddings that felt like a Funeral
May 14, 2009
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The title for this morning’s entry is mildly amusing, but it’s not particularly fair. With one exception, I greatly enjoyed all the weddings that I’ve detailed below. It’s just that there’s a common denominator that deserves singling out, and dumped under a spotlight so that we can throw things at him.
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Annie and James (Berkshire, August 2002)
A golf course and conference centre, and generally a fantastic afternoon. The DJ was initially my favourite person there, because when I was setting up the keyboard to accompany Annie as she serenaded her new husband, I didn’t know what I was doing. I have no idea about leads or amps or line in and line out. Thankfully he did, and I was able to hook up with minimal fuss. Once the disco started, he went down somewhat in my estimation. He cut stuff off halfway through, and then played ‘Murder on the Dance Floor’, which had the actual effect of clearing the dance floor. Oh, and I’m sure he played Jive Bunny as well.
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Ewan and Heather (Bristol, August 2004)
I was best man for this one, a job I still don’t think I did particularly well, but whatever my own failings, I can at least rest easy in the knowledge that there was at least one person there who was even less competent than I had been. The (house) DJ was a complete disaster: he knew the records, but had no concept of sequencing or structure, choosing to follow floor-fillers like Dancing Queen with those god awful 60s medleys. Someone asked for the Beatles: he played the Chaka Demus and Pliers version of ‘Twist & Shout’ and then, as the floor emptied, acknowledged his mistake with the words “Well, I guess they just don’t sing it like Lennon and McCartney did”. SO WHY THE FUCK DID YOU PLAY IT?!?
Later in the evening, the unmistakeable voice of a popular Canadian bimbo filled the air with the dirge-like ‘Think Twice’, and he announced “We’ve had a request for some Celine Dion…”
Yes, fine. If you have a request for Celine Dion, you ignore it. You say you have none with you, and if that involves lying, it’s a minor sin that will be more than compensated for by the avoidance of the aural punishment that Ms Dion brings. What was worse was that no one was going to admit that they’d actually asked for the record, choosing instead to linger by the dance floor, ruminating on whether ‘Think Twice’ was in any case an appropriate choice for an occasion when we were celebrating the act of tying the knot. Finally, about two and a half minutes into the song, one embarrassed elderly couple gave in and decided to give it a go, waltzing elegantly to music that really demanded more of a slow shuffle, but nonetheless managing to look suitably stylish. Which was more than I could say for the chap handling the records.
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Neil and Alexis (Torquay, October 2004)
The following conversation took place three songs into the set, the DJ on the microphone, and me standing at the side of the dance floor, wondering how I’d become an apparent target for ridicule.
“Yeah, that was ‘Dancing Queen’, just for the ladies. ’Ere, don’t I know you, mate?”
“Sorry? Me?”
“Yeah. Don’t you go down my gym?”
“Erm…no.”
“You sure?”
“Do I look like the sort of bloke who uses a gym?”
“So you’re not a lawyer, then?”
We left not long after, for entirely different reasons, but I am told he improved dramatically once they’d got him to shut up.
———
Diane and Peter (Berkshire, Summer 2002)
This was, in many respects, the wedding from hell – not so much for the bride and groom, whom I’m sure had a great time, but certainly from a personal (and general logistical) point of view. It makes for a decent story, but it wasn’t much fun, and in the interests of privacy, the names of the happy couple have been changed. Highlights:
• The bride’s younger son singing ‘Dancing Queen’ in the church with a group from his primary school, only to have them miss their cue and stand by the communion rail in embarrassed silence while the CD played on
• The bride having to stand two steps higher than her new husband to reach his mouth when they kissed
• My reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, which most of the (non-churchgoing) guests seem to think I’d written myself
• The taxi driver who got lost en route to the reception and who had to get directions from his base, meaning I almost missed the photos
• The table they put me on that was still empty when the food was being served, because my date had cancelled and everyone else who’d been due to sit there was either stuck in traffic or suffering from food poisoning
• The table to which I was subsequently moved, opposite one and a half middle aged couples who more or less ignored me, and Diane’s heavily autistic son, who made groaning noises
• The best man who threw away his speech and spoke ‘from the heart’, with disastrous, incoherent results
• The father of the bride who, having already convinced himself that I’d once fancied his daughter, chose to single me out for a special vote of thanks for “that lovely speech in church”, which met with complete disinterest from the other guests
• The cake that thankfully only fell on the floor once
• The taxi driver on the way home who, when asked to guess my age, responded with “Fifty four?”
Next to this lot, I suppose the DJ’s general ineptitude was almost to be expected. His bulky twenty-stone frame was perched behind an admittedly impressive setup, while his partner (more or less equal in size) had slumped down in a corner on a chair that was straining to hold her ample weight. She was reading Bella. The DJ was playing warm-up music at a thankfully unintrusive volume – classics like ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’, ‘It Must Have Been Love’, ‘I’m Not In Love’ and ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ – all perfectly apt for a wedding reception. Peter and Diane broke up three years later; I should have seen it coming.
Four Weddings that felt like a Funeral, Part II
May 15, 2009
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This is my favourite bad DJ story, but it really needs to be told in full, complete with bookends. It is therefore deserving of an entry in itself.
Flashback, warm nights, almost left behind…except I keep blogging about them, so there’s little chance of that.
Katie and Neal (Shropshire, July 2004)
Emily and James go to Shropshire. Drink beer. Come home. The end. It’s a mini adventure.
It was highly enjoyable, but I wanted to get specific. Magnifying glass zooms in on: Saturday evening, and a wedding interlude.
We reached Church Stretton at about 7:25, the shadows of evening beginning to throw darkness on the rain-flecked hills. The gargantuan Long Mynd Hotel sat nestled by a tall grass bank and a large wooded area beside the car park. It was just as impressive inside: large, high-walled entrance halls, leather furniture, antique staircases and a spacious dining room, with sensational views across the valley. A reception trading post sold Shropshire guides, paracetamol and disposable barbecues. The carpets were green and tasteful artwork adorned the walls throughout. It must have cost a fortune.
We seemed to have arrived just as the afternoon reception was dying down: people sat smoking in the dining room, clustered in groups of family and friends, drinking wine and beer and dredging the remains from the champagne glasses. Two impressive cakes adorned the end table, one a multi-layered effort with a ceramic bride-and-groom sitting on top, the other a single-layered fruitcake, topped by a photo of Kate in her wedding dress. I knew no one besides Emily, and she knew no one besides the bride and some of her family, so we sat at an empty table, flicking through the commemorative copies of “When I Was A Bridesmaid”, admiring the decor, and discussing wedding arrangements and children’s names.
It was Kate’s second marriage – she’s twenty-nine, and she and her new husband have five children between them. The upshot of this was that she had seven bridesmaids (for seven brothers?), and a page boy. You could see them dashing around; an erratic train of white and off-white and cream which moved in and out of the dining area, accompanied by the occasional remark from Emily that usually veered along the lines of “The last time I saw her she was eight years old….”. Kate’s sister Amy had an extremely cute little girl called Lily who couldn’t have been more than three; her infant’s legs carried her around the carpeted rooms with the strut of the happiest of children, and every time she passed my other half would look at me, and I’d look at her, the two of us wearing expressions that clearly read “I want one!”.
As things began to pick up, the action moved from the dining hall into the other end of the hotel. We wound up sitting by the dance floor for the rest of the evening, watching the DJ spin tunes for the children’s disco – ‘The Macarena’, ‘Saturday Night’, ‘The Ketchup Song’, and the execrable ‘Fast Food Song’. With the odd exception there was nothing over two years old, indicating that children have a very short memory – along with the DJ. Even though you expect it, I was quietly appalled. So, by all accounts, was Emily. “It’s like he’s taken every single bad record in recent history,” she remarked, “and then brought them with him.”
“I know what you mean,” I said in response. It sounded like the guy had fast-forwarded through his videoed copy of The Top 100 Worst Singles Ever before leaving the house, as a final reference. The bridesmaids, of course, were loving it, lined up on the dance floor in ascending height order like a set of Russian dolls. It was quite sweet, really, even when you’d figured out that they were doing approximately the same dance to each record – arm-twiddling, waving, and a clumsy, well-meant approximation of the mashed potato, before the occasional twist ninety degrees left or right.
