Originally published in www.swinemagazine.co.uk Nov 08
If you’re reading this you’re probably huddled around a clockwork Mac in a school gymnasium, having bartered the sleeves from your Lyle and Scott pullover for ten minutes online time. The Kredit Krunch has been hard on us all, but Swine is here to assist you with the simple process of living now that the economy is in ruins and marshall law is just around the corner.
Tip 1 – Foraging
It’s been a couple of weeks so your body has run out of fat reserves and is now burning off muscle and sinew. Shortly your limbs and extremities will contract from tissue wastage, leaving your gnarled hands looking like grasping Madonna-claws. Now is the time to forage for seasonal bounty. Roundabouts are a good source of defunct daffodil bulbs, they’re near to the surface so you shouldn’t expend much energy digging them out with your ragged, bloody fingertips. Another good bet is conkers – they’re not as poisonous as they look and you can chew on one for hours if you put your mind to it.
Tip 2 – Shelter
If you’re one of the 5 million people whose house is now owned by the Pathfinder scheme, then you’ll be living under a tarpaulin while an upwardly mobile first-time buyer snaps up your property as buy-to-let for the cut price of £1.5 million for a one bedroom flat. Tarpaulins are a luxury you can’t really afford – but you can get a cheap water butt or compost bin from the council under the European Social Fund Too Little Too Late Environmental plan, and two people can live in there quite comfortably. To deter squatters, spray paint ‘electric off’ or ‘rats in house’ onto the front like they’ve done on Edge Lane.
Tip 3 – Entertainment
During the war (the Iraq war) people got by one 40 inch plasma per family, but these are dark times and you’ll have to be more creative. If you have children, consider letting them join a ‘crew’ or a gang run by a friendly old Jewish gentleman who will teach them to do street theatre in the East End of London. The re-introduction of the death penalty under the tyrannical reign of High Commander Ian Blair is a blessing in disguise. Public executions are a cheap day out for all the family, and as they’re now being held in stadiums you can once again take to the terraces and yell abuse at paedos, rapists and robbers without having to pay £30 for the privilege.
Tip 4 – Sex
The government’s new policy of ‘one child per home’ contains many loopholes. (You may only have one child, but you can still have two ‘dogs’). However, the high price of contraception rules out vaginal intercourse, unless you’re a lezzer. Back door action is where it’s at, but remember it is still illegal, so if you’re caught it may mean castration or eviction from your compost bin. A safer option is just to read each other erotic fan fiction which you can find on any Liverpool FC discussion forum. Just search “Torres, Stevie, hard tackle ” and there’s a wealth of filthy imaginings to make those mandatory 19 hour nights just fly by. Going gay is another option.
Tip 5 – Alcohol
Alcohol is the only thing that makes life worth living, but high prices and increased demand has prices the average citizen out of the pub. You might try leaving fruit to go off and ferment. I heard that works. Virtually anything that can alter your mind in any way is now too expensive, but a good head injury works every time. You’ll feel lightheaded and woozy, slur your speech and pass out, all without spending a penny. Maybe you and a friend could take it turns to smack each other in the head with stones, or run tandem into a wall at full pelt – whichever way you try to do it, those ‘hangovers’ the next day will make you feel like you’ve had a great night in Spooners.
So there you have it – the Kredit Krunch doesn’t have to be all misery and death – make a bit off effort and it’ll be just like the war, which your dad always says was so fucking fantastic. Have fun Swiners!
Friday, 20 November 2009
Sunday, 21 June 2009
The Top 5 Most Offensive Children's Films*
*as defined by the Christian Childcare Action Project
Originally from Swine Magazine May 09
The Christian Childcare Action Project (or CAPP) spend most of their time viewing filth, in order to warn other parents about the perils of letting your child watch kissing or arguing on the big screen. They rate films out of a hundred, the lower the score, the more evil the film, with a score of 100 being the goal for which all entertainment should strive. Now if you’re sitting reading this and thinking “I don’t need a bunch of God-botherers to tell me which films aren’t suitable for Cruz and Rihanna”, you’d be so very, very wrong. As you can see, sometimes the most debauched children’s films can slip through the net…
5. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
If you’re looking at the title and thinking, “Hey, isn’t that the cartoon about a family of ecologists with mum and dad and three cute kids?” You’d be right. And either a parent or a little too interested in children’s films. Get out. Just get out right now.
One of the talking animals is called Darwin, which doesn’t go down well. CAP goes on for a whole paragraph about how apes don’t have souls, but the real issue it has with the film is that of youthful impudence and death threats. Eliza, the Dr Doolittle-esque heroine runs afoul of poachers who threaten to kill her. Fair enough, you might think, it’s wrong to threaten the life of a child, but it’s not quite as bad as goading a parent into trying to kill a child. You know, like GOD DID!
God instructed Abraham to take his boy Isaac up onto a mountain top and offer him up a sacrifice. Not only did Abraham bound up the mountain like a billy goat, anxious to please the Big Man, he made Isaac carry up the wood for his own funeral pyre. Nice guy.
The Wild Thornberrys Movie scores 33% evil for talking to animals, children disobeying parents and death threats on children.
God scores 49% evil for death threat on child and prolonged mental and physical torture.
Funniest contraventions of Biblical law : flatulence, “crude monkey display.”
4. Scooby Doo
The live-action Scooby Doo movie was offensive to public decency in many ways; the fact that it even exists sometimes makes me want to punch the wall until my knuckles bleed. The CAP reviewer is particularly incensed by the amount of cleavage on display from Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), and one scene in which Fred and Daphne swap bodies and comment on the possibilities which could arise.
Cleavage is indeed a problem. In the Bible for example, the Song of Solomon has this to say; “Thy stature is like a palm tree, and thy breasts are clusters of grapes. I will go up the palm tree and clutch the boughs.” Nudge nudge, wink wink. If that’s too vague a suggestion for you, check out Genesis 19, where Lot gets drunk and screws both his daughters. Yes, you read that right.
There’s one area on which CAP and the rest of the world agrees. “ Scrappy is not at all likable. Indeed, Scrappy is demonic and bitter with a hugely misshapen grotesque head of monstrous proportions and features and an attitude to match.”
Scooby Doo – 40% evil for cleavage and an annoying dog.
God – 90% evil for prolonged incest and poems which belong on a toilet wall.
Funniest contravention of Biblical law : “Daphne’s head under Scooby’s tail”.
3. Eragon
A fantasy story about a kid who realises he can ride dragons and has some kind of mystical quest to complete. Something to do with destiny or having great hair.
There seems to be genuine disappointment at the lack of cursing but CAP gets its knickers in a twist about Eragon’s ‘refusal to leave a residence’. They are also dismayed by the amount of ungodly creatures, and then by the fact that Eragon kills them. “Unholy beasts and creatures throughout” states the review, and it could almost be talking about the Old Testament, which is chock full of cool beasts. The cherubim sound cute but they had four faces; of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. They also had wings and carried flaming swords, whereas all Eragon has is some crappy dragons. That’s not to mention the actual Beast of the Bible, which is so fearsome it needs a capital letter, and has seven heads and ten horns.
Eragon – 41% evil for mystical dragons and almost-cock
God – 62% evil for flaming swords and things with a numerically interesting head and horn combo.
Funniest contraventions of Biblical law : “below navel skin threatening exposure of that which follows.”
2. Shrek
One of the most baffling entries because of the judgements made upon what is or isn’t ‘damaging’ to children. In this film Shrek inherits the crown of Far, Far Away from the King. Mistake number one, as ‘death of old age’ apparently comes under the bracket of violence and crime. If he died of old age then surely the criminal here is God?
The reviewer is disgusted that there is a scene which depicts a baby accidentally seeing his father’s genitals, and also that a donkey is present at the time. Now anyone brave enough to whip it out in front of a donkey when there’s a third party there to make comparisons gets a slap on the back from me. And when did it become sinful for a donkey to see your bits? Unless you’re covering them in apple sauce and swinging them coquettishly (thankyou Youtube) I can’t see where this would be a problem.
Check out Ezekiel 23, where our old friend the Song of Solomon has a word to say about donkeys; “She lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys’ and whose emission was like that of horses.” I swear to God I am not making this up – and He knows, His guys wrote the damn thing.
The review ends with this comment about the trailers for the film; “By the way, in the trailers selected for the showing I attended, Bart Simpson is seen frontally nude with a French fry hiding the most intimate features of his gender-specific parts, about the same amount of Austin Powers' flesh hidden by the baby's head. Come quickly, Jesus! We are morally attacking our children!”
I would like to think that the reviewer has a room full of dusty case files which contain comparative images of cocks and what they are obscured by in the movies.
Shrek the Third – 45% evil for fighting and showing a donkey your cock.
God – 80% evil for donkey-cock loving whores.
Funniest contravention of Bible law : “character in underwear, repeatedly”.
1. Kangaroo Jack
This PG romp about a kangaroo who accidentally steals mob money receives a rating of 29/100, which in CAP terms makes it less suitable for children’s viewing than Kill Bill Volume 2 which gets a respectable 33.
Amongst the films misdemeanours are “lies”, “reckless driving” and what the reviewer refers to as “grossly exaggerated flatulence”. We are not told what constitutes a ‘gross exaggeration’, there are no charts to aid our decision making.
The violence in the film seems to be of particular concern, not only “fighting” but “beating”, “strike in the face” and “assault”. I commend the reviewer’s vigilance at spotting the differences between beating and striking in the face, and between these two and assault. And between those three and fighting.
If violence is an issue for our reviewer he may want to set to his Bible with a big black marker to protect the youth. God is the shizzle at imaginative violence, for example, did you know that the dowry paid by King David for his wife was 100 foreskins? And not only did David go and get them without hesitation, he got twice as many, just to show the future father-in-law he was serious.
Kangaroo Jack – 71% evil for violence requiring four synonyms.
God - 98% evil for crimes against the foreskin.
Funniest contravention of Bible law : “attention to crotch”
Dishonourable Mentions
Very few films achieve that golden 100 rating which means there is absolutely nothing Biblically wrong with the film. The ratings system is so robust that not even actual Bible stories can escape the beady eye of the CAP reviewers.
Baby Miracles is a series of Bible stories made for children, and although they got a 100 rating for their re-telling of the story of creation, they weren’t so lucky with Noah’s Ark and Jonah and the Whale. CAP knocks two points off the Noah story because of the ‘violence’ included when people are drowned for disobeying God. Jonah and the Whale is docked three points for violence, namely, yes, you guessed it “man being swallowed by whale”.
Similarly, The Joseph Story, a cartoon by Bugtime Adventures, is reprimanded for showing Joseph being sold into slavery. The Jesus Video has scenes of ‘side-on male nudity’ and, shock, horror “death by crucifixion”, which makes it less suitable for children than The Jungle Book 2.
May God have mercy on our souls – though He probably wouldn’t, looking at the evidence.
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
The Secret Life of Beers
Originally published in Swine Magazine - April 09
If like me you find the conversation can dry up after 12 solid drinking hours, read on and furnish your pickled brain with some proper knowledge on our malty best friends.
Hoegaarden
This trendy witbieren was on its arse back in 1955. The Belgian Hoegaarden brewery (named after the town) closed its doors and it was left to a milkman called Pierre Celis to brew some up in hay loft ten years later. Demand was still high and times were good, until a massive fire claimed the new brewery in 1985 and Celis had to take the InBev dollar to rebuild it. He complained that InBev wanted to change the traditional recipe to make the beer more mass marketable, and took his ball home, starting the new Celis Brewery in Texas. InBev tried to close the Hoegaarden brewery and move it but local protests stopped them in their tracks and the beer continues to be brewed there.
The traditional many sided Hoegaarden glass comes in 12 sizes, from a tiny shot glass used for product launches to a 12 pint version which InBev claim is for 'display purposes only'.
Tetley's Bitter
Henry Boddington, John Smith and Joshua Tetley – or the Holy Trinity as I call them – are the fathers of modern British Bitter. Joshua bought the Leeds brewery in 1822 and in 1839 made his son a partner in the new Joshua Tetley and Son Brewery. By the sixties the company was expanding and merged with the Warrington Walkers (of which I am not one – my family were the other Warrington Walkers, much to my shame), the start of many name changes and buyouts until the word Tetley was dropped from the brand all together and Carlsberg UK became the brewer.
In 1911 Tetley's challenged Harry Houdini to escape from a cask of their ale. He didn't manage it, and indeed who would want to?
Guinness
Synonymous with Ireland but based on a porter, which originated in London. So concerned were the brewery with quality they hired a statistician called William Sealy Gosset to work out which were the best yielding varieties of barley. To prevent Guinness secrets being revealed he was never allowed to publish academic papers under his own name, and his greatest work, Student's t-distribution, was published under this pseudonym. I haven't the foggiest what this t-distribution means but basically whenever you use Microsoft Excel you're using it.
