Anyone else think Chris Martin is gradually turning into Marti Pellow? Or is nobody else old enough to bear the cross of remembering Wet Wet Wet? If you need to be told, the latter were a cheesy Scottish pop group fronted by the pretty boy Mr Pellow, who made a career out of pouting, gurning and tossing his carefully tousled locks for the Laydeez. Many of whom were sufficiently taken in to provide Marti and the boys with a very substantial income, for a while.
And now it seems the diffident young man who warbled "Yellow" is heading the same way, his amour propre presumably buoyed up by being shacked up with a Hollywood starlet. Designer stubble, writhing for the camera, pouting and gurning. "Look laydeez, I'm a rock god". Oh well, it must be tempting...
Saturday, 11 October 2008
Sunday, 13 July 2008
Smoke-free Amsterdam
I've spent a fair amount of time in Amsterdam lately so I've been conducting a straw poll of bar staff's opinions on the UK-style smoking ban that came into force on July 2nd. Purely for research purposes you understand. I am now in a position to report. I enclose my findings in quotes because their response is unanimous and almost identically expressed: "It's schit. All the staff in this bar smoke. Before, we could have a cigarette inside and carry on working. Now we have to take a break. And the customers all want to smoke too, so they're outside and the atmosphere inside the bar has died".
I hear conflicting reports about what's happening in the city's well-known coffeeshops, ranging from no change to air-conditioned cubicles for the staff to smoking spliffs being allowed, but on no account with tobacco - pure ganja only! You know Gobbag never frequents places like that so I can't comment on any of these rumours, including the last piece of entertaining lunacy but I can tell you that there is a lot more weed being smoked on the streets, which was banned anyway. What's happened to the Dutch?
I hear conflicting reports about what's happening in the city's well-known coffeeshops, ranging from no change to air-conditioned cubicles for the staff to smoking spliffs being allowed, but on no account with tobacco - pure ganja only! You know Gobbag never frequents places like that so I can't comment on any of these rumours, including the last piece of entertaining lunacy but I can tell you that there is a lot more weed being smoked on the streets, which was banned anyway. What's happened to the Dutch?
Airports
Everyone has grumps about airports, mostly to do with the fact that they aren't as convenient as teleporting and you don't get treated like the royalty (sorry, that should read "celebrities") everyone seems to think they are now that Andy Warhol's famous prophecy has come true.
My complaint today, however, is more specific. It's about the people you share the lounge, gate and flight with. It's not pissed-up Brit holidaymakers. It's not fat, braying Americans. It's the 20- and 30-something Jack-the-lads in cheap suits and expensive mobiles, gobbing off about their triumphant business trip as if they were something between Bill Gates and Gordon Gekko (did the writers of Wall Street imagine we wouldn't know a gecko was a type of lizard? If they wanted to indulge in that kind of crude sub-Dickens literalism why didn't they just get on with it and call him Sam Snake?) Said mobiles rarely get used for a phone call of course - their purpose is to illustrate how expensively you can announce your latest text with a poorly-reproduced chunk of shitty production line R 'n' B (funny how that term started out meaning Chuck Berry, then the Stones, then The Who and now, inexplicably, over-produced, under-inspired clone warbling). The man who does speak into his phone is these blokes' fellow traveller Mr Middle-Aged-Bottom-Rung-Executive. You'd think he was really really important by the way he continues to conduct a booming team conference with his minions all the way from the lounge to the tarmac, but you know he's a fraud because he's travelling on Jet2!
You've never got a Glock when you need one, have you? I'm not sure why these people get my goat quite so much. I think it's the pretence. You just know the young guys would love you to believe they're cool jet-setting movers and shakers but really they're about as sophisticated as Wayne Rooney and ninety percent of their cerebral activity is devoted to footy and pulling that blonde down the club with the massive tits. And Mr Exec probably goes home to his lawnmower and a bottle of mid-priced whisky to drown out the fact that he's still travelling by Air Scunthorpe after decades of service to the company.