When he’d exhausted his supply of bad records (and played Steps twice), the DJ told the kids to go and get their parents, who then stood watching while their offspring performed “rehearsed” renditions of ‘The Cheeky Song’ and ‘Cha-Cha Slide’. Despite my sense of loathing for the records it really was quite fun to watch, and I felt uncomfortable that so many of the parents seemed to lose interest halfway through, opting instead to go to the bar. I wondered, indeed, how much they’d been listening over the last hour or so. I hate providing music at evenings where people aren’t actually listening to you. It’s not the same as doing a disco where you know that people will dance eventually – I could live with a warm-up period, but there are few sights more depressing to a musician (or music lover) than a room full of people who really couldn’t care less what you’re doing, begrudgingly acknowledging your presence with the occasional smattering of semi-interested applause, but mostly choosing to simply talk over you, like a scene from the latter half of This Is Spinal Tap. Such is the case, I suppose, with interim music at parties – the music that the DJ plays before people actually get dancing, the records that you trudge through while you’re still officially classed as “background”, the ones before they notice you. It had been clear from his earlier choices that he didn’t really care what he had as background, opting for a set of pop hits that were (with one exception) eighteen months old or younger. This in itself is hardly a surprise, but it’s too bad that this sense of sloppiness bled into the children’s selection – I’m quite sure that he could have found older, more suitable records if he’d wanted, instead of grabbing everything from last year’s Children’s Party Collection, filling the pause between each programmed track with a quick burst of “Do you know this one?” over the microphone.
With all this revelry ended, the exhausted bridesmaids moved out of the way to let the bride and groom have their first dance – it was Chicago’s ‘You’re The Inspiration’, cheesy beyond belief but somehow appropriate. (It took me some time after the event to work out what it was. Chicago’s power ballads all sound the same to me – pale precursors what would later become the admittedly brilliant Glory of Love, all twanging synths, unambiguous lyrics, chiming augmented electric pianos and heavily-orchestrated middle eights that lead to Eurovision key changes.) After the first chorus, the DJ called for other couples to join the fun, and seemed surprised and more than a little put out by the lack of response.
“Come on now,” he reiterated with some urgency, “Come and join us. Don’t be shy. Ah, look, *there’s* a couple, right there. Thank Christ. Do I sound desperate to you? Please tell me I don’t sound desperate. I’m actually trying to come across as professional here, and not just a friend of the family who couldn’t programme a video, let alone an intelligent selection of music. Look – behold the size of my advertising board!”
Peter goes off to charm the skirt off some other big-haired eighties lass with a wide smile and too much lipstick, and everyone applauds. “Now,” said the DJ, “it’s time for the adult disco”. I thought that for a moment the evening might take a slide upwards in the ranks of taste, with our resident disc jockey demonstrating with a simple twist of the dial that the last hour had been an ebullient display of his versatility and ability to fit to the demands of an occasion, coupled with an admirable knowledge of the value of the commercial pap that young children love to dance to. I hoped, indeed, that he was a connoisseur of decent music in the vein of John Peel or Bob Harris or High Fidelity’s Rob Fleming, and was about to show his true artistic colours with an adult selection of interesting, evenly-paced and well-chosen records. It was when he decided to begin his set with Shania Twain’s ‘Man! I Feel Like A Woman’ that we realised it was time to get the fuck out of there.
She and I said our farewells to the bride, and left the wedding party to dance the night away. The roads twisted and turned, unfamiliar folds in a rural landscape, Emily glancing at her watch and the car’s dashboard clock with alarming regularity, determined that we should reach the Six Bells in time for last orders. On the journey back to Bishop’s Castle we saw an owl sitting on the road, having obviously swooped on a vole or some such: for a moment I thought I would have to swerve to avoid it, but it spotted me in time, and awkwardly shuffled backwards to let me past.
The Six Bells was hot, crowded and uncomfortable inside. Outside it was merely crowded. Emily’s family rested on the upper level, a two-foot high stone wall separating us. The first thing that hit you was the noise: a thrash band eagerly pummelled away in the corner, the drummer pounding skins like they were emblazoned with the face of Ann Widdecombe or Chris Evans, the guitarist’s fingers a blur, the singer a demented madman – his vocals consisting largely of shouts of “OOOOOH! AAAARRRRRGGGH!! SCROOOOOOOOLLLLLL!!!!!!” or some such nonsense, but nonetheless necessitating (as my brother-in-law pointed out) frequent glances at a lyric sheet. Emily’s father announced that years ago he’d seen Black Sabbath back in 1971: “In those days you could see any band for, ooh, 40p!”. I looked at him, somewhat enlightened, and then I looked over at the stage, where our vocalist was now breathing heavily into the microphone and jerking his head back and forth, bellowing in an approximate rendition of a silverback gorilla or some such apelike creature. Despite (or perhaps because of) the ear-splitting volume, it was a curiously liberating experience after the musical tedium of an otherwise fun evening. And it was a hell of an improvement on the Macarena.
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 19
May 17, 2009
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This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Iona – Treasures: The Best Of Iona
Chris Isaak – Wicked Game
Iggy Pop – Lust For Life
Incredible Bongo Band – Bongo Rock: The Story of the Incredible Bongo Band
The Geek shall inherit the Earth
May 18, 2009
———
I was seated at my desk this morning when Carley brought the post. She placed the square cardboard package neatly into my in-tray.
“Thank you Carley,” I said. “I forgive you for dropping it on the floor.”
Carley blushed slightly and said “Only a bit.”
I tore at the sellotape, as Jessica, sitting next to me, swivelled in her chair. “What did you buy?”
“I’ve been waiting for this for ages,” I said, removing packaging. “It’s a barcode scanner.”
There was a heady pause, and Jessica gave me the sort of look she might otherwise have reserved for the news that I had a steel plate in my head. “OK,” she said. “And you’ve bought that because…”
“Well, I have this software that lets me catalogue all our CDs,” I told her. “And another one for the DVD collection. Up until now I’ve been logging them by putting the CD into the drive and having the PC rip the code from the CD and look it up in the online database. But that was awfully tiresome, so I bought a scanner instead.”
Jessica’s obvious mirth was manifest in a visibly trembling upper lip. “Isn’t that a little bit….”
“Geeky? Yes, of course it is. But you know, I figured that it would be nice to have it all in one place. If we get robbed, for example, I’ll know exactly what I owned for insurance purposes. Besides, it’s handy for finding stuff. If I’m on the lookout for random tracks for whatever reason, it can be awfully cumbersome to go through every single shelf in case there’s something on there I need. This way, searching is just a keystroke away.”
“True enough. Actually, my husband could do with something like that. He has a lot of comic books and he needs to keep track of them. They come out in trilogy format and he’ll buy them bit by bit, but he won’t actually read them until he has the entire trilogy. So he has all these books at home that he’s never read, and when he’s out shopping he can’t always remember which ones he’s bought.”
“I have that. I can’t remember what I’ve got and what I haven’t, although I think I’ve only ever once actually bought a CD I already owned.”
“What, because they changed the cover?”
“No, because I’d forgotten I had it! I have cabinets full of CDs I’ve never played. That’s something we’re addressing this year.”
“How?”
I nearly sent her a link to the blog, but decided to summarise aurally. “The list. We’re picking out letters from a hat every week and only listening to artists beginning with that letter.”
Jessica shot me an incredulous glance. Sherry, at a nearby table, looked up with interest.
“I got the idea from Bill Drummond, who considered that all recorded music has run its course and wanted a new way of listening. He had the idea of doing one letter a year, but I don’t really want to stretch this over twenty six years.”
“But what happens if you don’t feel like listening to that sort of artist?”
“That’s kind of the point. For the most part, it doesn’t matter. Say you pick J, for example, you could have Martyn Joseph, Billy Joel, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Jamiroquai…plenty of variety. Some weeks we’re not so lucky. Last night we picked Q, so this week it’s going to be wall to wall Queen.”
Out of the corner of one eye, I could just about see Astrid, close to hysteria.
“The thing is, it forces you to change your listening habits. And I’m thinking about music in a way that I haven’t since my student days.”
“Good,” said Jessica, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of a bemused parent, responding to their child’s latest brainwave with a simple “Yes, dear”.
“It is geeky, though,” I conceded, “But you know me. You remember the blog entry.”
Said entry was written a little under a year ago, as a response to a conversation I had with the other managers on a business trip to Philadelphia. Matt requested that I post it on the company blog in a failed attempt to liven it up. Nonetheless, I think it makes for interesting reading.
Flashback!
———
June 2008
Picture the scene. It’s about nine thirty on a warm, early summer’s morning, and I’m in a Mercedes bound for Heathrow. Jenny and Glyn are my travelling companions, which is nice, although I have to keep twisting around in my seat to talk to them, and the belt is cutting into my ribcage.
