Wouldn't it be Nice

Dear 78records' friends,

Our hiatus appears to be nearing it's end. We'll soon be back and trying to impersonate John Peel while infringing any number of copyright laws. Until then, here's the Beach Boys:

We Are Golden

We are golden : Mika
by morg92

Dear Daniel,

Now, I've never been a fan of Mika and I suggest that you should not be either, despite him evoking the memory of Freddie Mercury in the nonsense-pop hit, Grace Kelly. In fact, he does more than simply evoke in that song. He more or less sings, "I'm going to try and sing like Freddie Mercury now," and then tries to sing like Freddie Mercury. As I say, nonsense.

Well, that's one thing. (In fact, there are two things: he sings, "Why don't you like me?" over and over which is simply dreadful and no amount of protestations about its ironic intent, its postmodern leanings, its subversive objective justify its complete bloody mawkishness.)

Anyway, he's gone a step further. For inspiration on his big new nonsense-pop hit, he's gone beyond Grace Kelly, bypassed Freddie Mercury and, erm, watched this clip of The Office from about 53"...



Surely the joke in The Office was that the song was awful?

Dear James,

I'm back!And I have this to say. If this was 1973 instead of 2009, Mika would be the new Sparks. Or the old Sparks. As it is, and as we always suspected, he's just turned into a dull pop act with the odd falsetto and silly shorts. So if this was 1984, he would actually be Freddie Mercury.

18 and Life

Dear James,

A couple of months ago I was taking the piss out of Skid Row and told you how their singer, Sebastian Bach (real name Sebastian Bierk), deserved a whole piss-taking post of his own. James, this is that post:

1. Sebastian Bach (real name Sebastian Bierk) named his 3 children Paris, London and... Sebastiana. If you and I were anything like Sebastian, I'd have a son called Stockport and you'd have one called Saint Saviour. Well, you'd have a son anyway. I suppose in many ways you have become more like Sebastian Bach than I will ever be. Unless I have a son and name him after a major conurbation, clearly. Leeds-Bradford Tunnard. It's got a ring to it.
2. Sebastian Bach (real name Sebastian Bierk) made his Broadway debut in 2000 in the title role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
3. In 2002, SB (RN Sebastian Bierk) played the title role in a touring company's production of Jesus Christ Superstar. He was fired for "diva-like behaviour". That sounds unfair. If you're playing Jesus Christ you've got to get into the whole "I'm the Messiah" thing, right?



I like to think Sebastian would have at least put more passion into his performance than the guy in the above video. The original album featured Ian Gillan of Deep Purple as Jesus and Murray Head as Judas. Murray Head of course went on to great success in the 80s with One Night In Bangkok.



But I digress:
4. Sebastian Bach was turned down in favour of ex-Stone Temple Pilot Scott Weiland as the lead singer of Velvet Revolver, because Slash said that with Bach they sounded like "Skid Roses". Of course, the fact that that Americans are as ignorant of the phrase "skid mark" as Germans are oblivious to the double meaning of "Bismarck" only adds to the humour.

5. Bach played the guitarist in the Korean girls' band in Gilmour Girls. As a married man, I endured the Gilmour Girls for years. I'm so gutted this huge comic moment passed me by at the time.



You may notice how he mispronounces the phrase "breast-feeding route".

6. Like many people, Bach went 13 years without speaking to W.Axl Rose. They made up, and Bach joined Axl's Not N Really aNymore Guns N Roses on stage on May 12, 2006, singing My Michelle. He then rejoined them on stage on May 14, singing My Michelle. He joined them again on June 4, 6 and 9, singing My Michelle. And again on September 23, singing My Michelle.



Eventually, they let him sing Nightrain as an encore, but only because Axl was "ailing".

7. 2006 was a busy year for Sebastian. He also formed a supergroup for the VH1 reality show "Supergroup" with Scott Ian (Anthrax), Evan Seinfeld (Biohazard and porn), Jason Bonham (Led Zep drummer, son of dead Led Zep drummer), and Ted Nugent (Ted Nugent). Oddly for a man with a 20-year career behind him, the reality show gets more words on his Wikipedia page than anything else. Which is probably about right.

8. That above article goes on for a bit, so I'll leave you with this gem:

In 2007, on an episode of the Trailer Park Boys season seven titled Friends of the Road, Bach played himself as a celebrity guest hosting a model train convention

I just don't know what to make of that, aside from the envy that Bach got to host it and not me, when I know loads more about trains. Anyway, 18 and Life, fantastic song in the late-80s glam rock vein of picking a name at random (Ricky, Billy, Johnny, etc) and writing a story about a young kid gone off the tracks. Great video too. Youth Gone Wild, meh.

Dirt Off Your Shoulder

Dear Daniel,

I've finally got around to listening to something which - when I heard about it 2 or 3 months back - got me pretty excited. I'm sure you'll remember back in late '95 when I used to repeat-play Sparklehorse's wonderfully-titled debut Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot? You don't? Well, you were all "Life" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" at the time.

I bought it because Jennifer Nine in the Melody Maker said "Rainmaker" sounded like an heir to Big Star's "Ballad of El Goodo", which you must remember me repeat playing. I remember getting the album home and being surprised at how remarkably dissimilar the tracks were...






Anyway, I saw Sparklehorse play in France a year later, Mark Linkous wheelchair-bound because, apparently, he fell asleep for 13 hours in the crouching position either after a particularly heavy night or because he was ill - depending on who you hear the story from.

Over the following years my relationship with the band dwindled, but then came Nina Persson - years after "Life" - to collaborate on a solo record of hers under the name A Camp with songs written by Mark Linkous. I can only imagine she worked with him to add a pleasingly circular quality to this tale.

And here she is with him again, this time adding vocals to a track on Linkous' album with Gnarls Barkley-bloke Danger Mouse, who created the super "Grey Album" by mixing Jay-Z's Black Album with The Beatles' White Album.

