Toxic Monday Morning Office Blues, Again

Picture I done for my wife of David Bowie with a bird on his head

2012-01-19T22:35:00.001Z

New Year's Message

2012-01-04T21:24:00.000Z

There are only so many faces. It's true. And after a while they start repeating themselves. I've been here for near on 40 years now and I think I've got most of them pegged. There's: sour-, arse-, pinch-, rat-, dog-, bunny-, melted-lard-, lump-, dried-cheese-, overripe-, ingrown-, badly-packed-, turtle-, potato-, melon-, and of course cocktail-sausage-face. That about covers the entirety of humanity. Everyone you've ever met, seen or are likely to ever see will have one of these faces. Forget race, creed and colour; this shit transcends that. It's pathetic really. That's the end of the miracle. Armed with that knowledge, there's no way any sane person could still believe in the creation or an omnipotent God. Incidentally, there's also a finite variety of vaginas evidently (thanks Internet).

This isn't all doom and gloom. The truth is that if you simply hang around long enough with your eyes open, you too can develop the power to categorise faces. Once you can read them all you're four-fifths of the way toward a coping strategy for life (I don't think reading vaginas is quite as useful a talent but what the hey).

No, once you know this, you can stop caring about all the whirring low voltage shit that goes on behind faces. Turtle-faced people and lump-faced people have the same problems. Just as there are limited human faces, there are even fewer human concerns. Essentially people are concerned that someone else has got more shit sorted out than them: more time, more love, more money, more sex... But the truth is everyone wants more (or at least wants to be sure that someone is getting less). Poor people think rich people are sitting around getting fucked and eating gilded potato waffles. Rich people think poor people are sitting around fucking (and breeding) and eating too many normal potato waffles. Dumb people think smart people are deliberately ruining their lives. Smart people think dumb people are deliberately ruining their lives.The unifying principle is that everyone is shuffling their little shifty eyes around their oily head sacks suspicious that everyone except them is out to fuck them. The exception to everyone is "family". A pathetic tenuous genetic strand of sticky organic matter that holds entirely disparate people together at times of government approved leisure time. That's right, I'm talking about Christmas! It's no surprise that while we're forced into this elaborate sentimental feast of consumerism and gluttony these fucking parasitic idiots have to be there. If they weren't around to disappoint, criticise and humiliate you, you might realise that our lives are so fucked we might as well lop each other’s stupid faces of with dull cleavers.

My Christmas was so fucking awful it’s put bad juju on the whole of 2011. And as for 2012, our Prime Minister David “Diddy” Cameron (combination or overripe- and melon-face) has told us that although we’re all gonna eat a continuous slurry of shit sandwich all year we should be happy that we have the Queen’s (ingrown-face) Diamond Jubilee and The Olympics to look forward to. Oh fucking yippee! I don’t mind fucking spending another 52 weeks in the dreamcrushing factory waiting for another shitty Christmas as long as I get to watch some fucking swimming and eat a cake because old German whore has lasted another year on the dole.

Happy new year!

Thanks to "The Kid" for making me feel like writing this, I did it on my phone on a train.

Concept Art for Pubmonkey

2011-12-03T14:05:00.001Z

Quick screenshot from the rushes of Pubmonkey

2011-12-03T01:07:00.001Z

Excuse the picture quality here.

That's my old man by the way. Never acted before in his whole life. Amazing performance. Why hire an actor, when you can beg the inspiration?

Another location photo from Pubmonkey

2011-12-03T01:04:00.001Z

Loony Noonie and Dodgy Roger storm the sex shop.

Reflections on Pubmonkey being filmed

2011-12-03T01:01:00.001Z

Heard a quote from a letter Dickens sent to Dostoevsky about how all the villains he wrote about embodied his darker moments, but the heroes were only his purer aspirations.

Another location shot from Pubmonkey.

2011-12-03T00:08:00.001Z

The Pubmonkey and Malcolm relax between takes.

The Berts and Debbie Dawson at the bar.

Pubmonkey Location Picture

2011-11-22T17:22:00.001Z

This is Loony Noonie's flat built by the wonderful set design team over in Tooting. It's a very weird trip the day you walk into a room built entirely from your imagination. This goes to show that my brain may not be a very nice place to visit.

Rise of the Pubmonkey

2011-11-17T23:57:00.001Z

We start filming the film what I wrote on Saturday. I'm in it playing the psychotic debt collector Bingo Heath. Check here for updates loyal mothertruckers...

Steve Austin: Bionic Motherfucker! (with Eagle Eye TM)

2011-10-13T19:05:00.003+01:00

Another drawing I done.

The Baroness

2011-10-13T19:03:00.004+01:00

This is another drawing I done

Behold! The Elephant Mod!

2011-10-13T18:50:00.001+01:00

Another drawing I done. It's a comment on vanity.

Lennon's Birthday Would Have Been Today

2011-10-09T15:29:00.000+01:00

Here's a drawing I done of John Lennon last month.

The Return

2011-10-07T23:10:00.002+01:00

I was looking at my old shit on here and decided I'm about the best thing on the interweb. So Mothertruckers, I chose a fancy background from the available templates and I'ma gonna update this bitch like it's 2007.

See you cocks soon.

Self-Analysis + Self-Indulgence + Self-Congratulation = Blogging

2011-03-03T12:07:00.003Z

This picture did my head in.

It’s the present day. It’s Adam Ant. Standing in front of an advertising poster featuring Liam Gallagher. Liam is draped in the Union Flag evoking the classic image of The Who used on the cover of The Kids Are Alright. Adam is mocking Liam’s signature Mancunian gait. Adam is also pulling what we, in our playground days, would call a “Joeyface”, which would normally be used to demonstrate the opinion that someone was retarded.