I can’t remember how we got onto the subject, but in the absence of any plausible explanation let’s come up with something. Let’s say, in fact, that I’ve given the two of them some sort of obscure fact about nothing that’s particularly relevant, as I am wont to do in production meetings, manager’s meetings, lunches out and the little impromptu gatherings we sometimes have in Matt’s office. The two of them nod and smile, apparently impressed, but I can tell what’s going on under the surface, so I get it out in the open by voicing it aloud.
“I know,” I say. “I’m such a geek. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“No?” says Jenny.
“No! I’m proud of my geekdom. At least I’m not a nerd.”
“Is there a difference, then?” asks Glyn, and that’s how it starts.
I’m making this up, but it’s quite feasible that the conversation could have gone that way, because The Difference Between Geeks And Nerds is something that I like talking about. Working in publishing – particularly in an area like ours that involves copious proofreading – makes you awfully pedantic about things. I have taken to carrying around a red pen, for example, so that I can make corrections to spelling errors and misplaced apostrophes on posters and signs and restaurant menus. (This works fine unless they’re laminated, in which case you tend to wind up with a big smeary mess that looks like you had a nosebleed while you were sitting at your table.)
I don’t know about you, but I’m proud of being a pedant. Terminology is one area in particular in which I’m notoriously fussy, and if there’s one thing that I won’t abide it’s having the word ‘geek’ used in a derogatory manner. The fact that it’s now an acceptable way in which to describe a person first came to my attention a little over ten years ago, when I was reading Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, which remains one of my favourite books and which is well worth a look if you ever feel your life is lacking direction. There’s a scene in which the narrator – a former programmer for Microsoft – is describing his team leader as a ‘true techie geek’, before countering his mother’s disapproving look with “You can say geeks now, Mom.”
Let’s back up a little, and define our terms. A geek is defined in Merriam-Webster as “a peculiar or otherwise odd person, especially one who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things including those of intellectuality, electronics, gaming etc.” That’s the contemporary translation: it may surprise you to learn that it formerly referred to “a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken, bat, snake or bugs”. I know of no freak-shows round here (unless you go to Newbury) so we will stick, for the sake of the argument, with the modern definition.
So what (or rather, who) is a geek? Broadly speaking, it’s someone who has an enormous love for one thing or another, to the point where they obsess over it. A geek will spend a disproportionate amount of their lives working on / enjoying said thing. However, being a geek is not the same as being a fanatic. Look for the details – because the geek will know stuff. You can be football-obsessed, for example, and follow the teams and have the posters and screensavers go to the matches and presumably beat up the opposition’s fans on your way home from the local derby. You can live, breathe and sleep football, but that doesn’t make you a geek. However, if you know that one of West Ham’s highest away Premiership defeats was their six-nil thrashing at Reading in January 2007, then that makes you a geek. This is stuff that you’re not expected to know, but you know it anyway, simply because you want to.
Everybody following me? Liking Bill Murray doesn’t make you a film geek, even if you’ve seen Groundhog Day twenty-seven times (on the same day, endlessly repeated…). Knowing that his part in Ghostbusters was originally written for John Belushi (and that Eddie Murphy was originally slated to get the Ernie Hudson role) probably does. Liking ‘Hey Jude’ doesn’t make you a music geek, but knowing that McCartney hired a 36-piece orchestra and then asked them to sing along and clap their hands in the final coda – only to have one of the players decline on principle – probably does. The devil’s in the details.
Geekdom shares a delicate, occasionally strained courtship with science fiction. Don’t ask me why, but a lot of people who follow Star Wars, Star Trek and other such space sagas won’t stop with collecting the box sets and listening to the occasional commentary. It’s got to be all or nothing, and so out come the comic books, the role playing games, the radio dramas – and, of course, the die cast John-Pertwee’s-Doctor-and-Bessie set. The conventions are fantastic, but never, ever go to an advance Star Wars screening, because the people who camp out there are just plain weird. This was referenced in a wonderful Conan O’Brien clip where Triumph the Insult Dog attended one such screening for Attack of the Clones, and proceeded to harass the costumed audience (”So this button controls your breathing….and which one is to call your mother to come pick you up?”).
The terminology has shifted somewhat over the last couple of decades, because as recent as twenty years ago the word meant something quite different. I remember spending an evening watching Flight of the Navigator with my other half (a film that is actually very, very funny after half a bottle of gin) and as the purple-haired 1980s punks roar away in their convertible, understandably freaked out by the sight of a huge silver alien spacecraft which had stopped to ask for directions, the animatronic head turns to Joey Cramer and says “Were those geeks, David?” – to which David nods and replies “Yes, Max. Those were geeks.” I’ll concede that this may have been true at the time, but not anymore.
Let’s leave the geek in their parents’ basement for a moment so that we can concentrate momentarily on the nerd. At first glance, the nerd is similar to the geek in that both of them hold a similar obsession with the details. However – and here’s the crunch point, folks – the geek is able to hold a normal conversation with people who are not geeks. The nerd finds it singularly difficult, if not impossible, to do this. Both geeks and nerds are able to relate particularly well with people who hold similar interests to their own, and share and swap information. However, the geek could also put the obsessive parts of their personality on the back burner long enough to have conversations and even relationships with people who don’t share their interests, and to chat to them about the weather, instead of the socio-political implications of the seating arrangements on Friends.
By this rationale, the two are theoretically interchangeable. A nerd who suddenly finds himself in a situation where he is forced to regularly hang out with and communicate with non-geeky people could possibly learn to function normally and thus become a geek. Conversely, a geek who suddenly finds himself bereft of non-geeky people may lose some of his social skills and become more nerd-like. That said, while this may be true on paper I’ve seldom seen it in practice, because the differences between geeks and nerds are generally rooted deep within their personality, rather than a result of any sociological conditioning. Old habits die hard – if you’re a natural-born nerd, you’re probably always going to find it difficult to relate to people.
Most of my friends are geeks. It goes with the territory: when you meet your other half on a bulletin board you find out that the friends you inherit from each other have suitably techy interests. However, most of them can hold sensible conversations with my parents, who are about as far away from being geeks as New Labour was from being socialism. If I’d chosen to hang out with nerds instead then my mother and father would stay away from our parties, because they wouldn’t be able to cope. It would be wall to wall prime numbers and Doctor Who. But with geeks it’s different, because when there’s a gathering of geeks (as opposed to a gethering of nerds) the dynamic is different. They still talk about whether Kirk was a better captain than Picard, but there’s a greater sense of inclusivity, and a non-geek could feasibly walk in without necessarily finding themselves out of their depth. Later in Microserfs, one of Coupland’s other characters goes on to say “People who don’t have lives hang out with other people who don’t have lives. Thus, they form lives.” There’s a common bond, but if you want to come and play there’s plenty of room in the sandpit.
So you see, I’m proud of being a geek, because with that label comes the unspoken addendum that I do, at least, possess some social skills. And I refuse to accept that the useless bank of trivia that I’ve accumulated over the years (often at the expense of stuff that I really ought to be able to remember, which gets pushed out of my brain, Homer Simpson style) is always going to be fundamentally useless. It’s great at parties when you can make an obscure reference to 24 that makes everyone laugh, because while they’ve all seen the show, only you can remember that particular line that turns out to be so relevant to the conversation you’re having – but which everyone remembers as soon as it rolls off your tongue. And I’m also convinced that holding onto extraneous information will one day be worth its weight in gold. This is why I love Galaxy Quest (if you’ve not seen it, think The Three Amigos in space), because while Tim Allen does discover his inner hero, it’s ultimately the specialist knowledge of the geeks that saves the day.
I’m also quite pleased, in a way, that my children seem to be following in their father’s footsteps: Joshua (who is not yet three) stared at the skeleton of an elephant boy at a chamber of horrors last week, gazing at the long, trunk-like protrusion that sat where the nose should have been, before declaring in a loud voice “It looks like an Ood!”. A few days later he was examining a Woolworths display of toys from a programme that we don’t let him watch, and then a few seconds later he was tugging at my trouser leg and saying “Look, Daddy! It’s Dalek Sec”. I swear he only saw those fridge magnets for a few seconds, but he seems to have inherited my ability to memorise useless information more or less on sight. And that’s a good thing, because the importance of said information – even if it doesn’t one day save the world – is not to be underestimated. It demonstrates a passion, a desire to better yourself and learn stuff and actually fill up your brain instead of just letting it rot under the cultural cesspit that forms much of the superficial, celebrity-obsessed so-called entertainment we have to put up with in this country. Collecting Battlestar Galactica bubblegum cards isn’t going to stop global warming, but it does mean that you are prepared to invest your time in something rather than just sitting and waiting to be entertained, and at least it shows you care about something besides the saga of Ashley and Cheryl.