The new album also features Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne, The Strokes' Julian Casablancas (whose forthcoming solo album sounds bizarrely like Vangelis...), Vic Chestnut, Iggy Pop, etc. etc. and is itself a multimedia collaboration with David Lynch.

But, months after it was "released" as a blank disc with the advice "For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will", you still shouldn't really be allowed to ever hear it.



Dear James,

At the risk of sounding precious, I remember it was you who was all "Life" in 1995, I carried on the Cardigan Torch for the Atlanta Olympics in 96 and there on in. And Sparklehorse's hugely original sound (you're right, nothing like Ballad of El Goodo) probably flew right over my head because I mixed them up with Seahorses, that band by the chap who used to be in a better band, and by your insistence on wasting your fancy Jersey States student grant on 2,761 CDs in 95-96 by bands that sounded like The Charlatans doing Crashin' In.



You'd already conned me into buying the Whiteout album so the pretty girl at Virgin Megastore (Hagar?) would notice me, and that was shit, so I drew the line at further jangly guiter US pop bands after that and snuggled up with Paul and Artie and my yellow wig. I'm pleased to report that my cats ripped the spine of the Whiteout album to fuck in the days when I had my albums arranged in alphabetical order, with the S-Z section dangerously low (My Bridge Over Troubled Water! How will I replace you?) and in a cruel twist of fate, now that I've reordered my vinyl by year of release, it's the 1986-1998 section at the bottom which gets the scratching. Which may fuck up half my Queen collection, but if it brings Whiteout more pain, it's a risk I'm willing to take.

And you didn't even tell us anything about the Grey Album, surely the most exciting song on this post? I was going to post Whiteout's "Jackie's Racing", but there's no whiff of Whiteout on youtube and they told me to post Jackie Wilson's "Lonely Teardrops" instead. No one reads this far down anyway.

Dreamer

Dear James,

Less of your modernism, here's some cheesy bollocks from the 70s. You know where you are with cheesy bollocks. Curious Supertramp video from a Paris gig here. The singer's only purpose appears to be to do a bizarre strip tease and speak a bit of French.

Supertramp were one of Princess Diana's favourite bands. We were in the Coto supermarket round the corner the other day when "Lady in Red" came on on the tannoy and we sang along at the check-out. I told Josefina the old chestnut about how Princess Diana loved the song and thought it was about her. And people think I have a big ego. At a gig or something Princess Diana went up to Chris de Burgh and thanked him for writing the song about her. Little Chris had to point out that actually it was about his wife.

Arming Eritrea

Dear Daniel,

Like a southern American Steptoe, you've spent a lot of time on here going through old metal. But where do your modern metallic tastes lie?

The edges are more blurred nowadays, so Future of the Left are very likely not metal. But let's not go down that road. I've paid little attention to them up until now cos I've been listening to a lot of music out of the US. That was before I discovered they were the remains of the Cardiff alt-noise fellows McLusky, who I was turned on to by John Peel a few years back. I liked their nonsense sensibilities:



and whoyouknow: "Your heart's gone the colour of Coca Cola"



I'm going to delve deeper into this latest FotL record. Why don't you join me?

Dear James,

All very entertaining this, sounds a bit like a heavy Pavement. And since Pavement were quite heavy sometimes, I suppose that means they sound like Pavement. Has the heavy indie genre been coined yet? The caretaker in our old building said he was in a "heavy country" band. He left before I could find out what that meant. As for my metal tastes nowadays, since I don't seek out new music anymore I'm stuck with trawling through the Black Sabbath back catalogue and the occasional System of a Down. This is still a good 'un:

Going Loco Down in Acapulco

Dear James,

With news today that Ronnie Biggs is a free man, let's have a look at the film that started it all. Here's the Four Tops on Top of the Pops. Phil Collins wrote this with one of Dozier, Holland or Dozier. Although he never matched the giddy heights of sister Joan´s acting feats, there can nevertheless me no doubt as to Collins´ songwriting talent. Ignore what Barry Norman says, he´s just a stooge of the royal family.



And here´s a coincidence I've just found half an hour later: the great train robbery was 46 years ago today. And it's Ronnie Biggs' birthday!

Que Je t'aime

Dear James,

One of the clichés of the modern world is the metal band playing a pop classic. It's been done. Today Josefina pointed out to me a case of the same man taking his 70s ballad and turning it into metallic shit. Yes, a big steel turd.



I always remember Johnny Halliday for popping up in my French GCSE exam. He wasn't invigilating, there was merely a reading comprehansion article about him. Other things you may not know about Johnny: he once recorded an album of songs specially written by U2; he hired the Small Faces in 1969 to record his Riviere album; the Jimi Hendrix Experience's first gig was opening for Johnny in 1966; in 2006 his application for Belgian citizenship was turned down; and he has the world's largest collection of cookie jars.

Heart-Shaped Box

Dear Daniel,

I was trying to put together a decent music synch for a radio piece yesterday and somebody suggested Christopher O'Riley. I had never heard of him, but apparently he's very popular for his covers of Radiohead songs. More of that in a second.

As I was looking through live videos fans have posted it became clear where his music taste lies and, like a lifelong dedicated Buddhist, it was only a matter of time before he got to Nirvana.

Maybe this isn't his best showpiece. At exactly 1'12", he reveals his otherwise-unspoken love for British light entertainment circa 1986.



Now I think about it, he's not the first person to cover Nirvana on the piano.

Most of the world wouldn't have heard Cornflake Girl if it wasn't for the novelty of Tori Amos surfing the wave of Cobain-love in the early nineties. And where would we be if that hadn't have happened? Erm... I guess we wouldn't have heard Cornflake Girl.

(you'll notice there's only one person in the crowd here who is interested in Tori's genre-crossing kookiness. And it takes him just slightly too long to work out what's going on...)