This picture sums up my life as I hurtle toward my forties. I loved Adam Ant as a kid from around the age of nine to eleven, he was the coolest bastard on the planet for me, him and Rocky. Then I “grew up” and Adam seemed naff. He looked like a little boy lost on Live Aid. The last thing I bought by him should have been amazing, on paper, the idea of Adam going through a spaceman phase seemed too good to be true, sadly the single ‘Apollo 9’ was duff and it was time to move on.

Fast forward ten years and Oasis’ ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ was exploding out of the Pepsi Chart Show one Saturday morning and the twenty-one year old me was hooked. The Stone Roses has been good, but who can really get behind lyrics about waterfalls and magical drummer girls? This was kick in the bollocks stuff. I was unemployed, drunk and only planning on getting drunker. Finally I could marry my love for music with my attitude to life. And then Oasis bloated up like a beached whale packed with sherbet and Pepsi in the tropical sun.

And now, here’s Adam, back again, dandy as ever, symbolising my childhood, mocking my clichéd and pompous twenties, warning me not to take life seriously – while simultaneously reminded me that, as he had once said, ‘Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.’

So I Wrote This...

2011-01-20T00:03:00.005Z

I was going to work today thinking of all the things I could be doing instead and I thought that until I’d listened to every piece of music Aretha Franklin had ever recorded on my own, on vinyl there would always be something better to do than work. Or to read Great Expectations. Or, fuck it, the whole time there is anything at all being pumped out through the idiot lantern... Or… well anytime I could get my hands on half a dozen hard boiled eggs, a flask of good tea and a reasonable blanket work would be a shoddy substitute.

And I thought, maybe I could write something here, and I remembered that I didn’t give a shit about that any more. The only time I remember that I used to do this is when I get an email telling me someone has posted a comment and it turns out to be a spam for dick hardeners or escorts. It’s like this place has become some sad derelict community centre where pushers and pimps scrawl their number on the walls.

I do the Twitter and Facebook thing now. From my phone. And I dig it. Mostly because I hardly drink any more and that means I’m not a shivering paranoid who worries that someone’s going to post something terrible about me that I clearly did but have no memory of. Or worse still, the creature that lives in my head decides to tell everyone what cunts he thinks everyone is.

I’m doing a degree. And of course, I’m acing it. But even that’s wearing thin. It’s a pissing contest. It’s like this piece on the history of Ireland. All I need to say is that some oily hairless apes were birthed on a rock a long time ago. The oily hairless apes on the rock next door happened to sail across and take the piss for such a long time that they finally got got kicked out. Then the original apes couldn’t remember what it was like living alone on the pathetic rock before the foreign apes and some of them wanted the other apes back. It all got so tiresome that most of them gave up, got drunk and started watching WWE.

And essay structure is a fucking joke. It goes: Hitler was a drag cos he was he was an asshole. Assholes hate Jews and fags. Hitler hated Jews and fags. Hitler was an asshole and was therefore a drag.

And while I’m not writing anything, the internet fills up with such bullshit it’s got like a sodden soiled clump of cotton wool floating in a plastic urinal trough, drowning pathetically in a sea of festival piss, while the refrain of The Kings of Leon’s Sex On Fire loops eternally in the background.

Farewell To The Smoke

2010-10-20T16:50:00.007+01:00

I moved to South London 20 years ago and I've kind of been "from" there ever since. I make the distinction about which side of the Thames I landed on because it's important. It was made abundantly clear to me that I had made a choice and formed an allegiance from the off. I didn't know anything about North London when I made the 30 mile move to West Norwood. I knew plenty about the South as I'd spent half my spare time there as a kid at my aunt's. But North London was alien to me. The lad whose family I lived with told me that North London was full of nasal whining "fishwives" barking orders at their mewling hordes of rickets afflicted kids from the doorsteps of Chalk Farm.

I never gave much thought to South London's allure. I moved there to find work, meet girls that I hadn’t gone to school with and to stop getting into scraps with the blokes I had gone to school with. I wasn’t bothered about street crime in London after dealing with some of the Neanderthals who had been unleashed into the world from my school the previous summer. In London, it seemed people only wanted to cave your head in for money, and when you dressed like I did in those days, you weren’t about to get mugged.

At first I commuted to Liverpool Street for work and buffeted up against City types. Some may argue that these people are the real Londoners as they feed the financial engine. In my experience they’re boorish Essex twats. The people I identified as Londoners were my mates in the South, and because of this I developed a strong attachment to the area that I never had for my hometown. I remember reading one of those Rough Guide tourist books about London that described the south of the river as being a hidden but more authentic working class London that people rarely see. The twat from Stereo MCs eulogised South London as having a physical bass in the fabric of the streets (or something). But the truth was – and a trip on the new London Eye will demonstrate all too painfully – there’s pretty much fuck all below the river.

North London has a lot more “stuff” there, but essentially, I’ve learnt, it’s essentially the same city, with some different migration patterns, some surreal alterations in architecture and infrastructure and a lot of people who think they’re better than everyone else. South London is still a hidden city. And one the great things about it is its invisibility. London, like many big cities, has a large percentage of achingly hip arseholes that move there to be cool. Thankfully, anywhere that doesn’t have a Tube station doesn’t exist to these “Londoners”. They’re the ones who swarm about to “happenings” and “events” and are involved in “scenes”. They're parasites and they have nothing to do with the city that I lived in

My city has been populated by a vast and bewildering array of madmen, eejits, geniuses, cunts and top people. Many of them left, some got beaten by the place, and some remain. During my time I’ve drank its shit beer, danced in its fountains, slept in its cells, taken its powders and pills, wondered into its elicit basements, stroked my chin in its galleries... I’ve lived alongside Streatham trash and been appalled by Shooters Hill scum. I’ve blagged and scraped my way around the place, until I finally settled in my favourite part of the city: Crystal Palace. A little non-place really that once had a giant greenhouse. A triangular roundabout with the spirit of a village. Essentially a bus terminal with a park. It’s a beautiful place, honestly, and for so long no one seemed to realise. I’ll miss it. But it’s changing. The rents keep rising and the children’s strollers look more and more like dune buggies since it appeared on the Tube map (as an “Overground” station). It's beginning to feel a lot like everywhere else.