Anyway, I must go. I’m working on a new way to catalogue my CD collection: alphabetically, but by cover artist. Stanley Donwood’s Radiohead stuff goes in the ‘D’ section, while Storm Thorgerson’s work for Pink Floyd goes near the back. My wife has barely spoken to me for a week and a half, but it’s going to look sooooo hot when it’s done – particularly when I’ve finished working on the Klingon version.
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 20
May 24, 2009
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This week, I have mostly been listening to…
Queen – A Night At The Opera
Queen – Flash Gordon
Queen – Made In Heaven
Queen – Queen II
Winter of Discontent
May 28, 2009
———
I have three songs that mark the beginning of summer.
The third is universally acknowledged as a masterpiece, and there is nothing here that I could add that hasn’t been blogged elsewhere. It takes me back to the summer of 1999, and a very late discovery of the Stone Roses’ first and only decent album a decade after its initial release. I always seem to stumble across these things years too late, like Kyle in South Park, doomed to jump onto the Chinpokomon bandwagon weeks after everyone else and remain one step behind his peers. This means I feel like something of a perpetual fraud, but it’s a mindset to which I’ve become accustomed.
I make no apology for the inclusion of the Boo Radleys, because even though ‘Wake Up Boo!’ is ghastly, stomping Britpop at its worst, its childlike enthusiasm is nonetheless maliciously infectious. It’s ironic that a song heralding the beginning of autumn (assuming it’s not a metaphor, which I’m willing to accept may be the case) should be so spring-like in its depiction of jumping out of bed on a sunny day to do Fun Things. The song’s protagonist comes across as inexplicably likeable, despite the fact that he’s a morning person from hell:
“Twenty-five
Don’t recall a time I felt this alive
So wake up Boo
There’s so many things for us to do
It’s early so take your time
Don’t let me rush you please
I know I was up all night
I can do anything, anything, anything…”
I will grant that I turned twenty-five the year I met Emily, and even took to singing this quite a lot during the summer of 2003, but it should be stated for the benefit of the jury that these little impromptu karaoke sessions nearly always took place in my head, or at least when there was no one else around to hear them. Because let’s face it, there are limits. There’s acceptable and there’s unacceptable. I don’t want to seem like a damp squib here, but I can’t help feeling that if I were woken just after the dawn chorus by the sight of a hyperactive indie musician, practically foaming at the mouth from the plethora of uppers that he’s consumed, bouncing on the bed and yelling “I can do anything, anything, anything!” then I think that I’d be hard pressed to resist the temptation to bury an axe in his skull.
‘Shiny Happy People’ is another matter entirely. A song that the band itself was keen to distance itself from (its omission from their 2003 Best Of compilation isproof, as with Ridley Scott’s director’s cut of Blade Runner, that what you don’t say is far more important than what you do say), I have to confess that it was for years something of a guilty pleasure, to go into my “shouldn’t like but can’t help it” file along with Mika, the Greatest Hits of Leonard Nimoy and pretty much anything by Andrew Gold. This was before I heard Stuart Maconie’s remarks about there being no such thing as guilty pleasures, and that “there’s just good music and bad music”, a sentiment that had never occurred to me before and which I endorse wholeheartedly. These days, I am not quite so two-faced.
Nonetheless, professing to a love of ‘Shiny Happy People’ seems somehow to mock the integrity of the band. I feel like the aliens in Stardust Memories (itself a sneering, condescending piece of work, but that’s another entry, or even another blog) who greet Woody Allen in a country retreat somewhere and tell him that they enjoy his films, “particularly the early, funny ones”. Is it possible to like ‘Shiny Happy People’ and ‘Orange Crush’? Can you like a song that’s so curiously upbeat, even in a grotesque, caricatured fashion, when it comes from a group who are playing against type for the sake of having a hit? Can something this superficial really have any value when it appears to be about nothing?
But then I read that the term “Shiny Happy People” was used by the Chinese government, and that
“The song is supposedly an ironic reference to a piece of roughly translated Chinese propaganda; and the massacre in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, two years before the song was released. The inference apparently relates to how politics is controlled by those with children in powerful positions, not idealistic revolting unhappy students on the ground in Tiananmen Square. The idea that propaganda is often used to cover up stark weaknesses in political systems. The song is mockingly played to encourage unknown political candidates to be upbeat even under fire.”
Well, thank you very much Wikipedia. That’s a bit of a downer, isn’t it? It certainly throws the video into a whole new light: Stipe and Company, joined by Kate Pierson, frolic about in front of a garishly painted mural, one that’s being animated by an elderly gentleman on a bicycle. During the string-led breakdown, he stops pedalling, taking the refreshment that’s offered by a cute child with a grateful, weary smile. Then a whole bunch of people appear in front of the mural to take part in a quirky and not entirely convincing dance routine. Presumably when the cameras were turned off, they were all run over by a tank.
My brother-in-law maintains that the video’s point is that there is always someone who has to run the show, and that they sacrifice the chance to have fun so that other people can enjoy themselves. Perhaps the only one not enjoying himself in the video is Peter Buck, who spends most of the song’s four-odd minutes looking thoroughly cheesed off. He can, however, be seen wearing a decent-sized smile along with his trademark black in R.E.M.’s glorious pastiche for Sesame Street, entitled ‘Furry Happy Monsters’ – a video that’s been a firm favourite in our weekend YouTube sessions. A piss-take of a song that is in itself something of a piss-take. It didn’t work for National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1, but it works here, and for that we are grateful.
Anyway. The point is that over the years I’ve come to associate all these songs with sunshine and warm weather and the coming of summer. There are various reasons for this, historical as well as musical – I’ve touched upon ‘I Am The Resurrection’ association but you seriously wouldn’t be interested in the others. As far as musical tone-painting is concerned, I’d have to attribute it to the flowery lyrics, upbeat melodies and vibrant harmonies – and the strings and brass, naturally. The inclusion of ‘Resurrection’, however, is somewhat incongruous – it’s a nasty, acidic rant at a former lover and it really has no place in an iTunes Sounds of Summer playlist, or a hastily-assembled compilation CD entitled The Best Summer Songs In The World, Volume 45. (It’s far too long, for one thing.) Its presence in my own personal canon is thus a reminder that these choices are always going to be entirely subjective.
But I do wonder if there are some songs that only work at given times of the year. For example, I am unable to listen to Nick Drake in any season except autumn. There’s something elegiac in the wistful, almost hesitant vocal, backed by warm strings and tingly acoustic, as the long-deceased Mr Drake waxes lyrical about spilling his guts to the River Man. Perhaps it’s that my first Drake album was Five Leaves Left, which – while implying the onset of winter, rather than of autumn – nonetheless carries with it the image of drifting foliage that is forever tied to autumn. ‘Fields of Gold’ is another one. I know that it’s probably just as appropriate for a summer’s evening, but I always associate it with harvest, perhaps because that’s what was happening during the period in my life that I actually got to live out some of the song’s lyrics.
Subjectivity is the order of the day, then. Still, it seems there are songs that are tied to certain seasons. Chief among these is the dreaded Christmas Hit. Emily once pointed out to me that “You can turn practically any pop record into a Christmas song; you just have to put bells on it”. She’s absolutely right, of course. Listen to ‘Stay Another Day’. Take out the church bells that form a descending scale during the final chorus and you’ve got a hit that would probably work at any time of the year. With the bells, however, it becomes irrevocably tied to December, and the waiting peal of country churches as inebriated revellers leave the pub to go to midnight mass. The bells made ‘Stay Another Day’ first and foremost a Christmas song, thus damaging its airplay prospects throughout the rest of the year, but its future on assorted Tesco compilation CDs and VH1 seasonal playlists was assured.
For me, however, there are two essential winter albums, and they’re both by Joni Mitchell.
I should pause for a brief parenthesis to explain my relationship with Joni. For years I knew her as the woman who sang something about a taxi, and a car park, but that was about it. I’m sure that there are a lot of other people who enjoyed the same superficial association with her, perhaps immortalised in the first episode of I’m Alan Partridge, in which he dismisses ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ as “a song in which Joni complains they ‘Paved paradise to put up a parking lot’, a measure which would actually have alleviated traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise, something which Joni singularly fails to point out, perhaps because it doesn’t quite fit in with her blinkered view of the world. Nevertheless, nice song.”