I should let it go. Imagine what they're writing about me. Well, maybe not writing, then...
My complaint today, however, is more specific. It's about the people you share the lounge, gate and flight with. It's not pissed-up Brit holidaymakers. It's not fat, braying Americans. It's the 20- and 30-something Jack-the-lads in cheap suits and expensive mobiles, gobbing off about their triumphant business trip as if they were something between Bill Gates and Gordon Gekko (did the writers of Wall Street imagine we wouldn't know a gecko was a type of lizard? If they wanted to indulge in that kind of crude sub-Dickens literalism why didn't they just get on with it and call him Sam Snake?) Said mobiles rarely get used for a phone call of course - their purpose is to illustrate how expensively you can announce your latest text with a poorly-reproduced chunk of shitty production line R 'n' B (funny how that term started out meaning Chuck Berry, then the Stones, then The Who and now, inexplicably, over-produced, under-inspired clone warbling). The man who does speak into his phone is these blokes' fellow traveller Mr Middle-Aged-Bottom-Rung-Executive. You'd think he was really really important by the way he continues to conduct a booming team conference with his minions all the way from the lounge to the tarmac, but you know he's a fraud because he's travelling on Jet2!
You've never got a Glock when you need one, have you? I'm not sure why these people get my goat quite so much. I think it's the pretence. You just know the young guys would love you to believe they're cool jet-setting movers and shakers but really they're about as sophisticated as Wayne Rooney and ninety percent of their cerebral activity is devoted to footy and pulling that blonde down the club with the massive tits. And Mr Exec probably goes home to his lawnmower and a bottle of mid-priced whisky to drown out the fact that he's still travelling by Air Scunthorpe after decades of service to the company.
I should let it go. Imagine what they're writing about me. Well, maybe not writing, then...
Thursday, 17 April 2008
Joan Hunter Dunn
It's sad to hear of anyone "passing on", as they say, (unless it were, oh... Robert Mugabe) but what struck me most about the obituaries of Joan Hunter Dunn was that she existed at all. I had always supposed her to be an invention, as her name seemed perfectly designed to evoke exactly the kind of tweed-clad, horse-faced, treetrunk-thighed, braying public schoolgirl that one would imagine John Betjeman engaging in ineffectual pursuit - when he could drag himself away from his teddy bears and his doggerel.
Sunday, 17 June 2007
Stephen Sondheim
Last Friday the Guardian ran a piece in which current musical luminaries were asked to nominate "classic" albums they thought were overrated. Sgt. Pepper, Trout Mask Replica, The Strokes' first album, they all got it. Even Abba's Arrival. Shock horror - to discover that someone had thought that Abba were sufficiently elevated in the first place to need debunking. Dark Side of the Moon had its Zimmer kicked away as well. Odd, that. After rushing out to buy it when it came out in 19-ahem I quickly dismissed it as overblown tosh. So did most other people, and the record has been an object of ridicule ever since, so to find that someone has been carrying it round as a sacred cow to be slain and has let rip just at the point in my life when I was starting to think "Hmm, maybe I should re-evaluate those old Floyd albums" seems a little ironic.
Sorry, I'm rambling. There is a companion volume to the old favourite "Classic Albums that are Actually Shit" and it's "Acknowledged Geniuses who are Actually Rubbish". My personal copy includes Dickens, Mozart (I always sympathised with the Emperor in Amadeus - "too many notes") and Stevie Wonder. Radio 2 (just flicking round the dial, honest) this evening reminded me of another as they paid homage to the supremely overblown and fantastically dull Stephen Sondheim. I mean I'm not a fan of musicals in the first place but I can see that, say, Guys and Dolls makes for a jolly evening which will send you home with a tune to whistle. Sondheim, on the other hand, is nothing but soulless cleverness, with not a fucking tune in sight. Smug, eyebrow-waggling, look-at-me showing off. Yet for some reason as clear to me as the computation of the first picosecond of the Big Bang in 11-dimensional space, people don't just like Sondheim, they adore him. Worship, even. But why? WHY? "He's so witty". No he's not. He's clever. So are a lot of people. "He's so clever". See above. So what? "The music is so marvellous". It isn't. It's... clever (see above). Plenty of people are writing clever music these days, just go to the music department of any serious academic university and ask them to output their computer scores to an audio rendering device (hi-fi to you). If they're prepared to sully their work with being listened to. These are people clever enough to out-clever Bach, Hawking and Stephen Fry put together and certainly can blow Sondheim clean out of the water in the cleverness stakes, but have a listen to their stuff. It's shit. And I suggest that the average show-going Heimie would agree with me.