When I first started working in Palace in 1993 there were three huge Irish pubs that were the centre of the community. Slowly the theme pubs and eateries wiped them all out except one. The last proper pub in Palace was run “The Mayor”. An old Irish lad who wore a Christian cross next to a star of David in order to hedge his bets in the afterlife. He was a real publican, a real character, and the last link to what the place used to be. I had some great chats with him at lock-ins over the years. He sadly passed away a few years back leaving the pub to deteriorate into the sort of hovel you wipe your feet on the way out. And to me, the Palace I knew kind of faded away too.

So I’m off in the New Year. I’ll still be working up here for the time being, but that will have to change. The very worst thing about London is trying to move across the face of it with all the other poor damned souls who endure its commutes. Then it will be over. I’ll come back – to visit football, and music and friends, but I won’t move back. I’d hate to be old in this city.

I think back to when I first came here and who I was. My granddad wrote me a letter asking me to take care of myself in the big city. I never gave it much thought at the time. The kid I lived with took the piss out of it, and I think I threw it away. Looking back, for better or for worse I think I did everything he advised against and sometimes I think I’m lucky I got out of it as intact as I did.

In The Beginin There Wuz Noddy

2010-09-03T13:25:00.009+01:00

My auntie Jean had Marc Bolan’s hair. That’s right mothertruckers, the hair of Marc Bolan on my auntie Jean’s head. I was a kid – under six year’s old – and she I suppose, looking back, may have been moving toward her late twenties with three kids on the boil. It seems she decided that it was time for her to put away her childish things – so I ended up with all her 45s. Not guns – singles. Shellac slabs of dynamite as it turns out. Not only did she have Bolan’s hair – she he had all his records too.

So I sat in my room with my little red record player and looked at the red and black silhouette of an man that looked like my auntie Jean on that blue paper middle as it spun round and got clocked in the ear by to tunes like: ‘Get It On’, ‘Jeepster’, ‘Telegram Sam’, ‘Metal Guru’, ‘Children of the Revolution’ and ‘20th Century Boy’. Bold, bombastic, blistering riffs potted with psychedelic bloshy babble farted out through the rudimentary speakers. And I was teleported into a freaky netherworld. These weren’t tunes from movies or standards overheard from grown-ups. I suppose most of my magic was in my head in those days, or from films and telly, but this was before videocassettes kids! And this androgynous freak and his cast of goons sparked something in my wee – then ginger – bonce that I don’t suppose ever went away. I mean, Mr. Benn was trippy and Jamie had a Magic Torch but this shit blew my tiny mind. I suppose you have to remember that these weren’t like records to me in the traditional sense. I wasn’t yet a music fan. These were toys in the same way a rubber snake or a Stretch Armstrong was a toy. Shit, everything was a toy. My favourite thing in the world was a burnt wooden spoon at that point in my life. Things were only as shit as your imagination allowed them to be. And T Rex records were a top fucking toy.

But it wasn’t just T Rex that she gave me. There was also a bunch of Slade stuff there too - which had me bopping around like mental case. There was ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’, ‘Gudbuy T' Jane’, but most of all there was ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’. All ball-breaker of a rekkit, made when I was a bawlin’ baby blue eyed boy. I wasn’t even musically aware enough mime with a tennis racket, but I knew even then how to lose my fucking mind and I did – every time I heard that tune, I’d wig out like an epileptic dervish. And I’ve never stopped loving it. In truth it may have been one of the reasons why I could never settle stateside – who could live in a country where people thought that Quiet Riot’s version was the original? I love music that much / I’m that shallow (delete as applicable). The last time I ever got goosebumps off watching Top of the Pops was when a bearded Liam Gallagher belted it out in 1996.

The other night I was watching the Gervais/Merchant miscalculation Cemetery Junction – which should have been better than it is, but sadly instead of being a film about how boring and stifling small towns in the 70s were, it ends up being simply boring and stifling itself. Which may go some way toward explaining why I got so terribly excited when the fat lad in the hat got up and sang ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’ at the local factory’s bigwigs AGM. It wasn’t a particularly good example of a that tired cinematic device where the unexpected loser rocks the socks off the squares but as he started belting it out I found myself coiling up as though I was about to pop.

As I got older, music got more and more into my blood to the point of obsession, but that tune and my reaction to it in a world before we knew that Star Wars had sequels – never mind prequels – is still the purest form of how it should be enjoyed. Through the ears and into the spirit and out through the spazz. Cum On! Feel The Noize!

Waiting For The Smug

2010-08-25T18:54:00.005+01:00

Some of you may know, some may not, but since we last spoke I've decided to knock the booze on the head. When you find that you spend more time recounting the horrors of your hangover than the pleasures of your nights out it might be time to call it a day. Besides when I started drinking it still felt a little roguish - these days a five minute dip into Channel 4 trash like UK's Most Hammered Infants (or whatever) it feels like the art of drunkenness has become decidedly low rent. Seeing some gormless Cornish teen bragging about drinking two pints of vodka a day before shitting his pants in A&E is hardly the stuff of Richard Harris.