In the middle of 1996, I arrived home from a night on the tiles to find Bill Oddie presenting a late night BBC2 documentary on Joni’s music. They’d reached her 1990 Night Ride Home phase by the time I tuned in, and I stayed up to watch the rest of it. I liked what I heard but gave it no more thought for a couple of years, until a chance encounter in a second hand video game store that possessed a small shelf’s worth of CDs. On this particular Wednesday the Japanese chap who ran the place had included a Joni Mitchell album among the rest. It was cheap, so I bought it, not really knowing what to expect.
Some eleven years later, Hejira isn’t just my favourite Joni Mitchell record – it’s one of my favourite albums by any artist, period. Every song is a gem, and there isn’t a duff note on it. The opening ‘Coyote’ is evocative, windswept and passionate, as Joni reminisces about an ex-love who may or may not be James Taylor in what is, at times, close to a whisper. In ‘Song For Sharon’, she writes a letter to an old school friend about the different routes their lives have taken – the tone is borderline-patronising, but there are some sensational lyrics:
“Sharon I left my man at a North Dakota junction
And I came out to the Big Apple here to face the dream’s malfunction
Love’s a repetitious danger you’d think I’d be accustomed to
Well I do accept the changes
At least better than I used to do.”
They just don’t write them like that any more. However, it’s ‘Amelia’, Joni’s lament for the long-deceased aviator, that provides the album’s standout track: sparse and hesitant, comparing her own doomed love affairs with Earhart’s “dream to fly / like Icarus ascending, on beautiful foolish arms / Amelia, it was just a false alarm”. You can practically feel the desert winds and hear the hum of the television in a cheap motel. I’d never heard anything like it before and eleven years later, I still haven’t.
Years of chain-smoking has deepened Joni Mitchell’s voice immeasurably: listening to her rasp her way through Shine provides quite a contrast to hearing ‘Night In The City’ from 1968’s Song To A Seagull. (The transition in her voice can perhaps be compared to that of Leonard Cohen, whose Essential Collection – if experienced in one sitting – gives the overall effect of someone going through puberty in two and a half hours.) My second essential Joni album is in this early period, perhaps the ultimate heart-on-sleeve expression of love and loss: I’m talking, of course, about Blue.
On some levels, listening to Blue is a bit like watching The Office. You squirm in your seat, uncomfortable. Here is someone who has opened up her whole world to you, someone who is willing to tell you exactly how she’s feeling, which is something we do very rarely. Emotional honesty doesn’t generally happen, largely because when someone asks you how you’re feeling they’re typically not actually very interested, and are merely resorting to pleasantries. Even when you sense that they mean it, it can be hard to actually tell them the whole truth unless you happen to be very close to them. Perhaps that’s why music works so well as an emotional conduit: it allows us to say the things we want to but can’t, and allows other people to hear a filtered version of how we might be feeling.
Sometimes the filter gets turned off, of course. ‘The Winner Takes It All’ is perhaps the most famous (or at least obvious) example in pop: a divorce record written by one partner and performed by another. It’s a miracle that Agnetha agreed to sing the damned thing – it became one of their biggest hits, but how must it have been for her to stand in a studio and ask “Tell me, does she kiss / like I used to kiss you” in the presence of her ex-husband? (Benny would revisit this trend some years later, when in the aftermath of his split from Annifrid he had her sing “In our lives we have walked some strange and lonely treks / Slightly worn but dignified, and not too old for sex”. If this sort of thing isn’t grounds for justifiable homicide, I don’t know what is.)
Perhaps it’s the emotional rawness of Blue that grants it a wintry quality. Perhaps it’s the suggestion of hypothermia – the blue on the album cover is a particularly dark and almost icy pantone. Or perhaps it’s the first verse of ‘River’:
“It’s coming on Christmas
They’re cutting down trees
They’re putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on…”
Never mind the fact that this ends with a preposition (it really ought to be “I wish I had a river on which I could skate away”). This really is pretty miserable stuff when you consider that Joni’s piano-driven counter melody is none other than a mournful rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’. As she sings about reducing her ‘baby’ to tears, before (later in the song) driving him away completely, the ivories linger on a D minor chord and off I go to fetch the razorblades. It doesn’t help that this song is preceded by ‘Little Green’, Joni’s adoption confession, and followed (a few tracks later) by ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’, perhaps one of the most miserable songs ever written. Even ‘My Old Man’, her spirited monologue about the joys of unmarried cohabitation, lapses into misery during its middle eight, when our favourite Canadian songstress admits that “when he’s gone me and them lonesome blues collide / The bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide”. Sheesh. Take some Prozac, woman.
Maybe it’s because most Christmas songs are relatively upbeat, or at least magical and wondrous. Even ‘I Believe In Father Christmas’, a mildly pompous rant about commercialism and the loss of childhood innocence, is nonetheless afflicted with a curious optimism, even if it does feel tacked on. Some of the heart-rending ballads that sit on disc two of the Tesco Christmas compilation are downright twee: Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Paper’, about a lonely street vendor selling gift wrap who is ignored by the throng of hurrying shoppers, is pretty vapid stuff (he just needs a better spot and a megaphone), and ‘The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot’, a threnody for single parent families, is so miserable it’s almost funny. Both of these pale into insignificance next to the train wreck that is ‘The Christmas Shoes’, but I refuse to discuss that here. Just go and listen to the thing. You’ll see what I mean.
No, the secret to the unashamed misery that is so integral to ‘River’ is the fact that Joni’s lament for love lost is coupled with such an incongruous melody. The same effect occurs when Tom McRae takes Paul McCartney’s insufferable ‘Wonderful Christmastime’, slows it right down, and sings as if it’s three in the morning and he’s just finished off the last of the vodka. The effect is at once familiar and utterly unsettling. What was a cheery (if quite dreadful) jaunt becomes a mournful dirge, and the song is improved immeasurably because of it.
If Blue possesses all the fun and laughs of Wagnerian grand opera, then Joni saves the big death scene for the end of the record. Closing the album is the aforementioned ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’, in which Ms Mitchell describes meeting a former lover in a bar, in which he predicts that she will, like him, end up “cynical and drunk in some dark café”. And, of course, that’s exactly what happens. Joni wraps up the third verse by stating that, like Garbo, she wants to be alone, before concluding that it’s “only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings and fly away / only a phase, these dark café days”.
Winter becomes spring, then. Even this curious turnaround feels a little like denial, or at least a desperate hope that will remain forever out of reach. At the end of 2002 I was listening to Blue a lot: I was in my own dark café, surrounded by wine bottles and the memories of a girl who’d come into my life only to leave it abruptly. I’m not going to go into the details now, because it’s not a particularly interesting story, but suffice to say that December of that year was bleaker than usual. I spent most of it with Blue on repeat play, until a friend of mine instructed me to “ban depressing melodies from the MP3 player and try cheesy Christmas tunes instead”. The dark café period lasted for only about five months, until I met the woman whom I’d eventually marry (and who was, on so many levels, so much better for me), but when you’re in that place it feels like an eternity.
Two good things came out of that little tussle with the bipolar, bisexual beauty. The first was that the next time I entered a relationship I was a little more careful about rushing in – which nearly cost me the girl in question, but at least when we did get serious I knew it was for real. The second thing was that I wrote a stack of songs about it, and most of them were quite good. All too often I’ll look back on stuff I did years ago and find it wanting, but I’ve not had that reaction with ‘December Winds’, ‘If I’d Never Met You’, ‘The Nearness of Love’ or ‘It’ll Be Fine’ (which, incidentally, was written in a period of deep denial).
It’s the writing-as-healing maxim again. I don’t know to what extent you have to be sad in order to write a sad song, but I’m sure it helps. In any case, I found that the whole experience had the effect of welding Blue (and, perhaps, Joni Mitchell in general) to winter with a ferocity that I’d previously thought unobtainable. She almost became the family Christmas heirloom in our CD collection: taken down from the loft once a year, dusted off and then displayed with reverence and awe for a few weeks before being placed back into storage for next Christmas. This probably isn’t healthy, but I always feel slightly wistful and melancholy at Christmas, even if it no longer has anything to do with mystery girl.
And if you’re going to feel that way by default, why not heighten your emotional state with depressing music? Rather than retreating into your cave to find your power animal, why not, as Tyler Durden would have suggested, “come back to the pain”? Besides, as much as I love Hejira, it’s a winter album, and listening to it in spring, summer or autumn somehow diminishes the impact. Part of it is the cover: a glacial, black-clad Mitchell stands by Lake Mendota (Madison, Wisconsin) in the aftermath of an ice storm. Lyrically, it’s the overriding themes of love and loss and looking back at times past. Musically, it’s Jaco Pastorius’ bass, which rivals the best of his work with Weather Report. Jaco jumps all over the place, but his tone is somehow sparse and wintry. For this reason, the album would not make my list of desert island discs: why play a wintry album when you’re sitting by a tropical lagoon?