Deep breath. So what do the Heimies (as they are now known) see in their boy? Really? Really, have another listen. THERE ARE NO TUNES (ok, Send in the Clowns is a tune but the aficionados' favourites are always the most atonal numbers). I can only conclude that they admire, err... cleverness. And possibly they believe Sondheim's own hype: my own feelings about Mozart notwithstanding, can you believe the towering hubris of a man who knocks out a popular entertainment and calls it A Little Night Music? Clearly he rates himself a bit. Maybe his fans find him a less arduous way of bolstering their view of their own intellectualism than reading A Brief History of Time (though certainly more expensive - have you seen the price of tickets in the West End?)
Finally: if you want a counter to the notion that cleverness is a virtue in music, I say this - Mark King of Level 42. Je reste ma valise.
Sorry, I'm rambling. There is a companion volume to the old favourite "Classic Albums that are Actually Shit" and it's "Acknowledged Geniuses who are Actually Rubbish". My personal copy includes Dickens, Mozart (I always sympathised with the Emperor in Amadeus - "too many notes") and Stevie Wonder. Radio 2 (just flicking round the dial, honest) this evening reminded me of another as they paid homage to the supremely overblown and fantastically dull Stephen Sondheim. I mean I'm not a fan of musicals in the first place but I can see that, say, Guys and Dolls makes for a jolly evening which will send you home with a tune to whistle. Sondheim, on the other hand, is nothing but soulless cleverness, with not a fucking tune in sight. Smug, eyebrow-waggling, look-at-me showing off. Yet for some reason as clear to me as the computation of the first picosecond of the Big Bang in 11-dimensional space, people don't just like Sondheim, they adore him. Worship, even. But why? WHY? "He's so witty". No he's not. He's clever. So are a lot of people. "He's so clever". See above. So what? "The music is so marvellous". It isn't. It's... clever (see above). Plenty of people are writing clever music these days, just go to the music department of any serious academic university and ask them to output their computer scores to an audio rendering device (hi-fi to you). If they're prepared to sully their work with being listened to. These are people clever enough to out-clever Bach, Hawking and Stephen Fry put together and certainly can blow Sondheim clean out of the water in the cleverness stakes, but have a listen to their stuff. It's shit. And I suggest that the average show-going Heimie would agree with me.
Deep breath. So what do the Heimies (as they are now known) see in their boy? Really? Really, have another listen. THERE ARE NO TUNES (ok, Send in the Clowns is a tune but the aficionados' favourites are always the most atonal numbers). I can only conclude that they admire, err... cleverness. And possibly they believe Sondheim's own hype: my own feelings about Mozart notwithstanding, can you believe the towering hubris of a man who knocks out a popular entertainment and calls it A Little Night Music? Clearly he rates himself a bit. Maybe his fans find him a less arduous way of bolstering their view of their own intellectualism than reading A Brief History of Time (though certainly more expensive - have you seen the price of tickets in the West End?)
Finally: if you want a counter to the notion that cleverness is a virtue in music, I say this - Mark King of Level 42. Je reste ma valise.
