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.

I seen Beyonce at Burger King

Dear James,

Another video recommended by my former colleague and, dare I say it, butler, Corbi, who got fired last week from where I work and has lots of time on his hands for this kind of thing. Maybe we should get him to be our guest blogger? Everyone else I've asked has politely ignored me.

As you can see, the song is quite a departure from my usual ELO-fuelled posts. I can't help but fear that in reaching out to a new audience I might betray our faithful followers (87 people). But maybe not.

Prior to watching that, I watched this Amanda Lepore video. We're very open-minded today, and we didn't even go to yoga! She's a good-looking girl and no mistake, but perhaps needs to take it easy with the make-up, show off her natural beauty.



Dear Daniel,

The first video reminds me of my friend Jenni, who through a great chunk on the 90s would dine out on a similar story to our friend Cazwell. But instead of seeing Beyonce at Burger King, she once served Pato Banton at the PicknMix.

I've never seen Another Gay Movie, or Another Gay Sequel, but from the covers alone I'm sure they both take a sensitive and enlightened approach to what it is to be young and gay in modern middle America. They're probably effectively remakes of My Beautiful Launderette...

Telephone Line

Dear James,

For every one of your cool-former-NME-reader posts, I post ELO. Besides, Wire were just an ELO rip-off. I was listening to this beauty on my way home and remembered this fact: All of ELO's videos from 1973 to 1980 were recorded in the same studio and on the same day, March 14th, 1973. For each video, ELO changed their clothes and facial hair in accordance with what they imagined would be the style over the coming year. Naturally, the songs were composed according to their predictions of the musical styles to come. The plan worked up to and including the 1979 album Discovery (or "Disco? Very!" as their fans call it), which made them the biggest selling act in the UK in 1979. Then it all went very wrong in 1981, for which ELO, having wrongly predicted that aliens would have invaded the planet and banned cellos, had recorded a synth-heavy, sci-fi album. The alien invasion failed to materialise and ELO went into eternal decline.

However, Jeff Lynne had one clever ace up his sleeve. The day after ELO recorded all their videos in one day, Jeff Lynne got pissed with his friends Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Roy Orbison, oh, and Tom Petty, I always forget him, and drunkenly tossed off a load of ironic 60s pastiches. Lynne then released the recordings in 1988, against the wishes of Harrison, Dylan, et al, and called it the Travelling Wilburys. True story.

I'm off to play snooker.

Dear Daniel,

Not sure what you're getting at with the NME-reader thing but it leads me to thinking that, over various years, I read Select, Mojo, Q, Melody Maker, Smash Hits and Look In and I'm sure Wire were mentioned in at least 4 of them. I remember fondly the Look In Chairs Missing pullout section with lyrics: "The lives of lambs, the shepherd cries / An afterlife for a silverfish / Eternal dust less ticklish."

I'm happy for you to post ELO. At least it's not Anthrax. I love the Disco?Very! thing. You bought me Discovery on vinyl at the same time as Atomic Kitten's Be With You was in the charts. I really and truly wish pop writers would come up with original music which is both modern and timeless, stuff like this (I hope). More often than not, however, they're nicking stuff from old records. I remember being very disappointed that Be With You wasn't an original piece of music, but not as disappointed as I was when I found out that the Crazy in Love music was not original.

Dear James,

I was looking for Los Clasiqueros' cumbia cover of Las Train to London when I found this funny guy, trying to fit the literal Spanish translation over the original song. I giggled.



Here are those Clasiqueros:

Xanadu

Dear James,

Life was good for Olivia Newton John in 1980. The men wore nice v-neck sweaters and ties, and the ladies wore long skirts and generous blouses. Everyone owned a pair of roller skates, and they weren't afraid to use them. Even the ladies who didn't own a pair of roller skates knew they could get a ride somehow. Brian May had a big cocktail umbrella and was slowly mastering the art of doing the splits. Roller skates were so cool, even the Evel Kineval was changing his act. And Olivia knew that no matter how much you dressed it up with dancing boys and a lady's voice, you could tell that this was an ELO song a mile off.

And Jeff Lynne had to live with the fact that, despite having written gems like Mr. Blue Sky, The Diary of Horace Wimp and Last Train to London, THIS would prove to be ELO's only UK number one.

I'm off to Misconception of the Uruguay for the weekend, or as I like to call it, Xanadu.

10538 Overture

Dear James,

This blog is so going to turn into a dodgy 70s rock blog. In a bid to turn the tide, here's some dodgy 70s rock. Pablo told me about this one, in a conversation about celloes and Ozzy Osbourne. He reckons Jeff Lynne sounds like Ozzy. I reckon I might start cello classes again. Jeff Lynne in this video looks like he'd always wanted to do a Christmas single like Wizzard. I bet Ozzy Osbourne's always wanted that too.

Have you read the bit in "17" where Bill Drummond says the bands that try to copy The Beatles are always the worst bands, just look at ELO and Oasis. Do you ever find ELO start to sound like Oasis? I do with this one, but less so with the likes of The Diary of Horace Wimp.

Hey Saint Peter

Hey Saint James,
Ever heard of these people? Australian twosome Flash and the Pan (George Young and Harry Vanda) and 1983 one-hit wonders with "Waiting for a Train". George Young was the elder brother of the Angus and Malcolm Young, which may explain the penchant for playing the guitar while wearing shorts. Never a good look. Not even that nice boy in Vampire Weekend pulled it off at Leeds.

Young and Vanda played in the Easybeats, who had a big hit with "Friday on my Mind", which David Bowie covered on Pin-Ups. Another of there songs "Good Times" featured Steve Marriot on backing vocals and was later covered by INXS, featuring on The Lost Boys soundtrack. They wrote and produced John Paul Young's "Love is in the Air". They also wrote Meatloaf's "Running the Red Light". I'm scraping the barrel there, I know.

I like how this song combines the better elements of late 70's rock, namely The Motors' "Airport" and ELO. Is sounding like ELO a good thing? I'm no longer sure. They spoil the effect slightly with their attempts at comedy (the cork hat, the hitting the tall man with a hard hat, the skeleton producer) but at least no one dresses up as a schoolboy for the best part of 30 years.