And so it frustrates me immensely: two of my favourite records, and my own stupid hang-up prevents me from listening to them except during a certain time of the year. We drew the ‘M’s some weeks ago and, out of general principle, I refused to listen to Hejira or Blue. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing. Perhaps certain records lose something with repeated playing. I have to hold myself back from listening to ‘Comfortably Numb’ too often, in case its impact is diminished, like the study that determined that the size of men’s erections decreased with repeated viewings of the same pornographic video. If the goal of this year was to restrict my listening habits in order to get me listening to other things that I’d usually have ignored, surely it can’t be bad to put a limit on the more obvious choices – however they happen to coincide with the shifting of the seasons.
Jesse’s Playlists – Week 21
May 31, 2009
———
This week, I have mostly been listening to…
The Velvet Underground – Loaded (Disc One)
Vanilla Ice – To The Extreme
Village People – Greatest Hits
Suzanne Vega – Retrospective: The Best Of Suzanne Vega
Jon & Vangelis – The Best Of Jon & Vangelis
Joie de Verve
June 1, 2009
———
“So just so I know, you didn’t listen to the Verve last week?”
Emily put down her mug. “No.”
“I’m just updating the list, and I need to check.”
“It’s funny, really. Even though we have so few V’s – and even though I got completely sick of Vanilla Bloody Ice – I still had absolutely no desire to listen to Urban Hymns.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I didn’t feel like listening to it either. I rarely do.”
“Maybe we should just get rid of it.”
“The thing is, there are some tracks on there I do like,” I admitted, backtracking. “’The Drugs Don’t Work’ is great, if thoroughly miserable. It’s just that they’re unbelievably pretentious. Pompous. Whiny. ‘Ooh, we all have money and live the rock and roll lifestyle, but it makes us miserable, and isn’t life futile and horrible, kids?’ And there was all that fuss from Chris Martin about ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ being the best song ever written, which is complete rubbish. ‘Fields of Gold’ is better. Although even that doesn’t hold a candle to ‘Every Breath You Take’, which is arguably the best song written in the last fifty years.”
Emily grinned. “You mean the Puff Daddy version, right?”
“Silence, blasphemer! Speak not his name in this house!”
Look what I found in my Inbox
June 1, 2009
——–
From: Kerry
Sent: 01 June 2009 10:06
To: James
Subject: Blur albums
Hi
Do you have the albums ‘Blur’ and ‘Think Tank’ on CD and if so would I be able to borrow them? Both my album cases at home are empty, no idea where they’ve disappeared to!
Thanks
Kerry
——–
From: James
Sent: 01 June 2009 10:09
To: Kerry
Subject: RE: Blur albums
Yes, we have that problem occasionally. It took me three months to find Bridge Over Troubled Water after Thomas got hold of it, and I still have no idea where Moon Safari has gone. We had to buy another copy.
Anyway, I have Blur and will bring that tomorrow. Think Tank I’m afraid I sold, because I never really got on with it. The one you get rid of is always the one you eventually need…!
——–
I know I’m obsessive about hoarding CDs, but right now I feel somewhat vindicated…
(Don’t) Look Back In Anger
June 2, 2009
——–
Over the course of the weekend, the Guardian published an interview between Alexis Petridis and Messrs McKean, Guest and Shearer, who were speaking about their plans to reform Spinal Tap.
Most people love This Is Spinal Tap. It’s a precognitive parody of Rattle and Hum (in much the same way that Monty Python and the Holy Grail seems to parody Excalibur, despite being released some six years beforehand). Where Grail delights in zany, off-the-wall characters who exist mostly in the form of pitbull cameos, Tap’s humour is more subtle and character based, although no less amusing because of it. Both films also share the common irritation of having specific moments that are quoted to death (the Knights of Ni and the amps that “go up to eleven” respectively), and which are usually banded around with great vigour at parties or pub gatherings, with no signs of abatement. (The general lack of imagination displayed by the British populace despairs me. It’s always the same scenes and characters that are on display, despite the fact that “We want…a shrubbery!”, while undoubtedly amusing, is far from the funniest moment in the film.)
Early in the article, Petridis recounts the initial reaction to This Is Spinal Tap: upon its release, it apparently made a lot of musical people very uncomfortable. Most were aware they were watching a spoof, but a few were convinced that their backstage dressing rooms and trailers had been bugged, so uncannily authentic was the sense of parody contained therein. Petridis goes on to report that “the only person apparently immune to its charms is Liam Gallagher, who, his brother related with relish, stormed out of a Tap live show in protest at the jokes, having apparently believed Spinal Tap was a real band, the film a serious documentary. ‘It’s fair enough,’ Shearer says. ‘I was under the impression for some time that Oasis was a real band.’”
I shouldn’t mock. Some years ago I watched Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen’s biopic of virtuoso jazz guitarist Emmet Ray, a Django Reinhardt for Chicago, beautifully portrayed by Sean Penn. After seeing the film I rushed out to the shops to search in vain for music by this sensational axe-man who had somehow escaped me all these years. It was only after my second trip round town that I discovered that Ray was entirely fictional and that the biographical nature of the film was a construct of Allen’s invention. It’s only comparatively recently that I consider myself sufficiently detached from the incident to recount it to anybody, and it’s fair to say that at the time, I felt rather foolish.
Shearer’s joke is an old one, but his point about Oasis carries some weight. Many jumped on the Oasis bandwagon when I was in my late teens, and while I will confess to a certain hypocrisy when it comes to some aspects of my musical past I’m pleased to say that I’ve always found them as dull and uninspiring as the rest of the world (by and large) seems to in 2009. Noel Gallagher was saying as early as 1998 that Oasis’ time was through and that the world belonged to Radiohead. It was a far cry from a few years earlier when, in the aftermath of the Knebworth concert, the band could seemingly do no wrong. But Oasis’ story is that of an average band with delusions of greatness, who were for a time afforded greatness, but who failed to live up to the astronomical expectations thrust upon them, and who thus fell mightily, in much the same way as countless others before them. From the top, there is nowhere to go but down.
Attitude was part of the problem. Both Gallagher brothers thrived on being brilliant and proud of it, man, and their brazen arrogance did nothing to dispel the urban myth that all Mancunians are full of themselves. The desire to make trouble and slag off those who differed in their musical approach meant that they quickly found chart rivals – if not necessarily outright enemies – in Blur, the other big British band of the day. The press, who can always smell the dollar signs that follow reportage of a good slanging match, were keen to accentuate the contrasts between the two groups, seemingly oblivious to the fact that comparison is a moot point, because the truth is that Oasis and Blur actually have precious little in common: they have different styles, different subject matter, and entirely different philosophies. So why insist that one sort of music is better than an entirely different sort of music? It’s like saying that a lawnmower is better than a baseball bat.
At the same time, I’d be an even bigger hypocrite if I didn’t admit that I believe very stringently in standards, and the fact that some music is undoubtedly better than others. I hated to do this at the time, but being forced to pick a team, largely thanks to a manipulative press (to whose machinations I was susceptible and vulnerable) I went with Bur. This was simply because I believed Blur made better music. I still do. I can understand what they’re singing about, for one thing. They have subtext and they have effective social commentary, even if the references to Balzac were a literary name drop too far. Oasis, on the other hand, have no idea how to write lyrics: they’re not vague and ambiguous because there’s a hidden enigma inside, they’re vague and ambiguous because they have nothing of interest to say. Even ‘Wonderwall’, which I will admit I do rather like, is full of empty couplets that go nowhere and exist solely to fill the gaps between the odd lines that do matter: particularly vacuous is the second verse opener, in which Gallagher junior sings “Backbeat, the word is on the street that the fire in your heart is out / I’m sure you’ve heard it all before but you never really had a doubt”. I’ve seen better sixth form poetry. Strewth, I’ve written better sixth form poetry.
If I sound hot under the collar about all this, it’s because I resented being told by the tabloids and even by some of my so-called friends that I’d backed the wrong horse. People couldn’t see that ‘The Universal’ was a far better song than ‘Champagne Supernova’. Part of me felt cross that I even had to make the comparison, but being somewhat easily led I was determined to fight my corner as the Oasis / Blur face-off continued with increased momentum. When things came to a head, it was in the summer of 1995, with the Battle of Britpop: a quest for a number one single back when the singles charts actually meant something, with Oasis’ dreary ‘Some Might Say’ experiencing a simultaneous release with Blur’s ‘Country House’ (which, to be honest, wasn’t much better). Blur seemed to embody everything Oasis were not: complex, layered meaning, pretentious art school sensibilities that were always going to clash with Gallagher’s Mancunian desire to ‘keep it real’, and a certain visual flair and comic irony that Oasis seemed to lack. Oh, and Blur were crap live.