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Burn The Arenas : The MEN vs the Hollywood Bowl
I find it hard to express in words how much I detest the Manchester Evening News Arena. Usually I settle for a primal scream which is a cross between a slaughtered goat and the first spasmodic mewlings of a Boyzone reunion tour audience. Sometimes I dress a dummy in a big yellow jacket and burn it, simultaneously hitting it with sticks and crying.
The MEN is like a punishment for wanting to be entertained. I suspect it was designed by a member of Opus Dei who is sickened by the decadence of performance that he wants us all to be metaphorically birched by high ticket prices, ridiculously overpriced food and a Gestapo like staff who would sooner leave your children orphaned than allow you to use flash photography.
I haven't been to the MEN for a while, in fact I have avoided it like the plague. Actually, if someone said to me "Kirsty, there's a village over there with the plague, or there's the MEN arena", I would hitch hike to the plague ridden village singing Hallelujah. Unfortunately, any performer slightly more popular than The Wurzels seemed destined to end up there and so I ventured to see Steve Coogan wishing I could just be blinkered and sedated like a travelling racehorse until I reached my seat.
First off, you don't park in the MEN if you want to get home before dawn. The arena car park is so congested that you all sit beeping and shouting at each other, edging forward inch by inch until someone just speeds over the edge of level four and everyone is rescued by helicopter. The alternative is to give £6 to Dazza who will ensure your car isn't broken into by waving a baseball bat with nails sticking out of it.
Once inside, that's it – you can't exit unless you're going home. This is because all of the tickets are checked by barcode, so once you get scanned, you're a prisoner of the venue. This is where the real fun begins. Fancy a drink? Well you've been frisked for bottles on the way in so you'll have to pay £3 for a warm mini-bottle of Becks that looks like something you'd give to a child so he could play at being a landlord. Either that or a pint in a plastic cup for £4.
Food is relegated to the starchy and inedible. They have a team of Chinese kids selling ice cream and candy floss, or a strange chicken wrappy thing, also £4. The hotdogs look like they've been made from previous employees and the pies were last seen on I Wouldn't Eat That, the hilarious consumer programme hosted by Nicky Campbell's devolved sense of self-importance.
Whilst sitting in this consumerist nightmare I recalled this summer when I went to Los Angeles and saw the new musical by Eric Idle at the Hollywood Bowl. The Bowl is one of the best and most famous performance venues in the world, but rather than beat you over the head with this fact they actively encourage people to come for the music and not the opportunity to spend. You can bring in your own food and drink (yes, even alcohol) and although they do provide food themselves it's reasonably priced. They rent you cushions to sit on for $2 and the only programme is a $3 magazine listing all of the season's performances and interviewing the people involved. Once inside the venue you can wander round as you please, the staff are actually there to help you rather than make you feel like you're in jail, and you can take flash photography all you want – it's an outdoor venue so it will look shit anyway. Oh, and by the way – the seats were even cheap. £10 to see the show from the cheap seats, with a view ten times better than the top tier of the MEN.
If the Bowl was transplanted to Manchester they'd ban all outside food and drink, force you to buy their rancid fast food and ensure that all staff members were on strict instructions not to allow anything which might pass for enjoyment or freedom. Ticket prices would skyrocket and they'd draft in Tweenies On Ice for a few months to make sure that a whole new generation of gig goers believed that this was the pinnacle of entertainment.
The Echo Arena is exactly the same, as is the NEC in Birmingham and the SECC in Glasgow. All nasty soulless places which have little to do with music, or with fun. Luckily it seems that all but the leviathans of music have deserted the Arena circuit, preferring to play twice as many shows in small venues and not have to spend millions on lighting design just to make sure the stage doesn't look too shit in the aircraft hanger they've been booked into.
Carling venues aren't up to much either but at least they don't try and masquerade as some kind of 'experience'. I'd rather 'experience' a rectal examination than the plastic scalping that goes on at arenas. I suggest an organised rebellion whereby 20,000 people all buy tickets to an event and walk in there wearing nacho hats filled with hot cheese. If I win the lottery this weekend I will make it happen. And so perish all tyrants!
The MEN is like a punishment for wanting to be entertained. I suspect it was designed by a member of Opus Dei who is sickened by the decadence of performance that he wants us all to be metaphorically birched by high ticket prices, ridiculously overpriced food and a Gestapo like staff who would sooner leave your children orphaned than allow you to use flash photography.
I haven't been to the MEN for a while, in fact I have avoided it like the plague. Actually, if someone said to me "Kirsty, there's a village over there with the plague, or there's the MEN arena", I would hitch hike to the plague ridden village singing Hallelujah. Unfortunately, any performer slightly more popular than The Wurzels seemed destined to end up there and so I ventured to see Steve Coogan wishing I could just be blinkered and sedated like a travelling racehorse until I reached my seat.
First off, you don't park in the MEN if you want to get home before dawn. The arena car park is so congested that you all sit beeping and shouting at each other, edging forward inch by inch until someone just speeds over the edge of level four and everyone is rescued by helicopter. The alternative is to give £6 to Dazza who will ensure your car isn't broken into by waving a baseball bat with nails sticking out of it.
Once inside, that's it – you can't exit unless you're going home. This is because all of the tickets are checked by barcode, so once you get scanned, you're a prisoner of the venue. This is where the real fun begins. Fancy a drink? Well you've been frisked for bottles on the way in so you'll have to pay £3 for a warm mini-bottle of Becks that looks like something you'd give to a child so he could play at being a landlord. Either that or a pint in a plastic cup for £4.
Food is relegated to the starchy and inedible. They have a team of Chinese kids selling ice cream and candy floss, or a strange chicken wrappy thing, also £4. The hotdogs look like they've been made from previous employees and the pies were last seen on I Wouldn't Eat That, the hilarious consumer programme hosted by Nicky Campbell's devolved sense of self-importance.
Whilst sitting in this consumerist nightmare I recalled this summer when I went to Los Angeles and saw the new musical by Eric Idle at the Hollywood Bowl. The Bowl is one of the best and most famous performance venues in the world, but rather than beat you over the head with this fact they actively encourage people to come for the music and not the opportunity to spend. You can bring in your own food and drink (yes, even alcohol) and although they do provide food themselves it's reasonably priced. They rent you cushions to sit on for $2 and the only programme is a $3 magazine listing all of the season's performances and interviewing the people involved. Once inside the venue you can wander round as you please, the staff are actually there to help you rather than make you feel like you're in jail, and you can take flash photography all you want – it's an outdoor venue so it will look shit anyway. Oh, and by the way – the seats were even cheap. £10 to see the show from the cheap seats, with a view ten times better than the top tier of the MEN.
If the Bowl was transplanted to Manchester they'd ban all outside food and drink, force you to buy their rancid fast food and ensure that all staff members were on strict instructions not to allow anything which might pass for enjoyment or freedom. Ticket prices would skyrocket and they'd draft in Tweenies On Ice for a few months to make sure that a whole new generation of gig goers believed that this was the pinnacle of entertainment.
The Echo Arena is exactly the same, as is the NEC in Birmingham and the SECC in Glasgow. All nasty soulless places which have little to do with music, or with fun. Luckily it seems that all but the leviathans of music have deserted the Arena circuit, preferring to play twice as many shows in small venues and not have to spend millions on lighting design just to make sure the stage doesn't look too shit in the aircraft hanger they've been booked into.
Carling venues aren't up to much either but at least they don't try and masquerade as some kind of 'experience'. I'd rather 'experience' a rectal examination than the plastic scalping that goes on at arenas. I suggest an organised rebellion whereby 20,000 people all buy tickets to an event and walk in there wearing nacho hats filled with hot cheese. If I win the lottery this weekend I will make it happen. And so perish all tyrants!
Saturday, 20 December 2008
Walker's Best Of 2008 - a lazy opinion piece for Swine Magazine
Originally published in http://www.swinemagazine.co.uk/ Dec 08
Best LP Jonathan Coulton - JoCo Looks Back
Some would say your life isn't complete until you've heard an arresting love song which was written from the point of view of a giant squid. I would be one of those people.
Runners Up : Flight Of The Conchords – Flight Of The Conchords, Laura Marling -Alas, I Cannot Swim
Best Live Act Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm – Manchester Uni – 29.10.08
All seated, full of people who laugh at references to the computer game Fable, songs about fractals and fighting nuns. Sounds like the world's worst gig but was actually the world's greatest.
Also featured a cameo from Neil Gaiman, reading lyrics about a creepy doll.
Runners Up : Edwyn Collins, Serj Tankian
Top 5 Singles
5. Lightspeed Champion – Galaxy of The Lost
4. Black Kids – I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You
3. Laura Marling – Ghosts
2. Estelle - American Boy
1. Vampire Weekend – Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
Best Club Strangeways @ The Library, Leeds
No point in explaining because I bet no-one's ever been there but this IS the best club night of 2008.
Runners up : Jamm, Brixton ; The Cabin Club,Liverpool and its foetal DJs
Best Film The Dark Knight
Almighty hype + Recently dead young actor usually = overrated but TDK was bombastic, brooding and surprising.
Runners up : The X Files : I Want To Believe (Yes, honestly)
Best TV Heroes (BBC 2)
To all the naysayers who have been complaining about a drop in quality, Sylar is the best character on television, and Sylar is in Heroes, therefore, Heroes is the best thing on television. www.endofshow.com/thelist is my Heroes podcast BTW.
Runners Up : Dead Set (Channel 4), The IT Crowd (Channel 4)
Best Radio Russell Brand
Well I think the loss of the show is a loss to BBC 2, and seeing as I can't vote for myself…
Runner Up : Me on End Of Show (HCR 92.3) (Balls to humility)
Best Book Stephen King – Duma Key
Chilling return to horror from the spookiest looking author of all time. Seriously, he looks like one of his own monsters.
Runner up : Stephen Fry In America
Best Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo Who am I to argue with everyone else in the world?
Best Event San Diego Comic-Con 2008
Attendees may be pegged as huge geeks but Comic-Con is the breeding ground of everything you will see on a screen for the next year. The media kingmakers' convention.
Best Weather Girl/Boy
Dianne Oxberry, watch the featured locations on the map, she spells out swear words with them – seriously, one week it was Chester, Urmston, Northwich, Trafford.
Tomasz Schafernaker – eye candy, the only thing worth watching on BBC News 24. Gives me a warm front every time.
Best LP Jonathan Coulton - JoCo Looks Back
Some would say your life isn't complete until you've heard an arresting love song which was written from the point of view of a giant squid. I would be one of those people.
Runners Up : Flight Of The Conchords – Flight Of The Conchords, Laura Marling -Alas, I Cannot Swim
Best Live Act Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm – Manchester Uni – 29.10.08
All seated, full of people who laugh at references to the computer game Fable, songs about fractals and fighting nuns. Sounds like the world's worst gig but was actually the world's greatest.
Also featured a cameo from Neil Gaiman, reading lyrics about a creepy doll.
Runners Up : Edwyn Collins, Serj Tankian
Top 5 Singles
5. Lightspeed Champion – Galaxy of The Lost
4. Black Kids – I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You
3. Laura Marling – Ghosts
2. Estelle - American Boy
1. Vampire Weekend – Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
Best Club Strangeways @ The Library, Leeds
No point in explaining because I bet no-one's ever been there but this IS the best club night of 2008.
Runners up : Jamm, Brixton ; The Cabin Club,Liverpool and its foetal DJs
Best Film The Dark Knight
Almighty hype + Recently dead young actor usually = overrated but TDK was bombastic, brooding and surprising.
Runners up : The X Files : I Want To Believe (Yes, honestly)
Best TV Heroes (BBC 2)
To all the naysayers who have been complaining about a drop in quality, Sylar is the best character on television, and Sylar is in Heroes, therefore, Heroes is the best thing on television. www.endofshow.com/thelist is my Heroes podcast BTW.
Runners Up : Dead Set (Channel 4), The IT Crowd (Channel 4)
Best Radio Russell Brand
Well I think the loss of the show is a loss to BBC 2, and seeing as I can't vote for myself…
Runner Up : Me on End Of Show (HCR 92.3) (Balls to humility)
Best Book Stephen King – Duma Key
Chilling return to horror from the spookiest looking author of all time. Seriously, he looks like one of his own monsters.
Runner up : Stephen Fry In America
Best Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo Who am I to argue with everyone else in the world?
Best Event San Diego Comic-Con 2008
Attendees may be pegged as huge geeks but Comic-Con is the breeding ground of everything you will see on a screen for the next year. The media kingmakers' convention.
Best Weather Girl/Boy
Dianne Oxberry, watch the featured locations on the map, she spells out swear words with them – seriously, one week it was Chester, Urmston, Northwich, Trafford.
Tomasz Schafernaker – eye candy, the only thing worth watching on BBC News 24. Gives me a warm front every time.