So it’s been a couple of weeks of uncontaminated sobriety here at Toxic Towers. It's amazing the amount of things that go through one’s mind when it’s not occupied by the recurrent mantra of: ‘I’m not going to throw up. I’m not going to throw up...’ It’s like having a million radio stations playing at once, like someone has downloaded an internet of everything I’ve ever known and fed it back into my brain through some kind of funnel and played it on shuffle. I feel almost constantly sharp, free from paranoia and full of this brainstuff called “recent memories”. Time has performed a rapid yet simultaneously gentle grind to an almost halt like it’s moving through golden syrup while I dart off down a shaft of light bathed in high grade engine lube.

The only downside seems to be all the squares telling me how proud they are of me. The last thing I want is praise from teetotallers. It’s one of the reasons I carried on drinking as long as I did. I always feared that being dry would automatically endow me with that dank whiff of pious, po-faced joylessness that lingers around abstinent people. I don’t want to be no puritan. To err is divine, isn’t it? Judge not lest ye be judged? Take this wine, it is my blood...

I’ve always sensed that non-drinkers derive a disproportionate amount of pleasure from watching, remembering and then gossiping about drunks. It’s the worst kind of voyeurism. A vicarious yet moralising and essentially parasitic existence. If I drifted that far I’d have to correct my path by mainlining meth for six months straight.

Not that I’m not looking forward to a certain glow of comfortable smugness. Not vegetarian smug, not gym-goer smug, just a simple Reddy Brek glow that I hope comes with having been there, done it and decided against it. Maybe I’m hoping I’ll come across as wise – but I’m long enough in the tooth to know it’ll be an insufferable smugness that oozes from my newly glowing pores.

The other thing I’d like to avoid is that indelible stink of shame that accompanies some victims of temperance. That unmistakable aura some ex-drinkers have of something bad having happened to them – something so unmentionably bad that they’ve had to pull way from the remotest danger of anything resembling fun ever happening to them again. These grey skinned phantom people who seem to be living in hope that death catches up with them before anyone finds out their terrible sordid secret.

There’s certainly a morbid sense of curiosity in people’s approach to me at the moment. They enquire just politely enough to see if I have some kind of confession to make before reverting to the sort of sombre expression reserved for the terminally ill, or possibly the already dead. Some people’s interactions with me at the wedding I was at on Monday were so fleeting I began to wonder if I had died and no one had remembered to tell me.

I’m thinking of making up horrific tales of debauchery including dextroamphetamine, dwarves, dumpsters, defilement, and the devil in order to see people’s faces. Actually many of my own drinking stories are enough to shame an average person into "taking the oath" but I’m nothing if not committed. There were plenty of times in my twenty-three years of boozing that lesser men would have hung up their tankard. Despite having surprisingly few problems avoiding booze, I’m still thinking of joining AA to tell my best drinking stories to a fresh bunch of people.

One thing I've been warned of is how irritating drunk people will become to me. This certainly hasn't been the case so far. Besides it's hard to imagine how people could annoy me any more than they did when I was drinking. Insofar as my friends go, the last thing I want is for them to be sober. I'm not sure I could live with myself if I found myself associated with a bunch of Fanta drinking fairies tucked up in bed by nine every night planning another paintballing weekend. Whilst at the wedding I found myself positively frustrated by the collective coherence of my compadres. I wanted nothing more than to be surrounded by a sea of shitfaced gin-monkeys dancing to Neneh Cherry like the big one was about to drop. I do have standards.

I'll admit to a reluctance in putting this up on here - mostly because I’ll look pretty fucking foolish if I end up drunk out of my gourd with pee down my trousers selling yellow pencils from an empty meatball can by the end of the week. After all, anything is possible. Anything.... That hasn't changed.

My Second Job

2010-08-10T19:11:00.003+01:00

My second job was cold calling people about double-glazing in a shitty little office above a pizza place in Chatham High Street. Like so many of the places I found myself in in those days they had two things in common: they were introduced to me by a friend and they had a vague sense of something Dickensian about them. That is to say these were places that wouldn’t necessarily appear in any directory. They were “businesses” held together with tape. The walls always had chip paper painted thick in nicotine beige. The telephones cables were knotted beyond unravelling. The carpets were made up of these ubiquitous death blue tiles stuck down with streaks of cement glue. There were rooms like this everywhere in the Medway in the early 90s. Sad little rooms, like over-used, worn out brasses trying to reinvent themselves with half-baked ideas of semi-legitimacy.

I suppose someone might have lived there once, but scams had been going on here before the call centre thing happened. You could tell that the last failed business hadn’t quite moved out. And the one before. There were shadows of failure everywhere. The filing cabinets were ringed with rust from mugs filled with Kwik Save instant coffee and powdered milk. The mismatched selection of chairs seemed to have been purloined from derelict school skips. The makeshift “booths” us callers had to sit in wore the sad expression of something so temporary its maker hardly tried. Like something bred for death.

The other oddly Dickensian thing about the place was that the staff were all kids and the only adult was a woman who miraculously came across as simultaneously maternal and malevolent. Her schpeel gave her the air of a post-feminist Fagin who could make us rich as we liked with her simple scheme. Consider yourselves at home! But beneath a overstretched veneer I couldn't help but sense that a long series of disappointments had already locked her in an ever more destructive struggle to convince herself that anything – never mind this shit – was worth it. But along with her dry-wipe leader board and talent for jaw splinteringly bad choices of nicknames for the kids she managed to motivate her merry band of pickpockets.

I was seventeen and the rest of the crew were all still at school. They were the sort of kids that had part-time jobs and parents who helped them save for things. The friend who took me along was the first kid I knew to sort out a driving licence and a car. He was organised and responsible – one of life’s winners (he still is). I was already a school drop-out and who had lost one full-time job within six months. Most of the kids worked one or two nights a week. I tried to pick up as many shifts as possible.