I know you are a keen pianist, Daniel, so before you dash off to build up a cannon of heavy rock on piano and upset that woman across from your kitchen window, may I suggest you start here:



Dear James,

Welcome back, again. I was going to post various clips of Les Dawson only last week, but couldn't think of any justification other than "here's some Les Dawson clips". Not wordy enough for me. Our friend Aine once told me that it took a special talent to play the piano like Les, shortly before she saw me play for the first time.

I'm taking it you haven't heard of Brad Mehldau, who sees Christopher O'Really and raises him a hundred pounds. That's because he's got a royal flush, and he knows O'Really has only got a two-pair.



He also does various Nick Drake covers. I think he's playing Buenos Aires soon. I bet he's already been and gone and I missed it again.

Midnight Train to Georgia

Dear James,

Here's some youtube fun that Jude and the Curtain Darlings found, featuring Ben Stiller doing his world-renowned "Foulger-face" and Jack Black spoiling it by overacting, the unfunny camera-hogger. Downey Jr looks like he's been begrudgingly dragged along to make up the numbers. The marvellous original's here. We saw a Jack Black film the other day, Margot at the Wedding. It was rubbish, even though Nicole Kidman was in it. I'm going to have to stop Josefina from choosing the DVDs.

This song was the subject of the first joke I ever told that made my dad laugh. I phoned him on my 22nd birthday, after my last exam, from the phone box upstairs from Bar One. Tha cions ran out and I said "There go the pips, on the Midnight Train to Georgia". Not one of my best, I know, in fact I copied it from Viz. But I knew then that if I could make my dad laugh, a fine career in comedy would one day await me. It's still awaiting me, I just haven't got round to it.

I like to tell people that Midnight Train to Georgia was number one in the UK on the day I was born. I like to tell them that, because it's not true. I used to think it was number one the week before I was born, but that's bollocks as it was US number one in November 1973. No, number one on the day I was born was by far the worst song of the 1970s: No Charge, by JJ Barrie. It's not even a song. It's a dispassionate list of fees.



The song was later covered by Billy Connoly as "No Chance", because only comedy songs and cover versions were allowed in the 1976 charts. A week later, JJ Barrie's turd had been knocked off the top of the pops by an equally awful song, by the Wurzels. For some reason, Hairy Cornflake does a pirate impersonation to introduce the song.



All 1976 UK number ones here.

Bus Stop

Dear James,

Today I spent 10 hours riding the buses of Buenos Aires and then writing about it. You can read all about it at my marvellously shamelessly plugged blog, danieltunnard.blogspot.com. In fact I posted 14 times on that blog in the last week. My prolificacy! It's back. How I missed it.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Concepcion with the in-laws, reading the entertainment section from a 4-month old copy of the La Nacion newspaper. I was quite bored. In it, there was a big feature on a grey-bearded sports journalist off the telly proclaiming his love for The Hollies and showing off his dated vinyl collection. A very odd article, I thought. The Hollies are unheard of over here and, more to the point, were always shite. The only redeaming part of the article was that the chap in question once declared on air that the Rolling Stones, idolised by any self-respecting Argentinian, weren't really up to much. He got lots of threatening e-mails afterwards. He also claimed that the Hollies were never as big as other 60s bands because they were from Manchester instead of Liverpool, a claim I often like to pass off in my own defence.

Then today I was reading my weekly World Wide Words newsletter and it had a piece on beghilos, a term for the geeky student practice enjoyed by you and me in the 1980s (and probably 1990s in your case) of spelling out words on an upside-down calculator. It mentioned that The Hollies 1979 album was called 5317704, which upside-down spells Hollies. Although 5318008 would clearly have been a far funnier title.

Baby I love You

Dear James,

So, our friend Rhian has had a baby girl called Ella, our friend Cathy has just had a baby girl called Esther, what are the chances of Ellen having a baby girl called Elizabeth? I've opened a book if you'd care to place your bets. Although being the father you should probably be disqualified from such book-making practices. Lovely video from Aretha too. She says hello and all the best.

Snowblind

Dear James,

This news just in: Ozzy Oscbourne is currently stranded in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego. There's a been a spot of snow and he can't fly out. It's quite a nostalgia trip for Ozzy, as he hasn't been surrounded by this much white stuff since the late 80s.

Ba-da-bum.

Mean Mr Mustard

Dear James,

Two Sundays ago, I decided to reorganise all my records by order of release. Man has yet to find a worse way to waste four and half hours. It did at least refresh my memory on this 1978 album. My record collection is full-to-brimming with cheap tat I picked up for 2 pesos while scouring various dusty parks and second hand shops in Buenos Aires (I have an alarmingly complete Cat Stevens and Carpenters collection) and no album is more indicative of this misspent time and money than the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Soundtrack.

This film, loosely-based on an off-broadway musical, tells the story of The Beatles, looking suspiciously like The Bee Gees, battling against the music industry and trying to stop people from stealing their instruments. Back in the 70s there was much demand for films about bearded men hanging on to their no-claims bonuses.

The album, as you might expect from the above video, is unrepentant shite. There are a couple of half-decent performances: Aerosmith manage a passable cover of "Come Together", while Earth, Wind and Fire flogged a million copies of their "Got To Get You Into My Life".



My friend Brandon Therun tells me that Rolling Stone magazine voted the album the worst album of all time. Rolling Stone evidently didn't get stoned and watch the movie before passing such judgement. And anyway, Rolling Stone's list of the best 100 songs of all time doesn't feature a single solitary Queen song, so they're stupid.

You'd think that one Beatles rip-off film would be enough for one decade, but you´d be wrong. SPLHCB came only two years after All This and World War Two. While having less emphasis on instrument theft and more stress on planes and bombs and stuff, ATAWWT had an even odder hotchpotch of artistes and Beatles songs: Keith Moon making When I'm 64 worse than you could ever have imagined it; Status Quo doing a Disney-flavoured version of Getting Better (interesting that Kaiser Chiefs later covered the same song); and, you'll like this, Leo Sayer doing a throat-busting version of "I Am The Walrus".