Saturday, 20 September 2008
What I Did In My Holidays
Originally published in www.swinemagazine.co.uk Sep 08
One of my finest school moments came in the first week of 2nd year juniors when we were asked to do a project entitled ‘My Summer Holidays’. As we did this every September while teacher’s blood alcohol level returned to normal, I had planned diligently and spent my summer holiday in Palma Nova collecting things that I might stick in my project book when I got back. Unfortunately for my parents and to the delight of my male classmates (and Laura Shaw, always wondered about her) I had been collecting flyers for wet t-shirt contests and Spanish prossy cards from phone boxes.
Our family holidays were just that, the whole family of uncles, cousins, aunties, nanas, great nanas and assorted school friends who’d somehow gotten the impression that this would two weeks of whores and nipples. We’d go on two of these a year, one with my mum’s side and one with my dad’s. We did once talk about assembling the entire clan into one nightmarish holiday but that fell through due to the lack of 28 bed cottages in South Devon. Mum’s side of the family are all noticeably calmer and less nuts than the Walkers so that holiday was usually at the latter end of the summer, like a gentle pear sorbet after a skunk balti.
Departure day on Walker holidays was always a bit like the opening scenes of Home Alone, with half a dozen mental kids belting around my nan’s house screaming whilst Dad, uncles and granddads got pissed and argued about the best way to drive. Satnavs have removed this problem but in 1990 it was just four blokes and a 1956 AA road map trying to decide which A road to go on to find the Dead Zone, otherwise known as our holiday destination. Because there were nearly 20 of us we could never find a big enough house and so ended up in some weird backwater with some questionable ‘rooms’ which were clearly cupboards before we arrived.
One house we stayed in was known as ‘the spooky house’ by the locals because it was a foreboding gothic mansion with 5 floors and sat on top of a hill overlooking Perranporth. It looked like the previous occupants had just been shipped in from Transylvania in wooden crates with a bed of their native earth. All of the door handles fell off, leaving you regularly trapped inside rooms, and all seven of us kids were placed in the top attic room which had no stairs, just a step ladder and a paper sign saying ‘Stairs Broken’.
In some posh hotels and villas there’s a lovely welcome basket with locally sourced produce laid out for your pleasure. In Castle Dracula Perranporth my mum opened the fridge to find a whole sea bass staring back at her and was informed that the people in the house before us had been on a fishing trip and that we were welcome to enjoy this bounty. The woman showing us round told my Aunty Janet to ‘whack its head off and just boil it’. Once she’d gone to feed the wolves my uncles went and slung it into the sea and it really did take two of them, wobbling down the hill with the creature from the deep while the townspeople laughed their tits off .
First on the agenda for any holiday taken in the UK was to find a pub with a skittle alley. For some reason my dad and his elder brothers prioritised this above all else, I have a theory that it was because it was cheap entertainment that everyone could get involved in and was just gay enough to stop them coming to blows during the inevitable final round grudge match. In Stogumber, Somerset, we had a local pub which advertised its skittle alley, but we were dismayed to learn that it was in an outbuilding that was full of tractors. The landlord promised to clean it out if we came back the next day, and sure enough we played skittles in a barn with a row of tractors staring at us and rats scuttling about whilst my nana screamed to God to save her from these unholy minions.
Holidays abroad were always just as chaotic, with the added trump card of an international airport. My uncle Stuart would always find what he called ‘a smashing hotel’ by only booking places which were advertised in German. He had an inkling that these would be the best because Germans are so stereotypically demanding, and he had a point, we stayed in some nice places. The most obvious exception was the Don Bigote, which we thought must mean ‘Mr Bigot’. It was half finished, looked nothing like its picture in Das Ferien and was packed to the rafters with German businessmen. One night we were all playing Trivial Pursuit (not even the travel version, the big original box which my grandad insisted on bringing everywhere) on the balcony of the biggest room whilst a few metres below a few dozen Germans were waiting for a coach. They kept looking up at us with suspicion every time we laughed, and at one point grandad was taking ages to ask the question on the card he had. When challenged he got flustered and started whispering “Which German city took most allied damage during the second world war?” Giggling ensued and through some fluke every question that followed was about the war, leaving the Germans below glaring as the words Kristallnacht, Goering and Rhineland floated down to them punctuated with hysterical laughter.
I won’t go into the myriad ‘incidents’, the goose stepping by my 6 year old brother in the dining room, my mum being thrown out of the Green Parrot bar in Magaluf for taking a swing at a guy selling photos with a chimp, and the night at the Spanish Evening which we now refer to only as ‘Black Fiesta’. Suffice to say that I managed to make ‘My Summer Holiday’ a thrilling read, and it eventually passed the censors with an 18 certificate for nudity and chimp related violence.
One of my finest school moments came in the first week of 2nd year juniors when we were asked to do a project entitled ‘My Summer Holidays’. As we did this every September while teacher’s blood alcohol level returned to normal, I had planned diligently and spent my summer holiday in Palma Nova collecting things that I might stick in my project book when I got back. Unfortunately for my parents and to the delight of my male classmates (and Laura Shaw, always wondered about her) I had been collecting flyers for wet t-shirt contests and Spanish prossy cards from phone boxes.
Our family holidays were just that, the whole family of uncles, cousins, aunties, nanas, great nanas and assorted school friends who’d somehow gotten the impression that this would two weeks of whores and nipples. We’d go on two of these a year, one with my mum’s side and one with my dad’s. We did once talk about assembling the entire clan into one nightmarish holiday but that fell through due to the lack of 28 bed cottages in South Devon. Mum’s side of the family are all noticeably calmer and less nuts than the Walkers so that holiday was usually at the latter end of the summer, like a gentle pear sorbet after a skunk balti.
Departure day on Walker holidays was always a bit like the opening scenes of Home Alone, with half a dozen mental kids belting around my nan’s house screaming whilst Dad, uncles and granddads got pissed and argued about the best way to drive. Satnavs have removed this problem but in 1990 it was just four blokes and a 1956 AA road map trying to decide which A road to go on to find the Dead Zone, otherwise known as our holiday destination. Because there were nearly 20 of us we could never find a big enough house and so ended up in some weird backwater with some questionable ‘rooms’ which were clearly cupboards before we arrived.
One house we stayed in was known as ‘the spooky house’ by the locals because it was a foreboding gothic mansion with 5 floors and sat on top of a hill overlooking Perranporth. It looked like the previous occupants had just been shipped in from Transylvania in wooden crates with a bed of their native earth. All of the door handles fell off, leaving you regularly trapped inside rooms, and all seven of us kids were placed in the top attic room which had no stairs, just a step ladder and a paper sign saying ‘Stairs Broken’.
In some posh hotels and villas there’s a lovely welcome basket with locally sourced produce laid out for your pleasure. In Castle Dracula Perranporth my mum opened the fridge to find a whole sea bass staring back at her and was informed that the people in the house before us had been on a fishing trip and that we were welcome to enjoy this bounty. The woman showing us round told my Aunty Janet to ‘whack its head off and just boil it’. Once she’d gone to feed the wolves my uncles went and slung it into the sea and it really did take two of them, wobbling down the hill with the creature from the deep while the townspeople laughed their tits off .
First on the agenda for any holiday taken in the UK was to find a pub with a skittle alley. For some reason my dad and his elder brothers prioritised this above all else, I have a theory that it was because it was cheap entertainment that everyone could get involved in and was just gay enough to stop them coming to blows during the inevitable final round grudge match. In Stogumber, Somerset, we had a local pub which advertised its skittle alley, but we were dismayed to learn that it was in an outbuilding that was full of tractors. The landlord promised to clean it out if we came back the next day, and sure enough we played skittles in a barn with a row of tractors staring at us and rats scuttling about whilst my nana screamed to God to save her from these unholy minions.
Holidays abroad were always just as chaotic, with the added trump card of an international airport. My uncle Stuart would always find what he called ‘a smashing hotel’ by only booking places which were advertised in German. He had an inkling that these would be the best because Germans are so stereotypically demanding, and he had a point, we stayed in some nice places. The most obvious exception was the Don Bigote, which we thought must mean ‘Mr Bigot’. It was half finished, looked nothing like its picture in Das Ferien and was packed to the rafters with German businessmen. One night we were all playing Trivial Pursuit (not even the travel version, the big original box which my grandad insisted on bringing everywhere) on the balcony of the biggest room whilst a few metres below a few dozen Germans were waiting for a coach. They kept looking up at us with suspicion every time we laughed, and at one point grandad was taking ages to ask the question on the card he had. When challenged he got flustered and started whispering “Which German city took most allied damage during the second world war?” Giggling ensued and through some fluke every question that followed was about the war, leaving the Germans below glaring as the words Kristallnacht, Goering and Rhineland floated down to them punctuated with hysterical laughter.
I won’t go into the myriad ‘incidents’, the goose stepping by my 6 year old brother in the dining room, my mum being thrown out of the Green Parrot bar in Magaluf for taking a swing at a guy selling photos with a chimp, and the night at the Spanish Evening which we now refer to only as ‘Black Fiesta’. Suffice to say that I managed to make ‘My Summer Holiday’ a thrilling read, and it eventually passed the censors with an 18 certificate for nudity and chimp related violence.
Saturday, 14 June 2008
KW Senior
My dad is stood on the doorstep in the rain with a dazed look on his face and a sprig of privet hedge in his hand. He looks up, with his usual visage of incredulity and gives the feed line to what I know will be a night full of coffee drinking and gasping for air as the laughter stitch leaves us both bent double and crying ; “You’ll never guess what just happened to me!”
My dad’s blond with blue eyes, and I am not. Because of this, throughout my life I’ve been told that I’m ‘exactly’ like my mother. I am not. If you have to draw parallels between parents and their offspring you have use a better starting point than their colouring because it’s the personality traits that really hit people. Anyone who really knows me knows that I am virtually the same person as my dad. This is immediately evident to anyone who sees us drinking together. I’m basically him in a dress, which is a chilling visual to say the least.
When I was born, my dad was 19 years old. I’ve got a picture of him with shoulder length hair and a cheesecloth shirt which was taken when I was about two months old and he looks barely out of nappies himself. He was at art college studying photography, a job he does to this day. I think a lot of the foibles I picked up from him were a symptom of his youth; the obsession that he had for The Beatles and Paul McCartney fed my obsession for Suede (my Dad used to have a guilty stash of magazines that I used to think were porn but were actually issues of Record Collector) and the reason that I have always found it so easy to embark on hare-brained schemes definitely comes from his attitude of “What’s the worst that could happen?”.
Dad’s schemes ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. He’s good with this hands (something I haven’t inherited in the slightest) and once made my grandparents a wardrobe. He then decided that this would be a first rate business venture, though that one wardrobe was all he ever produced. For a whole summer in about 1993 he helped his friend set up a crazy golf course next to Pickmere Lake, which was functional but lacked aesthetic value, in fact it looked like something from Disneyland Chechnya. It was made completely of unfinished concrete and you risked serious injury in trying to retrieve wayward balls because of the bits of broken glass and nails that were lurking inside every hole.
He was also adept at spotting new technologies that would become quickly obsolete. He bought a toploading Betamax video recorder in 1982 and quickly amassed a collection of taped off the telly programmes which he carefully labelled and filed. He used to spend hours sat in front of that machine fast forwarding to accurately document what was on the tape and for how long. To this day he insists that Betmax was the higher quality format, and I have to agree with him. He had a carphone in 1988 which my friends thought was the height of sophistication, even thought it was only used about three times because the calls were 50p a minute. In 1992, four years before the first DVD players came onto the market, he had a Kodak PhotoCD player, which was possibly the most useless piece of equipment ever invented. Only professional photographers have ever heard of them for they were designed to play back photographs from files that had been digitised, and only professional photographers wanted to do that. It was never popular and was quickly replaced by a technology we now know as the ‘computer’.
Our computer was an Acorn Electron, which my dad played on for hours. His favourite game was called Sphinx Adventure which consisted of a small, badly rendered elf character trying to reach a sphinx. A typical moment of game play is as follows:
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO LEFT
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO RIGHT
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO FORWARD
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO BACK
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
YOU HAVE BEEN SLAIN BY A WIZARD
GAME OVER
It took him nearly four years to complete, and was rewarded by a screen saying ‘THE END’. He also enjoyed ‘Tree Of Knowledge’, a quiz game where you had to actually input all the quiz data yourself. You could spend hours building a database on Neighbours characters or Manchester City Players 1964 – 1984, only for the game to formulate questions based on this data, which you obviously already knew the answer to.
It would take me a long time to run through all of the things that make my dad my dad. I attempted it when I was best man at his wedding to my stepmum, but the speech ended up being a testimonial to the man and I binned it, thinking that stories about the notes he used to leave in my lunchbox featuring poems about the headmistress’s underwear, or the time he took payment for some photography work in the form of a rabbit would say more about my relationship with him than his with his new wife.