But I was pretty much awful at it and lingered at the very arse-end of the leader board despite putting in the hours. The job involved going through the phone book – literally name by name – and calling to see if they had double-glazing. If they didn’t tell you to get fucked and hang up at that stage, you had to persuade them to allow a salesman into their house for a free quote. I knew nothing about double-glazing and couldn’t care less. I couldn’t sell the idea to them. I never even got a lead. You got a bonus if you got a lead. You got a better bonus if the lead was actually in when the salesman went round. And another bonus if they bought the glazing. I got a flat rate that barely covered my bus fair.

I was about to quit. I went out for a drink with my old man. Looking back I think he was probably worried about me. We got drunk with his friend "John Wilkins". Wilkins was, and is, a stocky man of indeterminate profession with an odd habit of soaking his own head in the sink of pub toilets and punching people. He was a builder by trade - like everyone else - but let's say he had a diverse portfolio - and a shitty temper. He asked me about the job and I explained the whole thing shrugging that it wasn't too bad but I just didn't think I had the knack yet. He looked at me like I was stupid for a minute, reflected for a shorter period and than suggested that next time I went in I should call his house and he’d accept the offer of a free quote. That way when the salesman called, he'd politely say no thanks and I'd be off the mark. I’d owe him a pint but I’d be off the mark. It was simple.

I went into work that Friday evening and suggested I’d take the section of the phonebook with the Ws. I sat there for a while ringing a few Williams and Williamsons so as not to arouse suspicion by getting a lead on the first call of the night. I felt a quiet sense of excitement as I looked around before pulling out the piece of paper with the fake lead on it. All the other kids were confidently chirping away in that confident manner that sales people use. To this day I can't work out how they do that shit in public without killing themselves in shame. I uncrumpled the paper and called the number. I got his wife.

“Hello, I’m calling from Ace Windows. Can I ask, does your home currently have UPVC double glazing?” - or some similar shit.

She didn’t seem to know what I was talking about and tried to brush me off in the same fashion as everyone else. My heart sank. I had a minor panic. I was sure no-one was listening to me – they were too busy getting legitimate leads – but I was terrified they’d catch me out. I wasn’t particularly prideful but I’d rather be thought of as a failure than a cheat. I whispered: “It’s me, Paul’s son”
“Eh?”
“Paul’s son. Did John not tell you I was going to call?”

She got it and laughed loudly. I tried to press the receiver against my ear so that people couldn’t hear her. No one laughed about agreeing to have a salesman come round. I jotted down the date of the appointment (the following day) and her address with the shitty chewed up yellow and black pencil and gently put the phone back in its cradle.

I walked over to the lady Fagin slowly trying to look pleased with myself and failing to summon some kind of cool. She looked at me with bewilderment as my voice creaked that I’d got my first lead. I handed her the piece of paper.

“Well, well, wonders will never cease! Slowpoke has got a lead!”

She drew unbearable attention to me as she erased the zero from next to my name and added a confident ‘1’. “That’s it now! You watch the floodgates open. You just watch. I knew you had it in you.”

I didn’t believe her. Not just because I knew I didn’t have it in me, but because I knew she didn’t believe it either. But at least I’d bought some time. Or so I thought. The following night I went to the pub to find John Wilkins to buy him a pint. I asked him how it went. He winced a bit, took a swig of Holsten Pils and informed me that it could have gone better. Evidently John wasn’t used to dealing with salesmen. And apparently this salesman wasn’t very good at taking no for an answer and after over half an hour of glossy leaflets and suggested payment plans, he'd become a bit of a nuisance. It became apparent that the salesman had been given some unique “persuasion” to leave. It was my turn to wince now. Looking back I don't suppose it was the best idea to send some cocky arsehole in a suit with a flash car round to a builder’s house for him to criticise his windows.

“You’ll still get the dosh for the lead though right?” said John.
“Oh yeah! Cheers John, Holsten is it?”

I didn’t go back to find out.

World Cup Diary: Belated Obituary

2010-08-10T18:35:00.004+01:00

"And, I would like my undies back." - Walter Sobchak

Well we never got round to writing our review of the end of the of the World Cup. I did write this shortly after the final:

“In South Africa: sixty-four games, ten venues, 145 goals, 260 yellow cards, seventeen reds... And in my life: two punch-ups, one case of heatstroke, three barbeques, too many relapses, one concussion, about a thousand pounds, incalculable amounts of beer, four brands of cigarettes, one lost t-shirt, one lost pair of sunglasses, one hotel room floor, significantly increased phone bills, one concert, four cuts, sixteen bruises, one wedding, one anniversary and one winner.

Those of you paying attention will notice things petered out here at Toxic Towers after just before the quarter finals. Sadly, real life took over and trying to juggle regul...”

That’s literally as far as I got. I’ve been too busy sitting on my kitchen floor drawing on my own hand to write anything more. But that may change now work is forcing me onto my feet daily.

World Cup Listening Post: 'Jigsaw Puzzle' - The Rolling Stones

World Cup Diary: South America Versus The World

2010-06-30T19:00:00.004+01:00

“You're goddamn right I'm living in the fucking past!” – Walter Sobchak

As you may know this World Cup is now South America versus the world! Or is South America versus Europe (with special added Ghana)? Or is it really South America versus THE WORLD?

Firstly it’s all nicey, nicey with the friendly people’s quarter final. “The Super Canaries” against “Them Splendid Oranges” in festival of colour, pet birds and fruit. It’s shaved lady bits in thong bikinis and samba and Caipirihas and all that versus liberal pothead swinging clog dancers who really do deserve to win it just once because they came so close so many times and have had so many good players. It’s bound to be a terrible game.