Friday, 8 June 2007
reacTable
I'm sure a lot of people saw Bjork on Jools Holland tonight, saw the weird and very cool-looking electronic instrument her keyboard/computer guy was using and went "Wow! What the fuck is that???!!!", quickly followed by "Want one, want one!" A few minutes googling revealed that it's called a reacTable, it's been around for a year or so, it was invented by a bunch of academics in Barcelona and there are a bunch of vids on youtube demonstrating it. Cool. Very. The kind of instrument Mr Spock would play. And all the comments are "Wow, want one!". Actually, that's going to be tough because there are apparently only two in the world and everyone's favourite Icelander has blagged the use of one of them for her tour.
But then the doubts started to creep in. Yes, it looks utterly stunning and there's no doubt it's a very organic alternative to knobs and switches but, but, doesn't it sound rather like, err... a twenty year old analogue synth? That you can pick up cheap on eBay? And then there's the little matter of how you, err... play a tune? Very old school, I know, the tune, but a popular concept to this day and showing no sign of being on the way out.
It's hyped as "multi-user" because you can get your mate to stand across from you and help you twiddle the little Lego blocks, but how many people are going to want that? Bjork's guy doesn't seem to. A piano is "multi-user" - we've all seen two people sit down at the same keyboard and play a duet but it's always a gimmick. It has, apparently, a "tangible user interface". A bit like a guitar, then. Or a keyboard. Or (you get the point).
And I still get these gripes about it. It's a good idea (as far as it goes) and it looks cool (this year at least, until people start to go "Oh yeah, another reacTable band, that's so 2007") but it's been implemented with the wrong technology. It's a string and ceiling wax creation of video cameras and projectors - too much to go wrong! Wait until a roadie trips over it and the projector goes out of register. And the Lego blocks (sorry, they're called "tangibles") - how long are they going to last on tour? "Sorry man, I stepped on your tangible." "Hey, let's make a bong out of Dave's tangible". It should, of course, be built using Jeff Han style technology (search Jeff Han on youtube). Maybe it will if they ever go into production. Which is doubtful if the attitude of the designers is anything to go by, which seems to be "What, you're a musician? You want to have one of these yourself? To own? I'm sorry, this is serious academic research. You may apply to borrow one for three days if you are a museum. Or an international rockstar who can provide us with the publicity to support our application for a research grant. Now fuck off."
Anyone remember Jean Michel Jarre?
But then the doubts started to creep in. Yes, it looks utterly stunning and there's no doubt it's a very organic alternative to knobs and switches but, but, doesn't it sound rather like, err... a twenty year old analogue synth? That you can pick up cheap on eBay? And then there's the little matter of how you, err... play a tune? Very old school, I know, the tune, but a popular concept to this day and showing no sign of being on the way out.
It's hyped as "multi-user" because you can get your mate to stand across from you and help you twiddle the little Lego blocks, but how many people are going to want that? Bjork's guy doesn't seem to. A piano is "multi-user" - we've all seen two people sit down at the same keyboard and play a duet but it's always a gimmick. It has, apparently, a "tangible user interface". A bit like a guitar, then. Or a keyboard. Or (you get the point).
And I still get these gripes about it. It's a good idea (as far as it goes) and it looks cool (this year at least, until people start to go "Oh yeah, another reacTable band, that's so 2007") but it's been implemented with the wrong technology. It's a string and ceiling wax creation of video cameras and projectors - too much to go wrong! Wait until a roadie trips over it and the projector goes out of register. And the Lego blocks (sorry, they're called "tangibles") - how long are they going to last on tour? "Sorry man, I stepped on your tangible." "Hey, let's make a bong out of Dave's tangible". It should, of course, be built using Jeff Han style technology (search Jeff Han on youtube). Maybe it will if they ever go into production. Which is doubtful if the attitude of the designers is anything to go by, which seems to be "What, you're a musician? You want to have one of these yourself? To own? I'm sorry, this is serious academic research. You may apply to borrow one for three days if you are a museum. Or an international rockstar who can provide us with the publicity to support our application for a research grant. Now fuck off."
Anyone remember Jean Michel Jarre?
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