I’ll leave you with the conclusion of the opening paragraph – so there’s my dad, privet hedge in hand and relates to me the following tale;
“I was dropping off some photos at a woman’s house, and came back to find the car was gone. Now, my first thought was ‘The car’s been nicked’, so I went to go back inside and call the police. Just then I saw the car at the bottom of the hill parked in someone’s drive, so I went down there to see what they were playing at. The next thing, this old fella comes out ranting and raving at me, saying that my car’s ruined his hedge. Turns out I must have left that handbrake off and the car’s rolled right down the hill into the guy’s drive and only been stopped by his privet hedge. Before I know it, he’s blocked me in with his car and is getting me to sign a written confession that I have damaged his ‘valuable’ hedge. He wouldn’t let me go until I’d signed it and taken some pictures.”
“So why did you bring some of the hedge with you?”
“This? This is my evidence.”
And so goes another normal night in the life of Keith Walker.
My dad’s blond with blue eyes, and I am not. Because of this, throughout my life I’ve been told that I’m ‘exactly’ like my mother. I am not. If you have to draw parallels between parents and their offspring you have use a better starting point than their colouring because it’s the personality traits that really hit people. Anyone who really knows me knows that I am virtually the same person as my dad. This is immediately evident to anyone who sees us drinking together. I’m basically him in a dress, which is a chilling visual to say the least.
When I was born, my dad was 19 years old. I’ve got a picture of him with shoulder length hair and a cheesecloth shirt which was taken when I was about two months old and he looks barely out of nappies himself. He was at art college studying photography, a job he does to this day. I think a lot of the foibles I picked up from him were a symptom of his youth; the obsession that he had for The Beatles and Paul McCartney fed my obsession for Suede (my Dad used to have a guilty stash of magazines that I used to think were porn but were actually issues of Record Collector) and the reason that I have always found it so easy to embark on hare-brained schemes definitely comes from his attitude of “What’s the worst that could happen?”.
Dad’s schemes ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. He’s good with this hands (something I haven’t inherited in the slightest) and once made my grandparents a wardrobe. He then decided that this would be a first rate business venture, though that one wardrobe was all he ever produced. For a whole summer in about 1993 he helped his friend set up a crazy golf course next to Pickmere Lake, which was functional but lacked aesthetic value, in fact it looked like something from Disneyland Chechnya. It was made completely of unfinished concrete and you risked serious injury in trying to retrieve wayward balls because of the bits of broken glass and nails that were lurking inside every hole.
He was also adept at spotting new technologies that would become quickly obsolete. He bought a toploading Betamax video recorder in 1982 and quickly amassed a collection of taped off the telly programmes which he carefully labelled and filed. He used to spend hours sat in front of that machine fast forwarding to accurately document what was on the tape and for how long. To this day he insists that Betmax was the higher quality format, and I have to agree with him. He had a carphone in 1988 which my friends thought was the height of sophistication, even thought it was only used about three times because the calls were 50p a minute. In 1992, four years before the first DVD players came onto the market, he had a Kodak PhotoCD player, which was possibly the most useless piece of equipment ever invented. Only professional photographers have ever heard of them for they were designed to play back photographs from files that had been digitised, and only professional photographers wanted to do that. It was never popular and was quickly replaced by a technology we now know as the ‘computer’.
Our computer was an Acorn Electron, which my dad played on for hours. His favourite game was called Sphinx Adventure which consisted of a small, badly rendered elf character trying to reach a sphinx. A typical moment of game play is as follows:
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO LEFT
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO RIGHT
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO FORWARD
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO BACK
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
YOU HAVE BEEN SLAIN BY A WIZARD
GAME OVER
It took him nearly four years to complete, and was rewarded by a screen saying ‘THE END’. He also enjoyed ‘Tree Of Knowledge’, a quiz game where you had to actually input all the quiz data yourself. You could spend hours building a database on Neighbours characters or Manchester City Players 1964 – 1984, only for the game to formulate questions based on this data, which you obviously already knew the answer to.
It would take me a long time to run through all of the things that make my dad my dad. I attempted it when I was best man at his wedding to my stepmum, but the speech ended up being a testimonial to the man and I binned it, thinking that stories about the notes he used to leave in my lunchbox featuring poems about the headmistress’s underwear, or the time he took payment for some photography work in the form of a rabbit would say more about my relationship with him than his with his new wife.
I’ll leave you with the conclusion of the opening paragraph – so there’s my dad, privet hedge in hand and relates to me the following tale;
“I was dropping off some photos at a woman’s house, and came back to find the car was gone. Now, my first thought was ‘The car’s been nicked’, so I went to go back inside and call the police. Just then I saw the car at the bottom of the hill parked in someone’s drive, so I went down there to see what they were playing at. The next thing, this old fella comes out ranting and raving at me, saying that my car’s ruined his hedge. Turns out I must have left that handbrake off and the car’s rolled right down the hill into the guy’s drive and only been stopped by his privet hedge. Before I know it, he’s blocked me in with his car and is getting me to sign a written confession that I have damaged his ‘valuable’ hedge. He wouldn’t let me go until I’d signed it and taken some pictures.”
“So why did you bring some of the hedge with you?”
“This? This is my evidence.”
And so goes another normal night in the life of Keith Walker.
Saturday, 7 June 2008
A Kick In The Festivals
Drunkenness, class wars, casual racism and a complete rip-off. Yes, the Glastonbury Festival is the most British of events. What escapes me is how the failure of a multi-million pound company to sell out a festival in three hours should be of any concern to anyone, anywhere, at any time.
I’m sick of hearing about Glastonbury. I was sick of it before I even heard of it. Why this overblown monster, this idiot taxation system, this money-grubbing behemoth of corporate whoredom should be greeted with such dewy eyed reverence by the music fans of this country is beyond me. The news that ‘Glasto’ , as it’s bog snorkelling ‘disciples’ insist on calling it, hadn’t sold out in under 4.0 nanoseconds was greeted with more wailing and gnashing of teeth than the death of John Lennon. Could it be that the World’s Greatest Music Festival (TM and don’t you forget it you snivelling internet pirates) was losing its grip on the zeitgeist?
Well hold the phone Martha, Glastonbury isn’t on the cutting edge? You could have fooled me, they even had Shirley Bassey there last year. It was a faux-ironic move that the made the students piss themselves but which was lost on the urban youths of Hackney, which is possibly why this year, when dear Emily Eavis announced - shock horror – Jay-Z as the headliner, the regular Glastonbury crowd started burning their crosses. ‘This isn’t irony, this is just unexpected! This will not stand!’ bleated Effie and Hugo Thorntonley-Smythe as they ditched daddy’s credit card and started making plans to plant cotton fields in Ecuador instead.
Glastonbury has finally been seen for what it is, another hollow ‘experience’ for those with more disposable income than imagination to tick off their Observer Music Monthly ‘Do Before You Die’ list. It’s been a long time coming but finally the wheels have come off the Worthy Farm bandwagon. The ‘Glasto tourists’ have realised that although it might be a mildly diverting after-dinner topic to mention that they’re forgoing the South of France this year and taking the kids to ‘really experience Glastonbury’, they don’t particularly want to spend over £600 to subject Kitty and Basil to ’99 Problems’ while a load of cidered up City boys vomit on their brand new Jeff Banks tent.
The new generation of festival goers are not fooled by Glastonbury and its fake hippy ethos. They have more choice than ever before, more new festivals cropping up every year, and they go not necessarily for the lineup, but for the fun of it. Remember fun? It’s what festivals are supposed to be, a weekend away camping, listen to a few bands you might not normally bother with, have a few drinks, etc. You know, fun? Glastonbury over recent years has become more like a stint in Vietnam than a weekend break. First there’s the ridiculous notion of pre-registering, where you hand over more information to Festival Republic Ltd. than you would to a national census. Then if you’re actually lucky enough to win the ticket lottery you have to plan for the inevitable deluge where your tent and all your belongings are washed away on a river of someone else’s feculence with your only comfort being an acoustic set by The Pigeon Detectives which you can’t even hear properly. Yeah, that sounds like a blast.
Vacuous proto-hippies will claim that the best of the fest is actually away from the music, in the ridiculously contrived Field of Lost Vagueness and the Healing Fields but even they are being ploughed over this year.
The day Glastonbury failed to sell out isn’t The Day The Music Died, it’s the Day That Music Woke Up And Punched Michael Eavis In His Great Big Beardy Face. The fact that organisers believed Kings of Leon and The Verve would offer value for money demonstrates just how clueless and out of touch they have become. The Verve reunion must be the least wanted comeback since legwarmers so why foist them on an audience who were pre-pubescent when they last charted? It’s almost as if they were trying to counteract the boat-rocking signing of Jay-Z with something purposefully bland and inoffensive, like having cucumber dip with your Balti.
However, the headliners can’t be blamed for the lack of interest in Glastonbury, after all T In The Park also have The Verve and Kings of Leon and they managed to sell out, as did Leeds/Reading (The Killers, Rage Against the Machine and Metallica). The fact is that the Glastonbury ‘experience’ which cons so many into going is losing its sparkle year after year, starting with the sell off of the management to Mean Fiddler in 2002, which was brought on by the fence-jumpers and the ridiculously over populated 2001 and 1999 festivals. So in essence it was the freeloaders who killed Glastonbury, trying to force the hippy envelope and take advantage of the naïve security and the ease of spreading the ‘weak fence pole’ hints online.
If Glastonbury truly is a national treasure there needs to be a re-think on what exactly it is there to achieve. If the original aims were trampled during the Battle of Yeoman’s Bridge in 1991 when New age Travellers clashed with police, they certainly haven’t been allowed to resurface since, instead the festival has moved further and further away from the mission of free entertainment and co-operation. Personally I blame Thom Yorke, and until he’s burned in a wicker man on the Field of Lost Vagueness the ‘Glastonbury Highlights’ programme on the BBC will be mis-named.
I’m sick of hearing about Glastonbury. I was sick of it before I even heard of it. Why this overblown monster, this idiot taxation system, this money-grubbing behemoth of corporate whoredom should be greeted with such dewy eyed reverence by the music fans of this country is beyond me. The news that ‘Glasto’ , as it’s bog snorkelling ‘disciples’ insist on calling it, hadn’t sold out in under 4.0 nanoseconds was greeted with more wailing and gnashing of teeth than the death of John Lennon. Could it be that the World’s Greatest Music Festival (TM and don’t you forget it you snivelling internet pirates) was losing its grip on the zeitgeist?
Well hold the phone Martha, Glastonbury isn’t on the cutting edge? You could have fooled me, they even had Shirley Bassey there last year. It was a faux-ironic move that the made the students piss themselves but which was lost on the urban youths of Hackney, which is possibly why this year, when dear Emily Eavis announced - shock horror – Jay-Z as the headliner, the regular Glastonbury crowd started burning their crosses. ‘This isn’t irony, this is just unexpected! This will not stand!’ bleated Effie and Hugo Thorntonley-Smythe as they ditched daddy’s credit card and started making plans to plant cotton fields in Ecuador instead.
Glastonbury has finally been seen for what it is, another hollow ‘experience’ for those with more disposable income than imagination to tick off their Observer Music Monthly ‘Do Before You Die’ list. It’s been a long time coming but finally the wheels have come off the Worthy Farm bandwagon. The ‘Glasto tourists’ have realised that although it might be a mildly diverting after-dinner topic to mention that they’re forgoing the South of France this year and taking the kids to ‘really experience Glastonbury’, they don’t particularly want to spend over £600 to subject Kitty and Basil to ’99 Problems’ while a load of cidered up City boys vomit on their brand new Jeff Banks tent.
The new generation of festival goers are not fooled by Glastonbury and its fake hippy ethos. They have more choice than ever before, more new festivals cropping up every year, and they go not necessarily for the lineup, but for the fun of it. Remember fun? It’s what festivals are supposed to be, a weekend away camping, listen to a few bands you might not normally bother with, have a few drinks, etc. You know, fun? Glastonbury over recent years has become more like a stint in Vietnam than a weekend break. First there’s the ridiculous notion of pre-registering, where you hand over more information to Festival Republic Ltd. than you would to a national census. Then if you’re actually lucky enough to win the ticket lottery you have to plan for the inevitable deluge where your tent and all your belongings are washed away on a river of someone else’s feculence with your only comfort being an acoustic set by The Pigeon Detectives which you can’t even hear properly. Yeah, that sounds like a blast.
Vacuous proto-hippies will claim that the best of the fest is actually away from the music, in the ridiculously contrived Field of Lost Vagueness and the Healing Fields but even they are being ploughed over this year.