Then it’s the rubbish one without a Yurpean team in it. The Black Stars are taking on the first ever winners of the World Cup. The average age of the Ghanaian team is just twelve and the have the whole of Africa blowing plastic trumpets at their feet. The Uruguayans however have already broken Africa’s heart once so far this tournament to don’t hold your breath. No do hold your breath, anything’s better than you all blowing those bleeding trumpets. And that’s what they are by the way, shit trumpets without keys. Or a trombone with a busted slide. Or a fucking plastic pipe.

The following day it gets all dark and twisted as the villains meet, with Argentina (helmed by that evil puppet from the Leprechaun films) taking on Die Mannshchaft with those freaky identical twins from The Shining in charge. It’s the cocaine communist versus the sartorial sauerkrauts. Nice! I want the winners of this to go on and conquer the world. Or maybe even join forces and conquer the world. Literally.

Then Paraguay against Spain. The Red Fury versus The White and Red. Or something. Spain apparently play a style of football they’re calling ping-ping or waff-waff or whatever. It’s nice to watch anyways. And Paraguay beat those lovely Japanese lads on penalties. I’m not that bothered really. And then on to the semi-finals that I can watch without having to drink myself into a state of near mental collapse. Which will be rather nice.

World Cup Listening Post: ‘Beunos Tardes Amigos’ - Ween

World Cup Diary: Germany

2010-06-29T18:09:00.006+01:00

“OVER THE LINE!” – Walter Sobchak

“Ouch!” – E.T. The Extra Terrestrial
“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco.” – David Byrne

Germany 4 (Muller 2, Podolski, Klose)
England 1 (Upson)

I was pretty well behaved. Brother Bagpuss had arrived Saturday afternoon looking for all the world like he’d stepped out of a Hunter S Thompson short story. He’d not been to bed. He was a little rubbery. The Wife and I were soaking up sunshine and eating fruit in the garden. Bagpuss introduced the 1664. My brain was still fizzing a bit from Wednesday. The regret was cranked up to 12 and the credit card and mobile phone bills were edging toward critical mass. We had fun though. Brother Bagpuss was asleep before “plucky” Ghana edged out “plucky” America. He woke up later in time for us to have a solid mid-size drink till the wee hours.

Sunday kicked off with a fry-up and a taxi to East Croydon to meet Brother Buck. He’d had a couple of beers already. My guts were rotten from a fruit, beer and kebab diet. There was a fair sized crew of us in Victoria station to watch the game in a pub with hand-stamps and air conditioning. The lads were hammering away the ales, and despite terrible nerves I managed to keep my beer intake to a respectable one pint every half hour. Of course the Ethel Mermans were two nil up by then and my nerves were settling in for a defeat. Sadly, there was hope. When Upson scored the place went absolutely ballistic and for a brief period England looked like they were going to give them a game. Then there was Frampard’s goal. The extremely cold revenge for ’66. And I had this horrible sinking feeling that I was seeing the excuse for another shoddy England performance. The worst thing about the reaction to the England side’s inevitable exit from the World Cup is the immediate scapegoating. It was obviously a terrible decision – but the last thing we needed was for it to be the reason why they went home early. They’d been shit. They didn’t deserve a let-off. And besides, no one gave shit one when the same thing happened at Palace against Bristol City earlier in the season. But now it’s all goal line technology this and instant replays that.

Thankfully, by the end of the game Ze Germans corrected the score-line to reflect the performances of the team. They were simply better. I’m sick of the excuses. England are simply unlovable at the moment. I know now what it must be like to support Tottenham. Delusions of grandeur really hurt when they come crashing down.

And another thing: It’s a pathetic situation when we are the only team in any World Cup that takes a male model as part of the staff. And the fans cheer him every time there’s a close up of him on the screen. It was a relief they were knocked out before they embarrass the nation any further. I shudder to think what the South Americans would have done to them.

What’s more, frankly, my credit card and liver are fucking exhausted, so they send their sincere thanks for such a collection of utterly abject performances throughout the tournament.

On a lighter note, after the game, we all enjoyed far too many beers and a spot of sunstroke at a Paul McCartney concert in Hyde Park. Splendid.

World Cup Listening Post: 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen' - Noel Coward

World Cup Diary: Slovenia

2010-06-25T18:32:00.009+01:00

"Donny, shut the fuck... when do we play?" - Walter Sobchak

Group C:

Slovenia 0

England 1 (Defoe)

The warning signs were all there. Literally actually. Written on chalk boards outside, what we'll call, Pub C. "Tomorow. World Cup shoeing here! SlOVeNIA V ENGLANG! 3PM" And no one had thought to correct them. Pub C might not contain the most erudite of drinkers. But nonetheless even at 1pm as we sat in in a rather nice pub (let's say Pub W) opposite Crystal Palace's home of the illiterate observing unscrupulous characters in wife beaters drinking from a bottle of Courvoisier milling outside, I'd decided that Pub C was a place to celebrate an England win without fear of reproach from uptight French ladies.

The nerves were jangling in the sunshine as Brother Jacko and I piled into pints of cooking lager. Pub W wasn't doing that split screen thing with the other game, but the crowd were all in great spirits, everyone was having a great time fully focused on England finally putting in a performance in this competition. I suggested that Defoe would score. Brother Jacko agreed and said he'd do it with a touch of Lineker. England closed players down well. They were more cohesive and finally key players like John Terry looked revived from the dead - I can forgive his personality when he does his job. Defoe did score, it had a touch of Lineker about it, we had that moment and the nerves were calmed across the nation.