Silence is Golden

Dear James,

You'll remember many years ago when we were young I made the crass error of living in Brussels for five months. I didn't have any music while there, so when I wasn't pretending to read Jean-Paul Sartre I listened to Belgian radio, particularly an evening radio show called "Le Vieil Méchin", which I think means "The Old Devil" but may actually mean "The Vile Messin". Most of what they played was old tat from the 60s and 70s, with a particular fondness for this Tremeloes hit, number one for 3 weeks in May 1967. I like to think that my over-posting of songs from the 60s and 70s can be traced back to Le Vieil Méchin, but the same station had Baader Meinhof's Mogadishu on daily rotation, so I'm probably just making excuses.

The song was written by Bob Gaudio, one of the Four Seasons (I think he was Autumn) and producer Bob Crewe, who as producer of the Four Seasons was probably nicknamed Vivaldi. Or God. They were responsible for similarly ridiculous falsetto on "Big Girls Don't Cry", wrote the Walker Brothers' "The Sun Ain't Gonna Cry Anymore" and also wrote one of my favourite wedding songs ever, "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You".



Sadly for Frankie Valli, that song is best known for Andy Williams' rendition, meaning that the song most people associate with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons is the comparatively rubbish "Oh What A Night". It turns out that old Frankie gets around more than the clap: it was his Beggín that those advertising people sampled to sell gym slips, he sang lead vocals on the theme from Grease and also released a somewhat jaunty version of The Beatles' "A Day in the Life" for the 1976 "ephemeral documentary", All This and World War II . More of which later. Or earlier, if you're reading this blog from top to bottom in traditional style.

And another thing: do you know how Bob Gaudio and Frankie Valli met? Joe Pesci introduced them.

Happy Birthday (song)!

Dear James,

Here's a more tender happy birthday song you, courtesy of Mr. Bird. I've been listening to a lot of Bird recently. I downloaded two of his albums over a year ago so it was round about time to start listening to them. I like to let these albums settle and mature a bit before opening.

As you'll now, in recreational mathematics 33 is the smallest odd repdigit which is not a prime. What is this recreational mathematics? Is it less hard maths that people like you do in your free time?

I went to a birthday party last night and am going to another tonight. I don't know whether it's age or a desire to copy Lary David in as many aspects of my life as possible, but I'm going increasingly bored of the happy birthday song. It's become depressing. Can we not establish some kind of agreement where we tell our friends which song we'd like to have sung at our birthdays? Instead of having the Coldplay-equivalent of birthdayness sung at you every year. I know what my birthday song would be, if only to add Queen to the list of 18 entries in the column of tags to your right.

Eloise

Dear James,

A few months ago I was trying to work out the name of this song in my head that went "Emaline I think you're swell and you really give me hell". Couldn't find a sausage. I'd got the lyrics all mixed up into a twisted version of a Ben Folds Five number. Then while looking for number ones of 1969, like you do, I came across this toppermost of the poppermost hit from January that year.

A typical Leeds lad, in 1978 Barry Ryan married Her Highness Tunku (Princess) Miriam binti al-Marhum Sultan Sir Ibrahim, the daughter of the Sultan of Johor. It didn't last.



And here's Ben Folds Five getting an unlikely "Shouts Out" during a CNN finance program.

Something in the Air

Dear James,

As you'll know, today is the 40th anniversary of the moon landings, a fact we are reminded of every year here because it's also Friends' Day, the stupidest celebration known to man, where you spend the day phoning and texting your friends to wish them a happy day, and then meet up with them in the evening for pizza. Surely this is what friends do every day? Anyway, here's a pop quiz question for you: who was number one at the time of the moon landings? As you've probably already guessed, it was The Who's roadie (he also wrote this number) and his short-lived beat combo Thunderclap Newman with an aptly named song.

So what was number one in the USA on the same day? Well as coincidence would have it, it was another aptly named song, Exordium and Terminus by Zager and Evans. You'll know it as In The Year 2525. I don't pretend to know it as Exordium and Terminus, I'm just pretending I do.



Zager and Evans have the dubious honour of being the only band to have a number one debut single on both sides of the Atlantic and then never ever chart again.

The meaningful moon-landing title hits continued that summer, with Creedence Clearwater Revival's Bad Moon Rising. You'll remember me telling you back in March during the live blog how Creedence are one of the most popular US bands in Argentina, while in the UK we only know them for their contribution to An American Werewolf In London.

Monkey Business

Dear James,

What's this funk,
That you call junk?
To me it's just monkey business.

Back in the summer of 92, the cool metal kids who wouldn't let me join their gang were listening to something heavy which I didn't recognise. This came as a shock. I'd spent the previous two years watching my Raw Power videos over and over again to become the ultimate metal geek.
"Who is this?" I cried over the wanky guitar solo.
"Skid Row", said one of the metal boys.
"Damn!" I thought.

You see, Skid Row didn't used to be like this. They used to be hair metal and sing songs about Ricky, the lost kid acting tough on the streets. My friend Gary who listened to Bon Jovi and Def Leppard, listened to them, which made them officially crap and for girls only. Then Sebastian Bach (real name Sebastian Berk) got into Pantera and they went heavy. It was OK to like them, even though Sebastian Bach had luscious long hair and looked like a girl.

We'll have more on Sebastian Berk later, as his Wikipedia page is ripe for piss-taking, but for now I'll tell you about my bass guitar idol between the summer of 92 and the autumn of 92, Rachel Bolan (real name James Southworth), who wrote this song with Dave "The Snake" Sabo (real name David "Michael" Sabo). The thing I idolised most in MRs. Bolan was his nose chain, which went all the way from his nose piercing to his pierced ear (see here). I tried to pull off the look myself, but those chains are really heavy. Plus, you can get away with that look in certain circles in Los Angeles, but you go out with that in in your nose in Stockport on a Friday night and there's no way you go home with it.