The day Glastonbury failed to sell out isn’t The Day The Music Died, it’s the Day That Music Woke Up And Punched Michael Eavis In His Great Big Beardy Face. The fact that organisers believed Kings of Leon and The Verve would offer value for money demonstrates just how clueless and out of touch they have become. The Verve reunion must be the least wanted comeback since legwarmers so why foist them on an audience who were pre-pubescent when they last charted? It’s almost as if they were trying to counteract the boat-rocking signing of Jay-Z with something purposefully bland and inoffensive, like having cucumber dip with your Balti.
However, the headliners can’t be blamed for the lack of interest in Glastonbury, after all T In The Park also have The Verve and Kings of Leon and they managed to sell out, as did Leeds/Reading (The Killers, Rage Against the Machine and Metallica). The fact is that the Glastonbury ‘experience’ which cons so many into going is losing its sparkle year after year, starting with the sell off of the management to Mean Fiddler in 2002, which was brought on by the fence-jumpers and the ridiculously over populated 2001 and 1999 festivals. So in essence it was the freeloaders who killed Glastonbury, trying to force the hippy envelope and take advantage of the naïve security and the ease of spreading the ‘weak fence pole’ hints online.
If Glastonbury truly is a national treasure there needs to be a re-think on what exactly it is there to achieve. If the original aims were trampled during the Battle of Yeoman’s Bridge in 1991 when New age Travellers clashed with police, they certainly haven’t been allowed to resurface since, instead the festival has moved further and further away from the mission of free entertainment and co-operation. Personally I blame Thom Yorke, and until he’s burned in a wicker man on the Field of Lost Vagueness the ‘Glastonbury Highlights’ programme on the BBC will be mis-named.
Wednesday, 30 April 2008
'Darwin's Rottweiler' Needs Putting To Sleep
As a lapsed Catholic there are really only two ways I could have attended the recent Richard Dawkins lecture at the Phil and not lost my saved seat in the afterlife. 1 – stand up halfway through and yell things at him, 2 – go on a comp and claim I was just there for the free bread sticks and a nice sit down.
I chose the latter.
Professor Richard Dawkins is now a major celebrity in the world of airport bookshop theologians. His book ‘The God Delusion’ has been printed in over 30 languages and has sold in excess of 1.5 million copies. Dawkins opens his lecture with these statistics, giving you a taster of how humble and unassuming he is. He follows with a slide showing the many titles which have been written purely in opposition to his work; “The Dawkins Delusion”; “Deluded By Dawkins”; “Intellectuals Don’t Need God and Other Myths”; and so on and so forth into infinity. Dawkins laps up this attention, to him it’s just further confirmation that the religious hate to be challenged. The first ten minutes of the hour long lecture are designed to impress upon any doubters in the audience the importance of Dawkins and his theories in today’s mondo-secular society.
Not that there are many doubters here. Most of them are outside with placards, one was chanting ‘Don’t let Dawkins make a monkey out of you’, alluding to the Professors stance on creationism. Inside the largest of the Phil’s lecture rooms those who don’t fully subscribe to Dawkins’ theories are notable by their absence. Every conclusion he reaches is accompanied by a silent chorus of nods, as if he is intoning some indefatigable truth rather than shooting religious fish in a barrel. I began to wonder why these people were here, paying £20 plus to hear what they already agree with, re-packaged with slides from the book they paid a tenner for.
The myth of Dawkins is more compelling than the fact. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic and though religion still plays some part in my life, usually through family ritual, I was ready for Dawkins to present me with something in the atheist position that I could agree with, or at least relate to. I was expecting this Oxford don to outsmart me in some way, to pose questions that I had no answer to. I was Dorothy, wandering down the yellow brick road to see the Wizard, and to match the analogy, I just saw an old man behind a curtain.
What Dawkins says is easy to say, make no mistake about it. Easier than telling people to ‘love thy neighbour’ certainly. He comes across not as an intellectual, or even a great speaker, but as a self-satisfied bore preaching to the converted. At one point he challenges God to strike him down with a thunderbolt – seeking attention from the deity he’s decrying as if the Almighty has nothing better to do than cut a jumped-up travelling salesman down to size.
Part of Dawkins’ problem is the dichotomy of belief vs. fact which he brings on himself and then can’t escape from. No matter how hard he tries, Dawkins can’t separate God and religion from physics and the universe. Even school aged children soon get over the idea of God as a man who lives in the sky, but Dawkins continues to rattle his bones over the lack of ‘proof’ of God’s existence. Much of his ‘lecture’ is concerned with making cheap digs at the religious, even reducing himself to mocking those who pray for their loved ones to recover from illness, literally sniggering at their belief that God has intervened when the much longed-for upturn in health arrives.
I was bored of Dawkins long before he got to the most distasteful part if the lecture, where he begins to pick away at single Biblical references. He obsesses over the Christian God and tellingly shies away from Allah, Buddha, Ganesh etc. After all, no-one likes the God he describes in ‘The God Delusion’, the Old Testament God who went Old School on the humanity after they started copulating with goats and murdering each others’ children because they were fed up. No, we like Jesus better, he even looks a bit like Brad Pitt in all those pictures and he everyone agrees her was a stand up bloke. Dawkins barely mentions Jesus, or that the basic tenets of Christianity are all concerned with being nice to each other and not breaking the law. He’d rather dwell on Genesis and the startling revelation that it MIGHT NOT ALL BE TRUE!
Throughout this lecture, Richard Dawkins never attempts to broach the simplest question of religion. Why do people believe? What exactly is in it for them? He rails against indoctrinisation but wants to indoctrinate us into atheism. He accepts no other belief system than his own, and delights in picking on the easiest of targets, like Ted Haggard, the American Evangelical preacher who was revealed to have a penchant for rent boys. It’s a good job that God hasn’t called an early judgement day because with this reasoning He might have seen Dawkins and junked us all. You can play this game with atheists too by the way, if he can ignore Mother Theresa and Father Damien of Molokai then I can ignore Baba Amte and Margaret Sanger and choose none other than Napalm Death to represent all Atheists. Don’t look so cool now do they?
During the dubious question and answer session (sample question : “Why are you so right, and where can I buy your books?”) a brave woman asked whether the survival of religion into the modern age when so much of it has been debunked by science could mean that religion has an evolutionary advantage. As you might expect, the answer was ‘I don’t know’, but it was preceded by a ridiculously complex and wordy answer which possibly only Dawkins himself will ever understand. I was bamboozled by the reply and so was the woman asking the question, as all other queries had been answered with plain English and very concisely. Dawkins had been rumbled and he pulled his secret weapon of academic waffle out the bag to send the woman back to her seat wondering why she bothered.
Comedian Matt Morgan recently compared Dawkins to Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss, commenting that his dismissal of all religiosity was similar to the woodpecker knocking the organ mice down to size with “It’s not a boat, it’s just a silly old shoe”. This sums Richard Dawkins up beautifully, he doesn’t allow for joy or hope in anything that can’t be quantified and proven. Take him to Westminster Abbey at vespers and he’ll probably prefer his own audio book on the iPod. Show him the Ali Mosque in Cairo and no doubt he’ll be tapping at the brickwork complaining it isn’t properly pointed. He may be the ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’ to some, but he won’t shake of the Great and Powerful Oz analogy until he takes on some real opposition.
I chose the latter.
Professor Richard Dawkins is now a major celebrity in the world of airport bookshop theologians. His book ‘The God Delusion’ has been printed in over 30 languages and has sold in excess of 1.5 million copies. Dawkins opens his lecture with these statistics, giving you a taster of how humble and unassuming he is. He follows with a slide showing the many titles which have been written purely in opposition to his work; “The Dawkins Delusion”; “Deluded By Dawkins”; “Intellectuals Don’t Need God and Other Myths”; and so on and so forth into infinity. Dawkins laps up this attention, to him it’s just further confirmation that the religious hate to be challenged. The first ten minutes of the hour long lecture are designed to impress upon any doubters in the audience the importance of Dawkins and his theories in today’s mondo-secular society.
Not that there are many doubters here. Most of them are outside with placards, one was chanting ‘Don’t let Dawkins make a monkey out of you’, alluding to the Professors stance on creationism. Inside the largest of the Phil’s lecture rooms those who don’t fully subscribe to Dawkins’ theories are notable by their absence. Every conclusion he reaches is accompanied by a silent chorus of nods, as if he is intoning some indefatigable truth rather than shooting religious fish in a barrel. I began to wonder why these people were here, paying £20 plus to hear what they already agree with, re-packaged with slides from the book they paid a tenner for.
The myth of Dawkins is more compelling than the fact. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic and though religion still plays some part in my life, usually through family ritual, I was ready for Dawkins to present me with something in the atheist position that I could agree with, or at least relate to. I was expecting this Oxford don to outsmart me in some way, to pose questions that I had no answer to. I was Dorothy, wandering down the yellow brick road to see the Wizard, and to match the analogy, I just saw an old man behind a curtain.
What Dawkins says is easy to say, make no mistake about it. Easier than telling people to ‘love thy neighbour’ certainly. He comes across not as an intellectual, or even a great speaker, but as a self-satisfied bore preaching to the converted. At one point he challenges God to strike him down with a thunderbolt – seeking attention from the deity he’s decrying as if the Almighty has nothing better to do than cut a jumped-up travelling salesman down to size.
Part of Dawkins’ problem is the dichotomy of belief vs. fact which he brings on himself and then can’t escape from. No matter how hard he tries, Dawkins can’t separate God and religion from physics and the universe. Even school aged children soon get over the idea of God as a man who lives in the sky, but Dawkins continues to rattle his bones over the lack of ‘proof’ of God’s existence. Much of his ‘lecture’ is concerned with making cheap digs at the religious, even reducing himself to mocking those who pray for their loved ones to recover from illness, literally sniggering at their belief that God has intervened when the much longed-for upturn in health arrives.
I was bored of Dawkins long before he got to the most distasteful part if the lecture, where he begins to pick away at single Biblical references. He obsesses over the Christian God and tellingly shies away from Allah, Buddha, Ganesh etc. After all, no-one likes the God he describes in ‘The God Delusion’, the Old Testament God who went Old School on the humanity after they started copulating with goats and murdering each others’ children because they were fed up. No, we like Jesus better, he even looks a bit like Brad Pitt in all those pictures and he everyone agrees her was a stand up bloke. Dawkins barely mentions Jesus, or that the basic tenets of Christianity are all concerned with being nice to each other and not breaking the law. He’d rather dwell on Genesis and the startling revelation that it MIGHT NOT ALL BE TRUE!
Throughout this lecture, Richard Dawkins never attempts to broach the simplest question of religion. Why do people believe? What exactly is in it for them? He rails against indoctrinisation but wants to indoctrinate us into atheism. He accepts no other belief system than his own, and delights in picking on the easiest of targets, like Ted Haggard, the American Evangelical preacher who was revealed to have a penchant for rent boys. It’s a good job that God hasn’t called an early judgement day because with this reasoning He might have seen Dawkins and junked us all. You can play this game with atheists too by the way, if he can ignore Mother Theresa and Father Damien of Molokai then I can ignore Baba Amte and Margaret Sanger and choose none other than Napalm Death to represent all Atheists. Don’t look so cool now do they?
During the dubious question and answer session (sample question : “Why are you so right, and where can I buy your books?”) a brave woman asked whether the survival of religion into the modern age when so much of it has been debunked by science could mean that religion has an evolutionary advantage. As you might expect, the answer was ‘I don’t know’, but it was preceded by a ridiculously complex and wordy answer which possibly only Dawkins himself will ever understand. I was bamboozled by the reply and so was the woman asking the question, as all other queries had been answered with plain English and very concisely. Dawkins had been rumbled and he pulled his secret weapon of academic waffle out the bag to send the woman back to her seat wondering why she bothered.
Comedian Matt Morgan recently compared Dawkins to Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss, commenting that his dismissal of all religiosity was similar to the woodpecker knocking the organ mice down to size with “It’s not a boat, it’s just a silly old shoe”. This sums Richard Dawkins up beautifully, he doesn’t allow for joy or hope in anything that can’t be quantified and proven. Take him to Westminster Abbey at vespers and he’ll probably prefer his own audio book on the iPod. Show him the Ali Mosque in Cairo and no doubt he’ll be tapping at the brickwork complaining it isn’t properly pointed. He may be the ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’ to some, but he won’t shake of the Great and Powerful Oz analogy until he takes on some real opposition.
Friday, 28 March 2008
Cringe When You're Winning
Awards. I never get any. Actually, I once won Best Film at the Lymm Film Festival, beating a short film which had been made by David Yip. Now every time I see him in some marginal TV stereotype role (‘David Yip as Laundry Manager, David Yip as Takeway Manager, David Yip as Chinese Prime Minister’) I have a silent chuckle to myself.