It was time to drink ourselves into a stupor. A stupor, incidentally, I am still recovering from (hence the brevity and clunkiness of this post). Not long after the victory we found ourselves away from the comfort and swanky décor of Pub W and firmly ensconced inside the oppressive blacked out windows of Pub C with bad medicine and worse company. For a while it was all going well, some black guy was playing country tunes on his laptop (despite another chalk board advertising a happy house DJ set). But as the £2.50 pints of shit lager kept coming and "conversations" with people dressed in so badly they'd be banned from Matalan, it didn't take that long for the inevitable fists to fly and an aborted mission. It seems illiteracy is a cause of violent crime after all.

And in the harrowing morning light, it all sunk in. In summary, England had beaten a very mediocre team who wore Charlie Brown shirts to the World Cup. They came second behind the USA and we are to face the Germans and a seemingly impossible route to the final. There's booze bruises on my arms and clumps round Brother Jacko's head. The hangover is as sizeable as the task ahead.

Go on England!

World Cup Listening Post: 'Dandy in the Underworld' - T Rex

World Cup Diary: Tantrums, Tonkings and Topsy-Turvy Tables

2010-06-21T22:00:00.010+01:00

"Dude, this is a league game, this determines who enters the next round robin." - Walter Sobchak

What was once just simply dull and noisy has become dumbfounding, intriguing and quite brilliant. It has, as the experts say, come alive. So here is our whirlwind trip round the groups at, what I'm assured is, the half-way stage of the competition.

Group A
As soon as the second round of games begun you had to feel a little sorry for the hosts as they looked to be reverting to spectator status far too early, but that was all overshadowed by the madness in the French court. For me, the most peculiar site was that of the bobble chapeaux clad substitutes skulking off behind the goal toward the end of the game while Domenech leaned against a post like a bullied kid at a school disco trying to ignore the popular kids' jeers. The gaggle of subs seemed to be avoiding the possibility of being asked to come on (and maybe sniggering at the coach’s eyebrows). It looked so incredibly childish, it made the late Michael Jackson’s look mature.

Group B
Argentina continued to look value for money in this tournament. After the fear that Maradona’s foray into international management would end up as farcical as a Mike Tyson comeback the team are showing some real venom and a good deal of coherence. And in talking to the press, Diego is continually entertaining, whether it's showing off his new bins or giving Pele and Platini exactly what they deserve.

Group C
OK then. Here's the rant. Look away now.

The long ghoulish spectre of stink that is Chelsea FC oozes ever deeper into the paralysed body of modern football. Anelka is the arch minge in the French camp and has been sent packing leading to rumours that other players may refuse to play. And then John “JT” Terry crops up on the telly, uninvited sweating like the proverbial rapist wanting a word in our shell-like. He wanted to tell us that he wanted a word in that foreign manager's shell-like. And he didn't give a monkey's if it upsets him. After all Jay T's an England fan like the rest of us. Oh, and he wants a beer. And a shag. And he's probably right. Problem is, he's an insufferable cunt. Take some responsibility if you're such a big man. Or are you used to getting off the hook scot free for your misdemeanours? Like stamping on people or banging your mate's wife?

Now I’m all for outlaw spirit, rebellion and even revolution, but this blokes no Che Guevara. I’m all for English folk acting like English folk and having a beer on their night off and raising spirits, but this blokes no Paul Gascoigne. He’s a nasty, self-serving, horrible son of a dog food thief who thinks he has a divine right to do whatever he wants. Why is he announcing to the world that he’s Chelsea captain and demanding that a player they’ve just released be included in a team he is simply one of the defenders in? Get out there, do your job properly and keep schtum you sneaky eyed twat. Right, enough of that...

Group D
The Ethel Mermans throwing away potential, getting players sent off, missing penalties. Now they know how it feels. What's that word they invented? Schadenfreude? Enjoy it while it lasts, because they’ll be back.

Group E
While chaos and shock results fly in all over the place, the Dutch are keeping their head down and getting on with it in a group who’s pedestrian nature seems to be providing them with some stealth. There’s still time for something mad to happen though.

As Cameroon seem to be symbolic of Africa's underperformance and assure their early departure, it does beg a question: has Pele ever predicted anything correctly?

Group F
We described this group as a midweek Stoke-Wigan match in the last round up. And then the Kiwis held the champions to a draw and it all looks more like an FA Cup giant killing replay, proving that it really is worth watching EVERY SINGLE GAME.

Group G
This group is ace. Drogba, unbelievably became a vaguely likeable Chelsea player – possibly because he wasn’t able to dive on that bad arm - as Ivory Coast got what for from Brazil. The Brazilians proved they’re still a machine. Effective. Utilitarian. Purpose built and reliable. They're borderline Swiss. Harrowingly inevitable. Blindingly yellow.

Meanwhile, Portugal single-handedly condemned the North Korean squad to a terrifying homecoming, possibly including rockets or salt mines, by slotting seven goals past them.

Group H
Chile look like a handful while Spain got their act together and really do look world class. This looks like it could be the game of the group stages.

And now what? Well it's effectively knockout stages now, with the first teams going home tomorrow. And it's only a couple of days before we find out England’s fate. Although I can’t really criticise fans for booing at the final whistle on Friday, at 3pm Wednesday they need to make a completely different noise and get right behind the team for the full 90. Supporters are there to support. Players are there to play. Let’s hope they both get on with it.

World Cup Listening Post: ‘We'll Let You Know’ – Morrissey

World Cup Diary: Algeria

2010-06-20T18:19:00.005+01:00

"You have got to buck up, man. You cannot drag this negative energy into the tournament." - Walter Sobchak

Group C

Algeria 0

England 0

One of the things about the World Cup for those of us who support the supposed smaller teams domestically is the chance to follow a team with potential. To cheer for players who, by definition, have international class. However unsavoury they are, however overexposed, overpaid and overhyped, these are the men that can play football at the highest level. That's why this shower of wank was so hard to take.