Monkey Business has some of the best rock lyrics ever, such as "Kangeroo lady with her bourbon in her pouch, can't afford the rental on her bamboo couch". Eh? Who rents a bamboo sofa? "Little kiddies playing dollies in the New York rain, thinking Bowie's just a knife". That one had me when I was 16. What's a Bowie knife? how could anyone not have heard of David Bowie? The song also includes two of my favourite rock guitar moments: At 0:59 ("widdly widdly phrooom!") and at 2:01 ("phroom -kjnk, kjnk, kjnk!").

But Monkey Business wasn't the song the cool boys were listening to. No, I got into Skid Row for the same reason I got into Guns N Roses through "It's So Easy": They said "fuck" in a song. In fact, in "Get The Fuck Out", they said it loads. It was great.

Colorado Beetle

Dear James,

Here's popular beat combo The Scroops with their first interweb appearance, and it's an oldie and a goodie. Some boat people make an impromptu appearance at the end, which is nice.

Remember when the Bluetones were the coolest thing around? Granted this was a very brief period between about October 1994 and November 1994, and yet I still managed to see them five times. If ever there was a sign of their declining cool, it's the fact that this blog has taken nine months to mention them. By the summer of 96, they were so uncool that when they appeared on the same Jules Holland show with ZZ Top, it was the weirdo beardos on the cover of NME the following week.

Lick My Love Pump

Here's a find: Keith Richards playing a nice piano piece on the piano there. Very nice, but can't help but think of another piano piece associated with another great rock guitarist of our time.

Piano Pickers

Dear James,

A splodge of good taste for you from staunch heterosexualist and Mr. Showmanship himself, Wladziu Valentino Liberace. I have so many keyboards in my flat, it's starting to look a little like old Wlad's place. I had a bubble bath the other day as well. Very relaxing. I'll let you know when I start parking a Rolls in the kitchen.

Having previously been portrayed by Bugs Buggy, Liberace will be played by Michael Douglas in a 2010 film directed by Steven Soderbergh. No, really.

As a child, Liberace suffered "from the taunts of neighborhood children who mocked his avoidance of sports and his fondness for the piano". A bit like Richard Carpenter, then. (Embedding disabled, but don't miss the video).

What We Did Wrong

Dear James,

In my eternal search for a video of Duels' "What We Did Wrong" (I'm beginning to think they never made one) I found this review at Said the Gramaphone:

"Three images:
1. David Bowie hitting a row of tee-balls out of the park. One, two, three, four, five, six home runs, no outs.



2. Matthew Friedberger's piano, finally fixed, rushing downstream, him laughing from inside.



3. The Harlem Shakes, wrapped in a Beatles flag, jumping off a ten-storey building into a waiting hammock.



Duels are loud, without being compensatory, regular without being uninteresting. This should be a "hit". As in, it should hit you."

System Addict

Dear James,

So my previous post got me thinking: "What ever happened to Five Star?" Well, not much as it happens. They broke up, had some babies, moved to LA and are reported to be "working on solo projects", which may be a euphemism for wanking a lot but probably isn't, considering the squeaky-clean image of Romford's finest. Not one of them went on to live in a bubble with a chimpanzee, form a relationship with Bobby Brown based around the magic of crack cocaine, shoot their faces off with a shotgun or shave their heads in a high-profile LA boutique. Very dull. In fact, the most scandalous event in their existence came about on children's television, one Saturday morning in April 1989. Which means that on a TV-presenter scale of scandal, they're a "Sarah Greene".

Five Star Day

Dear James,

One of the many joys of Pandora.com before it got taken away from non-US users was finding bands no one had ever heard of and which you never then heard of again in any media. Such is the case with Aqueduct, whose Wikipedia page reads like it was written by David Terry himself, and the band is so obscure that Wikipedia hasn't bothered to look into it. I downloaded their "I Sold Gold" album nearly three years ago and I haven't heard them mentioned by anyone else anywhere. They'd be my favourite band ever if it wasn't for the fact that the album isn't all that great shakes, and I've spent the last three years listening to my other big pandora find, Dr. Dog, over and over again.

As a Wilko fan you'll know that all average albums by average American indie bands have one great song. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has Jesus, etc. and I Sold Gold has Five Star Day. I worked out how to play it on the piano the other day, and it's really easy, to the extent that I've now completely gone off the song and have nothing to say about. Instead I'll tell you about the film "Five Star Day", about a man who sets out to disprove astrology, like you do, by getting together with three people born at the same hospital and on the same night as him. It's a promising premise, but the execution is poor and the trailer looks like a cheese-fest made by a first-year film student.

Interestingly, the first line of Aqueduct's "Five Star Day" is

I don't believe in astrology
but you can read me your horoscope
I like to hear your voice.

which as far as first lines go is write up there with Heroes and Villains.

Fear's a Man's Best Friend

Dear James,

As I just mentioned to you elsewhere (I just make these allusions about enigmatic private conversations here so we can sell our private correspondence in a couple of years to the highest bidder), after posting the comment in the Guardian website for the post below, we got 160 readers in a day. As opposed to the usual 6. However, my post there has now been removed by the moderator. Does this make me a spammer? Even though it was an ironic post about spamming? Oh well.

That was the second bit of good news today. The first was that in my scriptwriting course, the teacher and script writer Jorge Maestro (think Carla Lane, only without Bread. And an Argentinian man instead of a Liverpudlian woman, clearly) read out my script idea, which was an adaptation for TV of that there novel I was meant to be writing. I was very excited and very embarrassed all at once. It was like that moment with my mum when I was ten I told you about, only far less scarring. And more exciting.

So, I didn't have a title for this future award-winning sitcom, but I came out of the class, turned on my i-pod and Duels' "What We Did Wrong" was the first song that came on, and I thought "Hello, there's a name for a sitcom, and it's also the song I most associate with my divorce, and it would make a great theme tune". Sadly, there's no video of the song available on the web. The second song on the i-pod was John Cale's "Fear's a Man's Best Friend", so I'm going to call the sitcom that instead.

Here's Mr. Cale doing his best at butchering a fine tune, in that timeless former-Velvet-Undergournd-member style. There's a better version, but it cuts out half way.