Awards are important in life. They teach us crucial lessons about how to hate, how to seethe and how to gloat. They bring out the most disgusting of human emotions, and that is all they do. They encourage people to compare themselves to others and to spend their every waking moment imagining how a faceless panel, or in the worst cases the ‘public’ – those blithering hateful idiots, will judge the minutiae of their worth against some other hapless soul. As soon as I went to the front of the conference suite of the Park Royal in Stretton to accept my plywood and brass award from the Chairman of Lymm Film Society, I felt superior, like one of God’s own children. One of the older, nice ones too, not the snotty little git he sent down here to Earth to get tortured. During my acceptance speech I longed to say “And finally, thanks to all of the other nominees for being not quite good enough. Enjoy your lives as second best, losers!”
The Brit Awards were decried by none other than Craig David in their run up. I bet they felt like calling the whole thing off and just calling it a draw after he accused them of ‘Missing the 8 Ball’ by not nominating people like him anymore. The Brits mean as little as any other award ceremony because all they measure is ‘goodness’. Is this Mika record good, or not good? Is Kylie good? Who the goodest out of Kate Nash and KT Tunstall. Maybe if they actually gave awards for Britishness, they would become more relevant, and simultaneously give those hopeful immigrants some idea of what it is to be British, so they could stop revising by watching ‘Love Thy Neighbour’.
In terms of ‘Britishness’, the Arctic Monkeys deserve their award. Alex Turner sings like a whiny scal from Sheffield, which he is. They write songs about going to the pub and then getting in a taxi and going home. At the Brits ceremony they dressed up in tweeds and plus fours and thanked their old pals from the Brit School (where they never went). They were indulging in that old British pursuit Taking The Piss, which is a skill that non-Brits have never really honed that well. Americans get a bit obvious and aggressive when they try and Take The Piss. Ditto Australians. Watch and learn all you would be Britishers, this is how the experts do it.
Kate Nash may have gone to the Brit School but she deserved her award too. The likes of Leona Lewis are still aping Whitney and Beyonce with their ‘you may have dumped me but I’m gonna sell your bling and buy handbags’ brand of female empowerment, whereas Nash’s songs tell of her boyfriend being a bit of a knob and being too shy to flirt with someone. “I’ll leave you there til the morning and I purposely won’t turn the heating on’ is as harsh as Kate gets with her wayward men. British through and through.
Take That win on humility alone. They are the first to admit they were on the downs (not the Barlow obviously, he was rolling around in cash and pasties like a proper Cheshire millionaire) but after re-forming, storming through an acclaimed tour and selling 50 gazillion albums they should have rightly spent their time at Robbie’s house, pissing up the walls, stamping on his head and yelling ‘Who’s laughing now you fat loser?’ whilst shoving gold discs up his arse sideways. Instead they shrug and smile and say thank you, rejecting schadenfreude and only enjoying their ‘I Told You So’ moments in the privacy of their private yachts.
Conversely, Amy Winehouse should have her Brit rescinded on grounds of being an Americanised caricature of a pop soul singer with an unhealthy obsession for her ‘incarcerated’ hubbie which comes straight from the trailer parks of New Jersey. Just what is that accent she sings with? Sarf London? Don’t think so. Adele has the dodgy accent going on aswell but she reminds us all of that Great British Paradigm – the chunky barmaid with a good set of pipes. Gawd bless her! Kylie won as International Female on the ‘You Didn’t Die’ ticket and would actually be borderline British if she hadn’t shagged a Frenchman.
Until there are some real independent music awards which are voted for by people who have a clue and are definitely not the derisible ‘public’, we have to put up with the Brits. I hope to be nominated myself next year, hopefully against David Yip. Suck on that loser!
Awards are important in life. They teach us crucial lessons about how to hate, how to seethe and how to gloat. They bring out the most disgusting of human emotions, and that is all they do. They encourage people to compare themselves to others and to spend their every waking moment imagining how a faceless panel, or in the worst cases the ‘public’ – those blithering hateful idiots, will judge the minutiae of their worth against some other hapless soul. As soon as I went to the front of the conference suite of the Park Royal in Stretton to accept my plywood and brass award from the Chairman of Lymm Film Society, I felt superior, like one of God’s own children. One of the older, nice ones too, not the snotty little git he sent down here to Earth to get tortured. During my acceptance speech I longed to say “And finally, thanks to all of the other nominees for being not quite good enough. Enjoy your lives as second best, losers!”
The Brit Awards were decried by none other than Craig David in their run up. I bet they felt like calling the whole thing off and just calling it a draw after he accused them of ‘Missing the 8 Ball’ by not nominating people like him anymore. The Brits mean as little as any other award ceremony because all they measure is ‘goodness’. Is this Mika record good, or not good? Is Kylie good? Who the goodest out of Kate Nash and KT Tunstall. Maybe if they actually gave awards for Britishness, they would become more relevant, and simultaneously give those hopeful immigrants some idea of what it is to be British, so they could stop revising by watching ‘Love Thy Neighbour’.
In terms of ‘Britishness’, the Arctic Monkeys deserve their award. Alex Turner sings like a whiny scal from Sheffield, which he is. They write songs about going to the pub and then getting in a taxi and going home. At the Brits ceremony they dressed up in tweeds and plus fours and thanked their old pals from the Brit School (where they never went). They were indulging in that old British pursuit Taking The Piss, which is a skill that non-Brits have never really honed that well. Americans get a bit obvious and aggressive when they try and Take The Piss. Ditto Australians. Watch and learn all you would be Britishers, this is how the experts do it.
Kate Nash may have gone to the Brit School but she deserved her award too. The likes of Leona Lewis are still aping Whitney and Beyonce with their ‘you may have dumped me but I’m gonna sell your bling and buy handbags’ brand of female empowerment, whereas Nash’s songs tell of her boyfriend being a bit of a knob and being too shy to flirt with someone. “I’ll leave you there til the morning and I purposely won’t turn the heating on’ is as harsh as Kate gets with her wayward men. British through and through.
Take That win on humility alone. They are the first to admit they were on the downs (not the Barlow obviously, he was rolling around in cash and pasties like a proper Cheshire millionaire) but after re-forming, storming through an acclaimed tour and selling 50 gazillion albums they should have rightly spent their time at Robbie’s house, pissing up the walls, stamping on his head and yelling ‘Who’s laughing now you fat loser?’ whilst shoving gold discs up his arse sideways. Instead they shrug and smile and say thank you, rejecting schadenfreude and only enjoying their ‘I Told You So’ moments in the privacy of their private yachts.
Conversely, Amy Winehouse should have her Brit rescinded on grounds of being an Americanised caricature of a pop soul singer with an unhealthy obsession for her ‘incarcerated’ hubbie which comes straight from the trailer parks of New Jersey. Just what is that accent she sings with? Sarf London? Don’t think so. Adele has the dodgy accent going on aswell but she reminds us all of that Great British Paradigm – the chunky barmaid with a good set of pipes. Gawd bless her! Kylie won as International Female on the ‘You Didn’t Die’ ticket and would actually be borderline British if she hadn’t shagged a Frenchman.
Until there are some real independent music awards which are voted for by people who have a clue and are definitely not the derisible ‘public’, we have to put up with the Brits. I hope to be nominated myself next year, hopefully against David Yip. Suck on that loser!
Thursday, 21 February 2008
Fairytale Of New Yorkshire
Christmas and rock music go together like turkey and avian flu. When rock musicians try to encroach on the dusty glamour of the festive season it always ends badly, like an office party where the boss leaves at 9, or an attempted family reunion with that uncle who’s out on bail. Put Christmas and rock together and you get The Darkness poncing around a fireplace wearing tinsel. You get David Bowie trying not to trip over Bing’s colostomy bag.You get Bob Fucking Geldof.
Unperturbed by all of this misery, some artists are still trying to the glitz and the guitar solo together, more recently with the idea of Christmas shows. Now these have been rolled out in the past by everyone from Rick Wakeman to Ned’s Atomic Dustbin who even broadcast theirs on the internet, but last December saw the likes of The Wombats, CSS and Jarvis Cocker all set up special festive performances. The king of all these however, was the cutely-named ‘Cribsmas’ – featuring Wakefield punk trio The Cribs and an assortment of their celebrity friends.
Unperturbed by all of this misery, some artists are still trying to the glitz and the guitar solo together, more recently with the idea of Christmas shows. Now these have been rolled out in the past by everyone from Rick Wakeman to Ned’s Atomic Dustbin who even broadcast theirs on the internet, but last December saw the likes of The Wombats, CSS and Jarvis Cocker all set up special festive performances. The king of all these however, was the cutely-named ‘Cribsmas’ – featuring Wakefield punk trio The Cribs and an assortment of their celebrity friends.
Ryan Jarman at the Cribs' Christmas gig at the Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Originally designed as a fundraising exercise for Cystic Fibrosis, the three night residency at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds turned into a rampaging behemoth as it became apparent that The Cribs’ ‘special guests’ may well include their old pals The Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand, and guitarist Ryan Jarman’s current squeeze Kate Nash. By the time the extended indie-glitterati had realised that this might be a good prospect, the tickets were long gone, snapped up hungrily by superfans and ebay touters alike. At one point the £30 three day passes were being sold at internet auction for over 20 times their value, and The Cribs’ online fan base were desperately scrabbling for spares whilst all the time the lucky few checked their email confirmations over and over, for fear some small print loophole meant they had to recite the reg number of the band’s tour van before being allowed in.
The Brudenell was described by the NME’s Gavin Haynes as “a functioning working men’s club”, as opposed to the hundreds preserved by the National Trust presumably. He gushes about the “tacky seventies furniture” and “weathered carpet” like a cut price Michael Palin describing a kibbutz. In normal people’s terms, it’s a social club, with the only visible concessions to the event being an endearingly half-arsed banner and a t-shirt stand. The regulars are used to the influx of indie kids, as the Brudenell has a tradition of staging seminal gigs and getting the best and brightest from the UK music scene before the NME gets their grubby hands on them.
With the event being staged over three days there’s a kind of festival atmosphere at the Brudenell. There is much hugging amongst people you suspect have never met outside of Facebook or the previously mentioned Cribs forum. People are excited. Really excited. The prospect is this : The Cribs will play everything they have ever recorded. That means demos, b-sides, album tracks, everything. The first night will be occupied by their earliest demos, first album and b-sides from that period, and so the nights will continue. The band are in effect supporting themselves as they will take to the stage first to begin their chronological march across the discography, before making way for the aforementioned ‘support acts’.
Kate Nash supporting on Thursday night at the Brudenell
Something quite strange is happening front of stage. People are talking to each other, they’re milling and laughing and messing about. A couple of likely lads are dressed as Father Christmas and Kate Nash is pulling a fan around by the arm looking to introduce her to Ryan. It’s a bit like an office party, when your boss is also your mate and doesn’t mind you telling him how much you love him. There’s no room for cynicism here. Between sets the promoter of Wire Club’s Strangeways night launches into some Jarman-called bingo. “27, my age but don’t tell anyone!” winks Ryan as he thoroughly enters into the spirit of the occasion. Later there’ll be another round of the pint-pulling contest between band members and bar staff, interspersed with such merriment as a Cribs pub quiz and even musical statues. Cool is out the window, and it was never welcome here anyway.
In a bizarrely heart-warming turn of events the band seem to be dressing in their old ‘costumes’ to harken back to the good old days. Ryan Jarman bloodies his own lip during the ‘New Fellas’ set when this was a regular occurrence. His vintage Gitanes tshirt has already been shredded by the crowd, after surviving a Libertines tour. Drummer Ross has on the glittery waistcoat which was mocked in one of their early live reviews by Leeds Music Scene. They are self-referential, even ‘doing’ lines from their documentary film ‘Leave Too Neat’, but it’s not self-aggrandising, it’s more like a group of (200 plus) old friends reminiscing and telling in-jokes.
Gary Jarman on Wednesday night
When all the festivities are over and everyone has made a hundred new mates, sweated a few gallons and had their turn at slurring ‘”I love you guys canihaveaphotoplease?” it’s off to Wire, probably Leeds’ premier indie hotspot, to hear a DJ set by, you’ve guessed it, The Cribs! The entire Brudenell crowd seem to have decamped here, along with the band and their mates. It’s 5am before the place looks like calming down and even then there’s a glint in the eye of every Cribs fan leaving the place. They look like they’ve been whacked with sweat-soaked cricket bats but you can bet they’d do the same thing again tomorrow, and the next day, and that if the Cribs had 400 albums to get through it wouldn’t be a problem.
Christmas gigs may be de riguer, but this is more than that, it’s a bonding experience between a band who has tasted success and come back to nudge their fans and say “this is alright isn’t it?”. As we leave Wire some fans are hugging the band’s tour manager. When was the last time you saw a gig so good you did that?
Chris 'Shippo' Shipton, the Cribs guitar tech/tour manager
Monday, 26 November 2007
MobileAct Unsigned - A Spy In The House of Gav
It’s four thirty on a dismal Wednesday in half term. On Hotham Street, Liverpool a line of roughly a hundred assorted scals and indie kids are waiting to be let in to the Carling Academy. Suddenly a film crew appear with a bearded man with middle aged spread. This is Simon Gavin, head of A&R at Polydor and music ‘mogul’ at the helm of Channel 4’s new talent show MobileAct Unsigned. A few scally girls in brightly coloured tights yell ‘Who are you?’. They’ve got a point.