What both bands did have in common were the belief that they were apparently brilliant. This turned out to be true for one of them. Blur won the singles battle but appeared, for a while, to have lost the war: (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, Oasis’s second album, outsold pretty much everything else in the world, despite being staggeringly mediocre. In the meantime, Blur’s The Great Escape was a relative underperformer, and was derided in many corners as being smug. (Even Q magazine, who at the time gave the album a rave five-star review, later apologised.) Crucial to the war that was being fought was the ethos that you had to take sides: you could like one, or the other, or neither of them if you were into Portishead, but absolutely and categorically not both. A love of both Oasis and Blur was, in many quarters, the worst kind of fence-sitting, as epitomised in a 1996 episode of Father Ted in which a rebellious visiting priest questions Dougal as to his musical tastes: “Who d’you like, Oasis or Blur?”. When Dougal tentatively replies with the latter, he’s met by an unpleasant glare and a disdainful “Blur?!?!?”, whereupon he quickly changes his mind.
Never mind the fact that Morning Glory contained only a handful of decent tracks, most of which were the slow ones. (Even ‘Cast No Shadow’, the album’s undoubted high point, is utterly wasted by being dedicated to Richard Ashcroft.) Never mind the Gallagher’s insufferable arrogance – arrogance that did not seem to be backed up with the talent to justify it. Never mind the fact that British politics and the music scene in general both reached a new low the day that Noel visited Number 10. Never mind the fact that most of us were thoroughly sick of the whole Britpop scene and wanted to get on with our lives. Oasis were everywhere, generally in the Daily Mirror gossip columns but more specifically in the form of tribute bands – Oasish, who I saw in Leeds in the autumn of 1996, and who livened up an otherwise third-rate set by playing ‘She’s Electric’ and then ‘Parklife’, and the more popular ‘No Way Sis’, who made the top forty with their cover of ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’ (a tune that had itself inspired ‘Shakermaker’, prompting legal proceedings.)
But then came Be Here Now, which was the audio equivalent of being prepped by your best mate that the blind date he’s set up (and for which you’ve waited months) is with the girl of your dreams, only to arrive at the restaurant and find that said dream girl is in fact a plug ugly monstrosity with bad breath, no table manners and a humungous chip on her shoulder, and who also turns out to be crap in bed. Despite Noel’s assertion that ‘All Around The World’ was “gonna be bigger than ‘Hey Jude’, man” (or words to that effect) the album was unilaterally average – a label that can be hung on more or less everything that Oasis have done since. As Oasis released Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants, to which the general response was a vast collected yawn, there were the inevitable sprinklings of “a return to form” amongst various quarters of the music press – an accolade that’s awarded by some smart aleck to every single new album by the group, and which has never been true. (The same has happened to Bowie, with every new record he released being cited as “his best since Low”, which of course it very rarely is, unless you count Outside.) Some people loved everything they did – you can’t reach them, so I tend to give them a wide berth, with the exception that I’ll be coming to in a minute. Others were now scratching their heads in bewilderment at how old gods had fallen so far. In the meantime, those of us who’d never really liked the band were trying very hard not to say “We told you so”, for the most part failing miserably. The pattern was repeated with Heathen Chemistry, before Don’t Believe The Truth, which is admittedly the least crap Oasis album since Morning Glory, even if it does contain the insufferable ‘Lyla’.
Despite all these failings – and we haven’t even touched on the atrocity that was ‘Little James’ – the band still appears to have its fan base. Many advocates for the brothers Gallagher are the same kids who always loved the band, ever since ‘Shakermaker’ – who believed that Oasis were the new Beatles, that Liam’s chronic over-use of “Sheeeeeeeyine!” really wasn’t irritating, and who genuinely thought that ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’ was the new ‘Let It Be’. You’ve seen these people, most probably at about 11:45 on a Friday night, typically vomiting outside the local takeway that you have to pass on your way back from that late film. They wear fake Man United shirts and can wax lyrical about Alex Ferguson’s tactics and the team’s current form until chucking out time, but when it comes to popular music most of them don’t know their arse from their Elbow. Personally, while I have no problem with the game or what it represents, I know nothing about football, and so try and stay away from any sort of discussion. You would think that they’d follow suit.
I remember getting into a slanging match online with one of these idiots when I responded to an article that the Sun had printed about James Blunt. At the time, the paper had decided to be particularly hard on Blunt, citing his “irritating vocals”, while describing a track on Oasis’ latest album as “an absolute epic, featuring a 50-voice choir. Sounds mega”. Presumably ‘mega’ is a technical term. Said epic was eventually featured on Dig Out Your Soul, which comparatively few people bought and which nobody really cared about, except when the Cliff Richard fan club got hot under the collar about similarities between the opening of ‘The Turning’ and the beginning of ‘Devil Woman’. Oasis ripping off Cliff. Rock ‘n’ roll, man.
The conversation that I had with the idiotic Micradots is available for viewing on the page, but for the sake of clarity it is reproduced below, exactly as printed (including typos). It more or less sums up how I feel about Oasis (at least the bits I haven’t already mentioned) and also the lager-swilling morons who think that the brothers Gallagher are God’s Gift to the pop scene.
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------61: Lovely. And Oasis have managed to achieve what, exactly, during the last ten years? Album after album of third-rate dross that’s hailed as “a return to form” by their champions. Noel has never even come close to the standards he was maintaining on Definitely Maybe, and the thought of him having to move away from a songwriter who has more talent in his little finger than both Gallagher brothers have in their entire bodies, on the grounds that he finds him “irritating”, is frankly laughable.
Lee4news: get a grip u blunty lover. james blunt is a **** and so are u. ur saying blunt got more talent than noel well thats the best joke i heard all year, u have made my day.
Micradots007: Noel Gallagher is a genius ive been an Oasis fan since it all began in the 90s i love them.I even have the gallaghers faces tatooed on me arm but for all you little soppy James Blunt listeners get a life if you were ever at an Oasis gig its electric rock n roll full of life remember Noel can do both electric and acoustic were James just does soppy granny pop hes boring face it.
------61: Oasis had a real sense of soul when they started, with something to prove – but once they’d proved it all that was left was a lapse into overinflated egos, pathetic feuds with Robbie Williams, and delusions of being as influential as the Beatles. They did one album which is worth owning and one which is worth listening to once in a while when you’re round at a mate’s. Everything else is just window-dressing and deep down all the ******** Oasis fans know this – they just can’t face up to admitting it. Gallagher’s a self-obsessed prat with serious delusions over his songwriting abilities (derivative melodies, lyrics that don’t actually mean anything). His monkey-faced brother is a tone-deaf, braindead lager-lout of the worst kind – the sort of idiot you see singing along to Come On Eileen in your nearest firkin on a Saturday night, except that some shortsighted A&R man had him front a rock and roll band, and has probably regretted it ever since.
James Blunt’s biggest crime is overexposure, and that’s not exactly his fault. The “soppy granny songs” appeal to thousands of people worldwide – and even if they’re not your thing the fact is that they’re more intelligent and insightful and cleverly written than anything that the Brothers Gallagher have come up with since Champagne Supernova. It’s not a question of personal taste – it’s a question of quality. Pure and simple. And you know it.
Micradots007: LOL and who are you? a man that dont like football???? wuss?….Oasis would eat James boring Blunt for breakfast you obviously never saw the greatest band on earth live its all nonsense when people say they think tere the Beatles did the Beatles write a Live Forever or a Masterplan?? the answers no they dont sound one bit alike and the goons who say they rip people of yes they do but atleast they can admit it unlike these rubber goons in the music industry now.Oasis were voted te 2 greatest brit album tere last week i rest my case again so go away mate and have a little cry to James Blunt.
------61: Hang on – so because I don’t like football that automatically makes me a wuss? Despite the fact that for all you know I might be a six-foot three bronzed beach god who is an ardent supporter of rugby league? OK, I could see the logic in that.
The Beatles wrote Strawberry Fields Forever, Let It Be, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Hey Jude, Ticket To Ride (one of Noel Gallagher’s favourites, by the way)…I could go on but I think I’ve proved my point. They’ll all be played on radio stations All Around The World (you see what I did there?) long after Gallagher’s stopped collecting his pension. Sorry, but Oasis’ music simply isn’t gonna Live Forever.