Face In

Dutch Uncles - 'Face In' Music Video from RedLettuceCamera on Vimeo.

Dear James,

Here's a thing. I'm a regular reader of Charlie Brooker's column in the Guardian, mostly so that I can get some idea as to what I'll be like in 5 years' time if I don't cheer the fuck up or get married or both. From what I can gather, the 38-year old me is a still a grumpy twat, but at least he's funny and has got a job being funny for the Guardian and other people. Although presumably he also has the wherewithal to get grumpy twat writing jobs, something I've yet to master.

In this week's column he mentions how someone pointed out to him that his doppelganger appears in the Dutch Uncles video above, at 1:05. He does as well. And the song is mysteriously called "Face In". Now, I may be given to willy-nilly conspiracies, but do you think this band thought "let's find a doppelganger of a minor media figure, stick his "face in" our video and watch the whole viral thing kick in and take us to the toppermost of the poppermost"? I think it's a reasonable theory. And it's worked too, because I've now posted this and we made Little Boots famous, so, you know.

And while I'm here, I should direct you to another hay-fever sufferer who made me laugh today. Remember, it's all in the mind.

Canción de Alicia en el país

Dear James,

I'm back. You'll say I only spoke to you 2 hours ago, but for the purposes of the blog I've been away over a week, pretending to be working.

You may remember my previous posts about Charly Garcia and Sui Generis. Well, after they'd broke up he formed Seru Giran. This song is particularly interesting, I'm told by people who didn't get all their knowledge about Charly Garcia from a cursory glance at Wikipedia, because it was written in the early 80s when people like Charly couldn't get anything past the censors. Although if I was a censor, I probably wouldn't let these lyrics past either.

The innocent are guilty says his lordship,
the king of Spades.
Don't tell what you saw behind the looking glass
you will have no power, lawyers or witnesses.

The music press liked Charly's new direction with Seru Giran, but the fans longed for the good days of twee songs around a piano and tin-flute. I'm with the fans on this one.

Misunderstood

Dear Daniel,

Those celestial-types who make the decisions about who lives, who dies and when they go have been particularly active in the world of music recently. Two which were not widely reported last week in the rush to fill airtime/columns with Michael Jackson tributes were the deaths of Jay Bennett and Sky Saxon.

I don't think the former features on the above version of the first track of Wilco's Being There, but he is on this one:



You'll notice that version is a tribute to Jay Bennett although unfortunately his input has reduced it to derivate, Gram Parson-esque, shit-kicking yeeha country. But suffice to say he was involved in the second and third Wilco albums and that should be enough.

Sky Saxon had one of the best names in pop.



This next one is my favourite song by The Seeds. Another sharp Sky suit. Poor lip synching. Good of the bloke from Steptoe and Son to step in on keyboards at the last moment, despite clearly never having seen a keyboard before...



Dear James,

Did you get into The Seeds off a Nuggets collection? They sound like the kind of band you get on a Nuggets collection. As for Wilko, am I the only person who likes them when they play Red Eyed and Blue but then instantly goes off them when they play 6-minute dullness? Surely not.

Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy

Dear James,

Quick question for you. If you were to form a Queen tribute band, would you call said band "Bigot". I've been trying to work out all afternoon why these people thought this would be a good idea. "Bigote" is Spanish for "moustache", but the Freddie-impersonator doesn't have one, so that doesn't make much sense. Bigot asked me to be their Facebook friend. I told them I already had one Queen-tribute Facebook friend, but accepted their invitation all the same. We people have to stick together.

I once met Pablo Padín, the Freddie of Dios Salve La Reina. I told him if he wanted I could give him some classes to improve his pronunciation. He gave me a look which many would interpret as the "Who the fuck are you?" look. But he still gave me his autograph. I read it. It said "Pablo Padín". That really shattered my illusions.



Dear Daniel,

Have a scan down the list of acts featured on this blog. 17! 17! I'm about ready to propose a moratorium on all things Queen.

Dear James,

How very dare you? I haven't posted 17 Queen videos, we've just mentioned them in the general course of things because when you think about it, all music comes back to Queen one way or another. And you've mentioned Eric Clapton four times, which is far worse.

Paradise City

Dear James,

I had one of those "where did all that time go?" moments at work the other day. I was doing the subtitles for episode one upstairs, where our remaining designers work while listening to Radio Kabul, a fine radio station if ever I heard one. I find this with designers, being able to work with music on. I find it very distracting. Even now I'm writing this while listening to Guns N Roses and I can't hear myself think. Anyway, there we were when this song came on and I remembered when it came out for the second time (the first release failed to chart) in 1989, kicking off my switch from Queen-fidelity to dabbling in metal. I realised that this made it the first time I was aware of music in the big wide world out there (apart from Queen, which was always very much a private thing) and that this had happened a full 20 years ago. Until that moment I had considered "Paradise City" as the start of "modern" in my record collection, as opposed to the "old" stuff. It turns out that there are probably a billion or two young whipper-snappers on this planet who categorically categorise this song among the old, like when you'd listen to Dave Lee Travis with your mum on a Sunday morning in the late 80s and hear ELO songs from what appeared to be a bygone era but turned out to be nothing earlier than 1979.

So then I got to thinking that from Paradise City up to 1999 I could quite easily give a visitor to planet Earth (or my children, whichever comes first) a full and frank overview of the past decade in music: big-hair rock, Madchester, shoe-gazing, grunge, Metallica, Britpop, 60s, 70s and 80s revivals, Take That, Spice Girls, the tragedy of Coldplay and the fourth re-release of John Lennon's Imagine. But if my imaginary children or this imaginary spaceman overprioritising pop culture in his bid for world dominance were to say to me: "Tell us about the music of the period between 2000 and 2009, we're not altogether happy with the phrase "the noughties" but haven't been able to come up with a better alternative", I'd smile at them blankly and hope they'd think I'd gone senile rather than thinking I didn't really know much about anything. And then they'd go off and get into all kinds of music from the period between 2000 and 2009 which I knew nothing about because I'd spent the whole decade listening to Guns n Roses and ELO and reminiscing about Dave Lee Travis.