It’s not X-Factor, it’s not Fame Academy, it’s not Pop Idol. That’s the line that Channel 4 want everyone to swallow. Those shows are about stuffing one more glassy-eyed warbler into the already heaving pop industry, and pulling every string available to make sure that they peak and disappear, ready for the next one whereas Channel 4 describe MobileAct as ‘a multi-platform search to find the hottest unsigned band in Britain’. Multi-platform means it’s sponsored by and utilises mobile phone technology (like X-Factor), that viewers can interact with the programme using the internet (like X-Factor) and that the public can vote on the winner by texting in (just like…oh fuck it, I’ve made my point).
So it’s the indie band X-Factor, which Channel 4 seem a little embarrassed about. They shouldn’t, the talent show has always been a staple of TV scheduling and is a legitimate form of entertainment. The problem is that the viewing public know exactly how talent shows work, and that rather than a shiny new band being presented clean and ready-wrapped by the NME, Radio One, MTV and E4, we get to see every slip up, every desperate begging session, every in-fight and every tear before we even hear enough songs to fill an EP. We get the people before the product, which is an unnatural way to experience a band.
It’s not X-Factor, it’s not Fame Academy, it’s not Pop Idol. That’s the line that Channel 4 want everyone to swallow. Those shows are about stuffing one more glassy-eyed warbler into the already heaving pop industry, and pulling every string available to make sure that they peak and disappear, ready for the next one whereas Channel 4 describe MobileAct as ‘a multi-platform search to find the hottest unsigned band in Britain’. Multi-platform means it’s sponsored by and utilises mobile phone technology (like X-Factor), that viewers can interact with the programme using the internet (like X-Factor) and that the public can vote on the winner by texting in (just like…oh fuck it, I’ve made my point).
So it’s the indie band X-Factor, which Channel 4 seem a little embarrassed about. They shouldn’t, the talent show has always been a staple of TV scheduling and is a legitimate form of entertainment. The problem is that the viewing public know exactly how talent shows work, and that rather than a shiny new band being presented clean and ready-wrapped by the NME, Radio One, MTV and E4, we get to see every slip up, every desperate begging session, every in-fight and every tear before we even hear enough songs to fill an EP. We get the people before the product, which is an unnatural way to experience a band.
Back at the Carling Academy there are six bands waiting to perform to an invited audience of free ticket holders and blaggers. Alex James, the bass player from Blur, and the aforementioned Simon Gavin are sat on a white leather sofa looking like Blofeld and his gimp whilst a jovial floor manager heats up the crowd. These bands have already been through an online vote and an appearance in the heats, where they performed in front of such musical luminaries as Just Jack (who when faced with a tumult of indie bands was left repeating ‘it’s not really my kind of music’ like an idiot budgie), Mutya Buena and gawking fool Calvin Harris. The bands were then further whittled down with a series of ‘interviews’ where the judges broke their spirits, treated them like scum and forced a series of contrived in-fights.
In 2003, Simon Gavin told music industry directory Hitquarters the following ; ““If all you have are TV-associated projects, real talent has a problem getting noticed.” One of the real problems with public voting as it exists on Mobileact is the unreliable ballot. Bands are asked in the early stages to get as many people as possible to vote for them on the Mobileact, which basically means that the bands with the most mates (or the most mates with multiple email addresses) do better. The TV monster which Gavin warned us of four years ago also turns artists with raw creative talent and balls into toadies of the highest degree. In the second round of the show the acts are asked to perform acoustically and are judged on this, all ready for Radio One’s Live Lounge with Whiley. Where is it written that all bands have to reduce what they do down to its simplest and most generic form? At this stage, any electro or hip hop artists are at a distinct disadvantage, and quelle surprise, it’s the guitar based indie bands which get through.
The first band to play in the Liverpool round of the knockout stages are Revenue, a swaggering lot from rock ‘n’ roll Peterborough who are the embodiment of the ready-for-TV band that the judges seem intent on putting through. For filming purposes every band has to play two minutes of their song for camera coverage (ie filming from different angles) before they perform properly. Revenue churn out their two minutes looking like they’d rather be anywhere else, turning away from the audience and messing with their instruments whilst playing. All of a sudden, they’re being filmed for real and darn it if they aren’t bouncing around and gurning like indie jesters. The passion, the effort, all fake. They turn it on like they turn their amps on, and NOW we’re rock and roll stars! The judges love it.
In 2004, in an interview for the Guardian on the rise of ‘art rock’, Gavin told Alex Petridis that “record companies are in the position that they have a very successful mainstream roster and it would be criminal not to exploit the resources….not to try something different as well”. How times have changed. Gavin’s mantra on Mobileact has been ‘It’s not commercial enough. I can’t sell it.’ It seems those downloads are pinching tighter than expected.
All of the bands here tonight are too worshipful, too desperate and too easily persuaded. When Simon Gavin tells The Bad Robots, a ska tinged bunch with the best song of the evening, that they’re a ‘safe option’, they nod and grin like it’s the greatest moment of their lives. Alex James tells all-female The Mentalists that they remind him of 4 Non Blondes (possibly the first outing for that reference in 12 years) they giggle, blush and show mock horror before giggling again. All of these bands, being cowed by the bright lights and the backstage privileges, seem oblivious to the fact that they’re being sized up, poked, prodded and rejected based on a scant set of ideals.
I ask Simon Gavin who his favourite band of the series is. His answer is the same as host Alex Zane : Hijak Oscar. A blues/soul/folk band (their description) whose influences are either dead or haven’t released a record since the dawn of MP3. All fine and good you might say, but Gavin has spent the entire audition process saying that anything other than electro indie, indie rock or just plain indie is ‘a niche market’, or the old chestnut ‘too difficult to sell’. Hijak Oscar cannot win this competition – the votes will come from people who call blues and soul ‘their mum’s music’, and where does that leave Simon Gavin and his relevance to this show, primarily watched by 14 to 18 year olds? By the time the winning band are in a position to release their debut album, about 12 months from now, the music scene which Gavin is trying to shoe-horn them into will have moved on considerably. On the final auditions show, he told an aspiring soul singer that it was Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse who were selling records now, not Jamelia or Beverly Knight. The possibility that this might change was not mentioned, just as it wasn’t when Mr Gavin dismissed a Screamo band earlier in the series.
When I ask whether this contest will produce anything relevant to music today Alex Zane, the nicest man in television, convincingly toes the party line; “MobileAct gives these bands access to contacts that they wouldn’t get anywhere else. They’ll meet people here who will help them in the future and I think they’re all benefiting from the competition. Plus there’s the potential that we find an amazing band.”
But who are his favourite bands, and would they have entered a competition like this? “I like The Sex Pistols, The Clash, people like that. Things have changed in music now and you never know. There are platforms like myspace and bands are doing a lot of stuff themselves so they might well have done.”
It’s hard to imagine John Lydon re-writing Anarchy InThe UK for the acoustic guitar but you can see what Zane is getting at. Music has changed, the way that music is promoted has changed, the bands have to change to some extent because unlike the dark ages of Punk, New Wave and even Britpop, the processes and the people behind A&R are accessible to anyone with Wikipedia in their favourites.
I ask Alex James, cheese purveyor, whether Seymour (Blur when unsigned) would have done well in this competition. “Seymour? Seymour wouldn’t have been invited” he replies. No, Seymour would have sent in an unsolicited demo to Andy Ross, the Food records A&R, and invited them to their gig. In fact, that’s what they did, and they were signed. Ask a tiny indie label about this way of working today, and the response is different. Nobody wants demos any more, they want hype, numbers and a ready made band of followers. They want a website, some choice quotes and a million myspace friends, as well as a band who have done everything they’re about to pay the record company for before, done it better, and for free.
So what’s next for MobileAct and its confusing title? They have recently revealed that viewers will be able to re-instate one of the bands who have been ejected. The favourites seem to be Yorkshire-based The Headliners, five cheeky chaps with nu-rave clothes and some spiky indie pop songs which plough that barren furrow between McFly and The Buzzcocks. They’re adorable, and you can imagine spending five minutes in their company and not wanting to dig your eyes out with spoons. Luckily the public vote for the winner of MobileAct, so if The Headliners make it back into the competition they will almost certainly triumph. Whether this is a poison chalice for any up and coming band remains to be seen.
Friday, 5 October 2007
The Cribs - Birmingham Carling Academy 05.10.07
*This review was written for a Cribs website, if you're not familiar with the band a more detailed review of their latest album is further down this page*
Ah, Brum Academy, The Cribs’ favourite venue in the country according to them, though I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s the big sweeping balcony full of people who’ll throw empty glasses at you when you stage dive – even when you’re in the band. Maybe it’s the happy-go-lucky bouncers who put an X on your hand when you come over the top, yet turn a blind eye when your arm ends up looking like a game of noughts and crosses. Maybe it’s the fact that every single Cribs show there is fucking awesome.
Launching into Our Bovine Public like it’s their last three minutes on earth the band look possessed by the whole atmosphere. The kids have shown some mega appreciation to the fantastic Bobby Conn and Pavilion but this is what they’re after, and the energy that bounces back and forth from stage to pit is tremendous.
Gary reminds us that new single Don't You Wanna Be Relevant is "the one with the video where we look like the Archies", a comment which flies straight over the heads of the under 25 year olds in the audience but is nonetheless very accurate.
Ryan’s taking his t-shirt off, which to me signals he’s coming into the crowd, This he does, managing to kick me square in the head in the melee. (If you’re reading this Ryan I’ll settle out of court). The jeans are ripped in half, the shoes come off and the next thing I see Ryan is being passed back to the waiting security guards who carry him away. Someone helpfully yells ‘Shit, he’s dead!’, but thankfully just knocked out.
Moments later the band re-appear. Gary says ‘Thanks for raping my brother’. They did play something at this point but I can’t remember what due to a) beer and b) the aforementioned kick in the head. Ryan comes to Gary’s mic to sing a sweet rendition of Shoot The Poets and finally retreats, to Casualty probably.
As the lights come up someone is trying to persuade a roadie to give him Ryan’s forgotten t-shirt, like it’s the Shroud of Turin. And now we all know why this is The Cribs’ favourite venue
Ah, Brum Academy, The Cribs’ favourite venue in the country according to them, though I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s the big sweeping balcony full of people who’ll throw empty glasses at you when you stage dive – even when you’re in the band. Maybe it’s the happy-go-lucky bouncers who put an X on your hand when you come over the top, yet turn a blind eye when your arm ends up looking like a game of noughts and crosses. Maybe it’s the fact that every single Cribs show there is fucking awesome.
Launching into Our Bovine Public like it’s their last three minutes on earth the band look possessed by the whole atmosphere. The kids have shown some mega appreciation to the fantastic Bobby Conn and Pavilion but this is what they’re after, and the energy that bounces back and forth from stage to pit is tremendous.
Gary reminds us that new single Don't You Wanna Be Relevant is "the one with the video where we look like the Archies", a comment which flies straight over the heads of the under 25 year olds in the audience but is nonetheless very accurate.
Ryan’s taking his t-shirt off, which to me signals he’s coming into the crowd, This he does, managing to kick me square in the head in the melee. (If you’re reading this Ryan I’ll settle out of court). The jeans are ripped in half, the shoes come off and the next thing I see Ryan is being passed back to the waiting security guards who carry him away. Someone helpfully yells ‘Shit, he’s dead!’, but thankfully just knocked out.
Moments later the band re-appear. Gary says ‘Thanks for raping my brother’. They did play something at this point but I can’t remember what due to a) beer and b) the aforementioned kick in the head. Ryan comes to Gary’s mic to sing a sweet rendition of Shoot The Poets and finally retreats, to Casualty probably.
As the lights come up someone is trying to persuade a roadie to give him Ryan’s forgotten t-shirt, like it’s the Shroud of Turin. And now we all know why this is The Cribs’ favourite venue
Thursday, 13 September 2007
Monumental Hypocrisy
Who’s up for a trip around Parliament Square then? A swift visit to the Churchill memorial, swerve Abraham Lincoln where some tourists from Arsecreek, Kentucky are posing, and past Benjamin Disraeli, whoever he is.
There will we find the newest monument to a man who has demonstrated and inspired greatness, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Let’s just remind ourselves what this man stands for. Influenced by Ghandi, Mandela’s first political activity involved giving free legal advice and representation to blacks who suffered under the National Party. After non-violent actions failed, Mandela co-founded and led the armed wing of the ANC in paramilitary training, guerrilla warfare and sabotage. To put it lightly, this was one serious motherfucker.