Micradots007: LOL rugby? isnt that for college toffs? that game??? the toffs with the silver spoon in tere mouths? who never saw hard ship?? ,,, listen mate the reason why Oasis stil have a HUGE fan base is because tere a peoples band they write uplifting songs for people you fool they said it tere selves and them songs by the beatles are simple and boring by the way, Noel might like the Beatles but i dont think Oasis are any thing like them tere totally different and tere songs are aswell your obviously snobby to the talent the Gallaghers have if it wasnt for them rock music would be dead in the ground now so keeplistening to your commercial James Blunt balad you beautiful voted the most annoying song ever by the way its only the old timers who cant except Oasis are better than the Beatles the Beatles bore me.Oasis might be arrogant but they have the right to be new album out soon meant to be mega aswell….:)
Lucy82: Oasis are better than the Beatles? What are you on? If it wasn’t for the Beatles there would be no oasis. Oasis are one of the most inconsistent bands I’ve ever known they’ve had as many bad albums as they’ve had good they’re incredibly hit and miss. Noel Gallagher has been spending far too much time with that other arrogant opinionated has been Weller.
------61: Micradots – I didn’t say I liked rugby either. I’m merely pointing out the flaws in your logic – you made all sorts of assumptions about who I am when you know absolutely nothing about me. (And BTW, I’m sure there are plenty of people on here who do like rugby but whose mouths have never seen a silver spoon. Be very careful with those sweeping statements.)
I do agree with you in that Oasis are great fun to watch live. So was the OJ Simpson chase, but neither have contributed much to our culture. In any event Oasis were only fun to watch when Liam wasn’t sulking backstage or having a punchup with his brother (although to be fair you don’t hear too much from him since he got the **** kicked out of him and his teeth knocked out in Germany). And they might still have a huge fan base, but so does fox hunting, doesn’t it?
I did listen to Definitely Maybe this morning and had forgotten what a great album it was, but I can’t give the band the messianic status you afford it on the strength of one record. The rest of their stuff has been at best inconsistent and at worst banal and dull – insipid, meaningless lyrics and forgettable melodies, the sort of stuff I switch off as soon as it comes on the radio. I take your point that they did contribute hugely to the rebirth of rock in Britain in the mid-nineties, but they’re a shadow of their former selves and you know it. Liking decent music that’s actually made an impact and contributed something doesn’t make me a fool or a snob or an old timer – that’s just more of your delightfully twisted logic. I just think they’re hugely overrated – I could live with them being egotistical and arrogant if they had the talent to back it up, but it’s talent that I just don’t think they possess. And judging by the amount of other people on this thread willing to slag off the brothers Gallagher I don’t believe I’m alone in that sentiment.
Micradots007: LOL you just one of thses student types into the likes of boring Keane, Radiohead and the Kooks your not worth it Oasis rock and are bigger than all of them Oasis will be remembered unlike James Blunt end of story now go away please you can not face it.
GEMMA_CLARK: oasis have acheived far more than that jumped up little ******. true musicians… how can james blunt even compare…
Micradots007: Thanks Gemma honey now teres a lady who no her music Oasis are rock icons James Blunt is for the mtv music awards for god sake get a grip losers.
------61: Do you have any idea that you’re still talking?
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Not my finest hour, admittedly, and in a way the contest itself was inappropriate. I was able to put together reasoned (if hacked) arguments which were indisputably lost on this tattooed, semi-literate Irishman (who, by the way, supports Manchester United) – we were never going to see eye to eye, and we both knew it. He’s entitled to his opinion, and his comments about the Beatles’ music being totally different are quite true, but the issue here is that Oasis are judged by many of their fanbase as being “better” than the Beatles, which is undeniably false.
What makes me cross was that even though I’d got the last word I still walked away feeling that I’d lost the debate, which is a shallow way to be feeling, but – like Shakespeare’s villainous Don John – I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. I’d not have commented at all were it not for the Bizarre team’s unfair bias against Blunt – a man who’s never been one of my favourite musicians, but who has nonetheless a good deal more songwriting ability than either of the Gallaghers, not to mention the willingness to send himself up.
Eventually Blur reinvented themselves with 1997’s Blur, and then released K, which remains perhaps their strongest work, before coming up with Think Tank, which is where they lost me. Damon Albarn tried a disastrous foray into acting in Face (1998) before coming up with the idea for Gorillaz – the rest, of course, is history. It seems silly and childish to think back now to the old rivalries and wonder if Noel Gallagher will ever be granted the respect that has (somewhat belatedly and almost certainly begrudgingly) been foisted upon Albarn. It also seems petty to belittle the “dull and ignorant,” because, as Max Ehrmann suggests, “they too have their story”. But sometimes it’s nice to be right – and it can be fun to be an arsehole. God knows Liam Gallagher’s made it his trademark for well over a decade.
Avon calling
June 8, 2009
———
“So I had an interesting wedding yesterday.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yeah,” replied Ewan. “Ended in a punch-up.”
“Good grief. It’s like a Radiohead song waiting to happen. How did it start?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t really see what happened. It was a young party – the couple were in their early thirties, and it seemed to be mostly their friends. All I heard was ‘Keep your hands off my wife’ and then that was it.”
“Did they call the police?”
“I don’t think so. Mind you, they were all absolutely blotto by then. They were pretty far gone when I got there. One bloke came up to me towards the end of the evening and said ‘Shall I take over for a bit? ‘Cause, you know, I don’t think you’re doing a very good job.’”
“Good grief,” I said.
“I know. And that was the groom’s brother. Thing is, when he approached me there were fifty or sixty people on the floor, and the guests had been dancing all night. So he was just pissed. As opposed to myself, who was just pissed off.”
“What did you tell him?”
“No. And that was it. But it happens more than you’d know. People come up and assume that they know the decks better than you because you’re not playing the songs they like. What gets me is that most of the time I could, if I wanted to, reply that it’s the bride and groom’s playlist. So the stuff they don’t like is the stuff that their friends chose.”
“Do you stick to playlists, then?”
“Mostly,” said Ewan. “I mean, not religiously. I do chop and change. But they’re the ones who sign the cheque. Sometimes you know that a record’s going to bomb. Last night the groom wanted ‘Decent Days and Nights’ by the Futureheads, and I played it, but it emptied the floor.”
“That must happen sometimes when you don’t expect it.”
“Yeah, you never know what they’ll go for. You can guess, to an extent. Do you know what’s really popular at 18th birthday parties right now?”
“Tell me.”
“PJ and Duncan, ‘Let’s Get Ready To Rumble’.”
“Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”
“What’s good is that I keep my playlists – it saves them by default – so if a client says that they were at another wedding and that they really liked the music, I can use that playlist. Well, more or less.”
“What happens when you play a record that empties the floor, then? Do you stick to your guns and let it ride? Or do you cut to another track after the second chorus?”
“It depends. I look at what the crowd is doing. If they’re all off to the bar or the buffet, I’ll put this down to a natural break and keep the song going. If I can see people at the edge of the dance floor making gestures at me, then I’ll cut the record. Sometimes not even after the first chorus. Depends how quickly I can cue up another track.”
“So you’d rather go with admission of failure than maintain artistic integrity.”
“End of the day, I’m providing a service, and they’re paying. Although that worries me a little. We’re fully booked for a while but as far as next year is concerned, the phone hasn’t rung yet.”
“People will call. They’ll still want to get married.”
“Yes, but I’m also thinking that with the credit crunch on, a lot of DJs who can’t get overtime in their day jobs are going to be dusting off the speakers at weekends. So I might have to drop my prices to deal with the competition.”
“The good thing is that you’re established,” I told him. “And you’re very good at what you do. What you’ll have to contend with is the packages. I heard this offer on the radio the other night. You pay a grand at the Holiday Inn for a ceremony, reception and food for a hundred guests, two course breakfast the next morning, overnight accommodation for bride and groom and house DJ. You have to wonder about what sort of quality you’re going to get.”
“Thing is, we paid £200 for our DJ. And he was crap.”
“Even so.”
“You’re right,” said Ewan. “I think most people are going to go for DJs over bands, because bands are expensive. But in-house DJs are very rarely any good. I had a friend the other week who’s heard me before and who’s getting married next year. I offered to do what was essentially a free disco for her at her reception. She said ‘Oh, that’s all right, I think we’ll just go with the one that the hotel is offering.’”
“Oh my giddy aunt. Really?”
“Yep. So I said ‘Well, all right, if you want to, but I can’t help feeling that you may be a little disappointed.’”
“Well, it’s her funeral.”
“Or wedding.”
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