Do you ever have thoughts like these? Or do you think like Taasha of The Audreys:

"A person quizzed me a few days ago about Paradise City and kept referring to the Axl Rose song, so I told him to imagine it for the women," Taasha offers. "Axl's singing that the grass is green and the girls are pretty with his misogynist view, so what was it like for the women in that city? Well it was probably pretty fucked. I really love people's interpretations of our songs and they're often more interesting than our own."

Incidentally, Slash's suggestion for the second line of Paradise City was "Where the girls are fat and they've got big titties". This was tragically vetoed by the rest of the band.

Dear Daniel,

It explains why Velvet Revolver didn't catch on in quite the same way as G'n'f'n'R.

Do you think your lack of naughtie-knowledge if down to your interest drifting away from modern stuff or it is that you are living in a different culture to the musical one you reference from 60s - 2000?

A lot of what you speak about it down to a shared frame of reference in one country. A rough 2000s from here looks, on guitar, like The Strokes through The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, The Killers while at the same time pop was doing Destinys Child, J-Lo, through Pink, Busted, McFly, the rise of the Black Eyed Peas and underground was turning the internet into a modern socialist revolution.

But in America, the whole guitar scene listed above is largely unknown and is replaced with Eminem and Emo. Pop's much the same, but it's all about marketing by multinationals so that's unsurprising.

Anyway, it's not like you've never heard of these acts. What are you talking about?

Dear James,

Yeah but no but, I've heard of them but they haven't formed any kind of soundtrack to my life in the last ten years, and due to my refusal to listen to much radio I've been making my own ignorantly oblivious soundtrack. Right here, on this blog.

Man in the Mirror

Dear James,

Bloody hell! The news sources in Argentina can rarely be trusted, but I think their ¨Michael Jackson might have died¨thing might be correct. And to think we were just talking about cardiac arrests, two posts below, eh?

Mine and my dad's favourite MJ song has to be the eighth single to be released off the Bad album. Me and my sisters had received the Bad album from Great Auntie Susan, who used to send us a cheque for 2 quid every Christmas. We put out heads together and got this. Then we started taking it on access days with Dad. Dad enjoyed Man in the Mirror and could regularly be spotted singing along in his inimitable tone-deaf way, clearly taking in Jackson's wise lyrics and starting to look at that ¨Man in the Mirror¨. Or ¨Dad¨, as we used to call him. Time passed and the Bad cassette seemed to take up residence in Dad´s Lada Combi. Slowly, the awful truth began to dawn: Dad had nicked our tape. So much for Man in the Mirror.

Dear Daniel,



He was good, wasn't he? But let's be honest - only until the end of the 80s. Still - what a showman. I spoke to somebody who saw him play in Roundhay Park in 1988. The buildup was massive. Silence. The lights went up and he was propelled up through the stage, head facing right. Crowd went wild. He stood there for ten minutes. Crown continued to go wild throughout. After the ten minutes, he jerked his head to the right. The crowd went wild. For ten minutes. Then he started the show.

True or not, it totally believable and that is the mark of the man.

Crikey. The king is dead. To quote David Quantick, "Now, Jermaine is King."

Dear James,

I had no idea that my dad played in Roundhay Park. Was it rugby? I disagree that he was only good up to the end of the 80s; he had a purple patch in the late 90s and he's really perked up since his retirement and gave me a hundred quid for my birthday. Unless you're still talking about Michael Jackson.

Bark at the whole of the moon

Dear James,

If Mike Scott of The Waterboys had come to your school assembly in the late 80s, would your fellow pupils have reacted in such a friendly manner? I can't help but feel that if Mr. Scott had come to Hazel Grove High School and played a jolly tune on the piano, the students would not have reacted so enthusiastically. In fact, I don't think my school had a piano. And don't be fooled by their pretty website. In our day, we didn't even have those claret sweaters for uniforms. They were later imposed by an Aston Villa-supporting headmaster.

Yesterday when I was supposed to be working I discovered something very interesting. To begin with, some etymology for you, courtesy of Mr. Quinion. Did you enjoy that? Good. By now you should be aware that there's a leap year every four years, but not in years ending in 00 (1700, 1800, 1900), unless it's divisible by 400 (2000) in which case it's a leap year, and thus we keep all the seasons in step. This process, as you'll know being a scientist, is called metemptosis.

However, what happens if we want to add a date to the calendar to keep it in step with the moon? This is called proemptosis, one of which we won't be needing until 4200, but Quinion shirks out of explaining what this is all about. However, the 1892 London Encyclopaedia explains all in layman's terms:

METEMPTOSIS, from ¡ura, after, and iriirriD, I fall, a term in chronology, expressing the solar equation necessary to prevent the new moon from happening a day too late ; by which it stands contradistinguished from Proemptosis, which signifies the lunar equation necessary to prevent the new moon from happening too soon. The new moon's running a little backwards, that is, coming a day too soon at the end of 312 years and a half; by the proemptosis, a day is added every 300 years, and another every 2400 years : on the other hand, by the metemptosis, a bissextile is suppressed each 134 years; that is, three times in 400 years. These alterations are never made but at the end of each century ; that period rendering the practice of the calendar easy. There are three rules for making this addition or suppression of the bissextile day, and for changing the index of the epacts. 1. When there is a metemptosis without a proemptosis, the next following, or lower index, must be taken. 2. When there is a proemptosis without a metemptosis, the next preceding or superior index is to be taken. 3. When there are both a metemptosis and a proemptosis, or when there is neither the one nor the other, the same index is preferred. Thjs, in 1600, we had D : in 1700, by reason of the metemptosis, С was taken : in 1800 there were both a proemptosis and metemptosis ; so the same index was retained. In 1900 there will be a metemptosis again, when B will be taken; whicli will be preserved in 2000, because there will then be neither the one nor the other. This is as far as we need to compute for it : but Clavius has calculated a cycle of 301,800 years ; at the end of which period the same indices return in the same order.