Mandela began his struggle in the shadow of Ghandi, but drifted towards what Malcolm X would later describe as equality ‘by any means necessary’. It was arguably the Sharpeville massacre which turned many moderate ANC members into armed revolutionaries. In a South African township in 1960, a group of over 5,000 people converged on the local police station. They asked to each be arrested for the crime of not carrying their identifying passbooks. As the crowds grew, armoured tanks surrounded them, and opened fire, killing 69 and injuring another 180.
Lt. Colonel Pienaar, the commanding officer of the unit which committed the massacre, had earlier been quoted thus; “the Native mentality does not allow them to gather for a peaceful demonstration. For them to gather means violence." A similar feeling seems to have been behind a piece of legislation which makes the unveiling of a statue to Mandela despicably ironic. If, tomorrow, the government unveiled a piece of discriminatory legisaltion, it would be against the law to protest about it in the shadow of Mandela’s image. Since 2006 it has been illegal to mount a protest in Parliament Square without the express permission of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Anyone entering Parliament Square with a placard could be arrested, fingerprinted, photographed and held whilst a DNA sample was taken from them. The same could happen to anyone who had a permit to protest (a contradiction in terms really) but who used a loudspeaker. In fact, this could now happen to anyone, technically for doing anything at all, as the definition of an arrestable offence is now anything for which a policeman arrests you. It’s the kind of Catch-22 situation that the phrase was coined for.
The passbooks which those at the Sharpeville massacre were protesting against being forced to use were basically ID cards. They held a person’s name, employment details, photograph and fingerprints. They had to be presented on demand and not carrying one was an arrestable offence. Sound familiar? Imagine being arrested in front of that statue for failing to produce your compulsory ID card, which unlike the paper versions given to the blacks in South Africa, can also record your biometric data, and can hold an unlimited amount of information due to its chip technology.
Mandela had no qualms about moving towards armed resistance when the freedoms at stake were so precious. Surely a better tribute to his efforts would be to lift the restrictions on demonstrating in Parliament Square and to send the ID cards legislation to join the Passbook in freedom’s own Room 101.
There will we find the newest monument to a man who has demonstrated and inspired greatness, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Let’s just remind ourselves what this man stands for. Influenced by Ghandi, Mandela’s first political activity involved giving free legal advice and representation to blacks who suffered under the National Party. After non-violent actions failed, Mandela co-founded and led the armed wing of the ANC in paramilitary training, guerrilla warfare and sabotage. To put it lightly, this was one serious motherfucker.
Mandela began his struggle in the shadow of Ghandi, but drifted towards what Malcolm X would later describe as equality ‘by any means necessary’. It was arguably the Sharpeville massacre which turned many moderate ANC members into armed revolutionaries. In a South African township in 1960, a group of over 5,000 people converged on the local police station. They asked to each be arrested for the crime of not carrying their identifying passbooks. As the crowds grew, armoured tanks surrounded them, and opened fire, killing 69 and injuring another 180.
Lt. Colonel Pienaar, the commanding officer of the unit which committed the massacre, had earlier been quoted thus; “the Native mentality does not allow them to gather for a peaceful demonstration. For them to gather means violence." A similar feeling seems to have been behind a piece of legislation which makes the unveiling of a statue to Mandela despicably ironic. If, tomorrow, the government unveiled a piece of discriminatory legisaltion, it would be against the law to protest about it in the shadow of Mandela’s image. Since 2006 it has been illegal to mount a protest in Parliament Square without the express permission of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Anyone entering Parliament Square with a placard could be arrested, fingerprinted, photographed and held whilst a DNA sample was taken from them. The same could happen to anyone who had a permit to protest (a contradiction in terms really) but who used a loudspeaker. In fact, this could now happen to anyone, technically for doing anything at all, as the definition of an arrestable offence is now anything for which a policeman arrests you. It’s the kind of Catch-22 situation that the phrase was coined for.
The passbooks which those at the Sharpeville massacre were protesting against being forced to use were basically ID cards. They held a person’s name, employment details, photograph and fingerprints. They had to be presented on demand and not carrying one was an arrestable offence. Sound familiar? Imagine being arrested in front of that statue for failing to produce your compulsory ID card, which unlike the paper versions given to the blacks in South Africa, can also record your biometric data, and can hold an unlimited amount of information due to its chip technology.
Mandela had no qualms about moving towards armed resistance when the freedoms at stake were so precious. Surely a better tribute to his efforts would be to lift the restrictions on demonstrating in Parliament Square and to send the ID cards legislation to join the Passbook in freedom’s own Room 101.
Tuesday, 31 July 2007
Swindler's List
Daily life is full of decisions. What shall I have on my sandwiches? Where should I park? Should I download child pornography for the purposes of spurious ‘research’ into the area of childhood as a whole for a one line appearance in a BBC Three late night comedy drama, or is that a bad idea fraught with pitfalls?
Decisions, decisions, decisions. But in what form of reality could you reasonably be expected to decide whether you prefer a serial killer, a dwarf, or an animated crab? I’ll tell you where, in a land called Listopia, where even the most idiotic of people can claim to be film buffs because they can enthusiastically rate fictional characters depending on their resonance in their pathetic daily lives.
We all know that lists are big money these days. Lists on TV can last for six hours and straddle a whole bank holiday weekend, and will guarantee news coverage and promotion when the Daily Mail gets upset that ‘Gaz twatting Mozz’ is the nation’s best loved street crime on YouTube. Lists in magazines always guarantee big sales, because everybody wants to match their personal outrages with those of their film/music/tv heroes. “Jimmy Page better than Jimi Hendrix by one place! I’ll firebomb the offices of Mojo before I will allow this travesty to stand!”
Total Film magazine have already delivered their Top 100, as voted for by people who find Empire too mentally challenging. Readers placed The Empire Strikes Back at number one, rather predictably, in a list so masculine that it virtually sprouted chest hairs. The gangster, horror and sci-fi genres were so overwhelmingly represented that you get to number 18 in the list before you find a film with no violent deaths. Total Film have now unveiled the voting forms for their newest list, the Top 100 Movie Characters, and the result is a trip to Listopia so surreal and unfathomable that David Lynch must have been the guest editor.
Only in the fields of entertainment are enthusiasts expected, nay encouraged, to rate completely disparate paradigms against one another. In Annie Hall Woody Allen jokes about the pointless awards industry and wonder whether they will crown ‘Best Fascist Dictator – Adolf Hitler’. But that would at least draw some lines of comparison – Maggie probably wouldn’t make the cut if there was a panel involved - unlike the idea that a sci-fi film about killer robots can be judged equally against a Swedish language dadaist introspective about fruit trees.
To help those film buffs who don’t actually know or like any films, Total Film has compiled a list of characters to choose a Top 100 from. As well as fictional characters from literature (Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird, Gandalf) there are real people (Johnny Cash, Bonnie Parker) and all manner of weird inclusions. Nowhere does the magazine attempt to justify or explain its reasons for compiling this list. Is it to measure the skill of actors in taking a script and developing a character, including voice and movement? If so then Johnny Depp’s rendering of Captain Jack Sparrow is certainly a relevant entry. Caspar on the other hand owes very little of his ‘character’ to the voice actor playing him in the children’s movies. There’s a even a clue for the kid in the description ‘the friendly ghost’. Not rocket science really, just don’t make him a bastard platypus who speaks fluent German.
Elsewhere amongst the prescribed choices is ‘The Monster’ from Frankenstein. Unfortunately the IMDB lists four films called Frankenstein, including a frankly strange method attempt by Robert De Niro and the 1931 version with Boris Karloff. Other multiples occur with Alice In Wonderland (8 versions), Aladdin (3), and Cinderella (24). This would suggest that it is the character in general that is being celebrated and not the film character at all. If that’s the case, why is there Hightower from Police Academy, but not Dr.Jekyll? Are we voting for Jude Law or Michael Caine as Alfie?
There are so many errors and omissions in the list that it becomes painfully clear that the magazine is putting this out as a money making exercise. Who is Willy Wonker? What the fuck is Toy’s Story? Who is Romeo ‘Montigue’? Don’t they know that Danny Zucco is in Grease and not ‘Greece’? Or is this a straight to video version that I haven’t seen? Also, if the Total Film journalists are choosing the list from which to vote, should they not be fired immediately for suggesting that of the millions of characters ever committed to celluloid, the dad from Jumanji and the whale from Free Willy are among them?
In the October issue of Total Film, this feature will probably take up around ten pages. That’s ten pages that could have been used to discuss relevant and important issues in film, such as funding for independent films which haven’t been produced by George Clooney and don’t have Oscar nominees in them, or the state of British film industry, or the fact that cinemas like FACT in Liverpool are forced to screen summer blockbusters instead of foreign language films to keep on the sweet side of the distributors. Instead we have the eternal question – is Sebastian the crab better than Idi Amin? If only we didn’t have to wait til October to find out….
Decisions, decisions, decisions. But in what form of reality could you reasonably be expected to decide whether you prefer a serial killer, a dwarf, or an animated crab? I’ll tell you where, in a land called Listopia, where even the most idiotic of people can claim to be film buffs because they can enthusiastically rate fictional characters depending on their resonance in their pathetic daily lives.
We all know that lists are big money these days. Lists on TV can last for six hours and straddle a whole bank holiday weekend, and will guarantee news coverage and promotion when the Daily Mail gets upset that ‘Gaz twatting Mozz’ is the nation’s best loved street crime on YouTube. Lists in magazines always guarantee big sales, because everybody wants to match their personal outrages with those of their film/music/tv heroes. “Jimmy Page better than Jimi Hendrix by one place! I’ll firebomb the offices of Mojo before I will allow this travesty to stand!”
Total Film magazine have already delivered their Top 100, as voted for by people who find Empire too mentally challenging. Readers placed The Empire Strikes Back at number one, rather predictably, in a list so masculine that it virtually sprouted chest hairs. The gangster, horror and sci-fi genres were so overwhelmingly represented that you get to number 18 in the list before you find a film with no violent deaths. Total Film have now unveiled the voting forms for their newest list, the Top 100 Movie Characters, and the result is a trip to Listopia so surreal and unfathomable that David Lynch must have been the guest editor.
Only in the fields of entertainment are enthusiasts expected, nay encouraged, to rate completely disparate paradigms against one another. In Annie Hall Woody Allen jokes about the pointless awards industry and wonder whether they will crown ‘Best Fascist Dictator – Adolf Hitler’. But that would at least draw some lines of comparison – Maggie probably wouldn’t make the cut if there was a panel involved - unlike the idea that a sci-fi film about killer robots can be judged equally against a Swedish language dadaist introspective about fruit trees.
To help those film buffs who don’t actually know or like any films, Total Film has compiled a list of characters to choose a Top 100 from. As well as fictional characters from literature (Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird, Gandalf) there are real people (Johnny Cash, Bonnie Parker) and all manner of weird inclusions. Nowhere does the magazine attempt to justify or explain its reasons for compiling this list. Is it to measure the skill of actors in taking a script and developing a character, including voice and movement? If so then Johnny Depp’s rendering of Captain Jack Sparrow is certainly a relevant entry. Caspar on the other hand owes very little of his ‘character’ to the voice actor playing him in the children’s movies. There’s a even a clue for the kid in the description ‘the friendly ghost’. Not rocket science really, just don’t make him a bastard platypus who speaks fluent German.
Elsewhere amongst the prescribed choices is ‘The Monster’ from Frankenstein. Unfortunately the IMDB lists four films called Frankenstein, including a frankly strange method attempt by Robert De Niro and the 1931 version with Boris Karloff. Other multiples occur with Alice In Wonderland (8 versions), Aladdin (3), and Cinderella (24). This would suggest that it is the character in general that is being celebrated and not the film character at all. If that’s the case, why is there Hightower from Police Academy, but not Dr.Jekyll? Are we voting for Jude Law or Michael Caine as Alfie?
There are so many errors and omissions in the list that it becomes painfully clear that the magazine is putting this out as a money making exercise. Who is Willy Wonker? What the fuck is Toy’s Story? Who is Romeo ‘Montigue’? Don’t they know that Danny Zucco is in Grease and not ‘Greece’? Or is this a straight to video version that I haven’t seen? Also, if the Total Film journalists are choosing the list from which to vote, should they not be fired immediately for suggesting that of the millions of characters ever committed to celluloid, the dad from Jumanji and the whale from Free Willy are among them?
In the October issue of Total Film, this feature will probably take up around ten pages. That’s ten pages that could have been used to discuss relevant and important issues in film, such as funding for independent films which haven’t been produced by George Clooney and don’t have Oscar nominees in them, or the state of British film industry, or the fact that cinemas like FACT in Liverpool are forced to screen summer blockbusters instead of foreign language films to keep on the sweet side of the distributors. Instead we have the eternal question – is Sebastian the crab better than Idi Amin? If only we didn’t have to wait til October to find out….
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