All of which is no news to Ozzy Osbourne.



Dear Daniel,

During our time indindustry, our marketing woman at the label was called Claire Moon. During the video shoot for Animal, in between some shot or other, a bass-playing friend of mine started talking about the "hole of the Moon".

We got dropped soon afterwards...

Tarred and Feathered

Dear Daniel,

News today of the Cardiacs lead singer Tim Smith, who had a cardiac arrest almost exactly a year ago. The band has been going as long as you and I have been alive, but then ceased activities on that date and have been quiet ever since. Then,this.

To be frank, I've always found it difficult to get past the dishevelled-clown makeup (latterly inspiring Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, possibly?) and the pseudo-cryptic lyrics to actually get to the songs. And when I get to the songs.. erm, my god. It's a certain breed of genius, definitely. In the world of awkwardness I prefer Devo, but I have a feeling that makes me a lightweight.

A friend was adamant I would like them, even asking whether parts of the first Duels album were inspired by them. Not so - I'm with the reviewers who say one Cardiacs song has more ideas in it than some bands have in their entire career (do you see what I'm saying here?). I haven't counted, but I'll wager that Tarred and Feathered and this one, R.E.S., contain more mini-songs between them than there are tracks on the two Duels albums...



Honorable mention for the friend: one Chris Catalyst who is a multi-talented, indefatigable force of nature himself. He's currently to be found fronting Eureka Machines, anywhere and everywhere:



... when he's not featuring on MTV's cribs... I think.

Dear James,

Is it just me, or do The Cardiacs look and sound like Chris Evans trying to be funny?

At Last

Dear Daniel,

At last it is so very very sunny here. Yesterday I walked to the shops and back and as I put my key into the door, I could feel the sweat on my back and at the sides of my nose and I was reminded of the humidity in Buenos Aires and how I would feel the same way this March when I arrived back to your apartment from a half day spent walking around the city.

I remember one such walk through the park near Plaza Italia when I made my way along Ave Dorrego back to the Palermo tube and the Cardigans album Life popped onto the iPod. I hadn't heard it in years and I had forgotten what a great soundtrack it is to sunshine. On many occasions during that super spring/summer of 1996, I would wake up hearing Rise and Shine shimmering from somewhere beyond the ceiling of my room.

I loved Nina Persson's voice. And here we are in 2009 and I'm walking in the sunshine and The Do come on the iPod and it makes me feel the same way. From time to time, Olivia B. Marilahti's vocals crackle down my spine, sounding a bit like a yawning dolphin, and breaking my heart in the heat.

Dear James,

It amuses me how people get so excited about heat in England. I suppose it's like people here getting excited about snow. It only snows every 70 years, so that's about right.

Good to see a surprise appearance from Jeff Lynne there at 3.19, and good to see a French band that sounds like a Swedish band. The theme of the video appears to be the search for one's "half-orange", a particularly annoying Spanish phrase that the French seem to be familiar with. What if you're a half-apple and you find your half-orange? Do you go on searching until you give up until you meet a half-banana, settle down and make a limited fruit salad?

Video Killed the Radio Star

Dear James,

Well this has been a very informative afternoon. After entertaining my neighbours to a loud rendition yesterday of one of my favourite songs off mother's Island Collection and the answer to a thousand pop quiz questions (as long as all 1,000 questions are "What was the first video to be shown on MTV?") I got to thinking "Whatever happened to that funny chap with the glasses?" Turns out, speccy here is Trevor Horn, the world famous producer! How did so much time pass without my knowing that little morsel of pop anorakia? Am I ignorant after all? Here's a whole load of stuff I never knew:

1. Trevor Horn is English, not American. How did they sneak that one past me?
2. Trevor Horn leant Bob Geldof his studio to record the "Do They Know It's Christmas?" single, and produced the b-side, which was the same song recorded by all the people who didn't make it to the first recording.
3. Trevor Horn was the man behind The Art of Noise.



4. He was also responsible for Grace Jones' Slave to the Rhythm, which was originally intended for Frankie Goes to Hollywood. No, really.
5. Grace Jones is still alive. And touring.
6. His wife's been in a coma since 2006.
17. He's the man resposible for TaTu.
444. Video Killed the Radio Star was the 444th UK number one.
There can be only 1. The video for VKTRS was directed by Russell Mulcahy, of Highlander Fame. He directed this video too. Feel the talent.

Piano Man

Dear James,

Here's two new discoveries:
1, Type "Old Grey Whistle Test" into youtube and admire the goodies it showers upon you;
2, Billy Joel with a moustache. Any chance we can do an occasional series of performers we don't usually associate with moustaches who at some stage had a moustache? I'm sure you can find one of Phil Collins at the very least. I looked for one of Elton John, but came home empty-upperlipped.

You're a musician James - is it harder to play a harmonica and a piano, or a harmonica and a guitar? I'm tempted to phrase the question as "Is it easier to do a Billy Joel tribute act, or a Bob Dylan tribute act?" In which case, I think I've answered my own question. Speaking of tribute acts, we saw the Will Ferrell film Stepbrothers the other day which includes a lengthy Billy Joel joke. It's not tremendously funny, but then neither is the film, so in context it's tremendously funny. Not a patch on Blades of Glory, of course, but then what is?

Other Billy Joel songs off the Piano Man album I found are Travelin Prayer, possibly the silliest song to ever start an album (and that's coming from a Queen fan), and a wonderfully overfast rendition of Ain't No Crime, one of my favourite Joel songs, if only because he says it's OK to go out and get drunk. In 1973.



Those seeking further Joel-based entertainment might like to check out his 1982 nightschool. I'm going to watch it now, but only because I've already read this superb bilingual blog about life in Buenos Aires. Our 95 readers (!) would be well advised to head there first. There's photos and stuff.