The day started with the sort of buzz I only normally reserve for relegation six-pointers (or more rarely play-off clashes) but as I mentioned, the difference here is we're not relying on spirit alone. This time we were looking at a team with ability. Weren't we?

Germany - who we'd been highly tipping at Toxic Towers after their trouncing of Oz, shat out royally, missing their first penalty in twenty-eight years. It seemed like an omen. Things were about to change. England were going to break that hoodoo of playing like slags against teams they assume should roll over and expose their bellies to them. They were going to be class.

I got home from work early, met up with Brother Jacko and cracked a beer while America took on Slovenia. It was a disastrous game to begin with and at half-time, I suggested that losing wouldn't be the end of the world if only the Yanks show some spirit, some nuts, some passion. And they did! They came out of the blocks and did what I'm used to seeing in a team I give a shit about. Like my beloved Palace, they fought for everything and clambered back from two down and should have won if only for that cruellest of football inevitabilities - injustice. It made France's prolonged and unforgivable sulk even more saddening as the Irish team sat at home after a similar travesty.

We went to the boozer full of hope and met Brother Tone Bloke, scarfing in retro England kits, ready to celebrate a victory achieved in an equally gung-ho fashion. Now, I'm not going to dwell, but I'll tell you this: I have seen Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and the other players running around that field like hopeless cloggers on many occasions. I have watched them have their egos stroked by Sky Sports pundits and Premiership supporters and I have loathed them for it more often than not. But I have always seen them play - to varying levels of success - a game commonly known as football. Not this time. This time, although the faces were the same, the expressions, haircuts, and mannerisms identical, these people had been stripped of all their ability and passion. To take nothing away from the Algerian side, it was't that they were stifling talent like a lower league team taking on a top flight club in the cup. They were equally as piss poor.

The excuse that the pressure of having to beat teams of supposed lesser ability is the hardest thing to swallow from these pampered fannies. Is that right? You're under too much pressure? Try being deducted ten points for a relatively inconsequential fiscal impropriety committed by someone in a boardroom somewhere, losing your coach and arguably your most promising player and still going out and fighting till the very last second of a season (longer than your supposedly arduous Premiership campaign) for a fraction of your money or glory. The one thing I never wanted to see was an England side spit out their dummy like the despicable French side. But that's exactly what they did.

Compound this with the prevalence of once-every-four-years bourgeois fair-weather arseholes in the pub telling me not to swear in frustration. The World Cup went very sour Friday night. The team and the punters in the boozer ought to leave football to those of us who care. Wimbledon starts soon, that should see the back of most of them, and if the team can't get their shit together by Wednesday, maybe they should stick to golf.

Of course, if they tonk Slovenia come Wednesday, I - like every other real football fan always does - will forgive them and start believing that they won't let me down again. That's the curse.

World Cup Listening Post: 'Rock El Casbah' - Rachid Taha

World Cup Diary: Drones and Clangers

2010-06-16T17:00:00.008+01:00

"Mark it zero, next frame." - Walter Sobchak

Well everyone's had a turn now, and what do we think of it so far?

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Sorry, that's not me falling asleep. That's the unique sound of the first African World Cup, the Vuvuzelas. It says something that the biggest talking point so far has been the sound of plastic horns. The players (well the French players) are complaining they can't hear themselves complain. The fans are complaining they can't hear the fans. Personally I don't mind, it's not like the World Cup is renowned for witty chants - and who would understand them if you could hear them anyway? They're all in "foreign".

I'm not denying it's an annoying noise, but the talk of banning them is excessive. Besides, if they want to ban an annoying drone they could do a lot worse that getting rid of Mick McCarthy's insipid monotone moronic utterances that pass for commentary on the BBC. 'This is what I call parasite football,' he informs us in a tone of voice that threatens to cause the nations' main arteries to spontaneously split open and scuttle off to find a warm bath to bleed into. No wonder Roy Keane quit when he did. The man's a menace.

Anyways, here's the story so far...

Group A

It all started well (albeit with a draw) between the hosts and Mexico and a well worked goal from South Africa's Tshabalala. You couldn't help but start to believe the hype and develop a soft spot for the Bafana Bafana. That may have been the Guinness.

The longest sulk in international football continued as France did the equivalent of rolling around in the isle of the supermarket screaming against Uruguay. It was nice to see Gillette's Terry Henry having a penalty appeal turned down for handball of things. They can't go home soon enough.

Group B

Diego Maradona seems to have evolved into a portly animated evil garden gnome and is my favourite thing in the competition so far. They had a sputtering qualifying campaign, but I hope his seemingly erratic (some say demented) approach to coaching this incredibly talented side comes to something. It would really make a change from the usual anal sports science plus media training equals smooth transition to next management position approach.

Group C

Well, the less said about this the better really.

Group D

Despite an unfair sending off and their defenders impersonating mannequins Australia were taught a lesson in football by Joachim Low's Germany. And quite rightly so. I know it's my own fault, but I have an irrational hatred of all Oz sporting teams - especially the football team. I may be paranoid but I almost get the impression that they only play sport to try and beat England at stuff, and this bunch of appallingly labelled "Socceroos" are like an afterthought.

Germany for their part, have their own uniquely subdued version of a "rainbow nation" with a couple of Poles and a Brazilian adding colour to the ever clinical machine. Despite the ribbing of England in the press they were great to watch and one of my highlights so far. Go on Die Mannnschaft.

Group E

One of the nice things about this World Cup is that I have a convoluted sweepstake thing going on with my wife's family in America. One of my teams therein is Japan. The Samurai Blue are my tip for the surprise package in this tournament - they build things in miniature over there you know? And besides, they scored twice for England recently. And Holland look good.

Group F

It may seem weird for WW2 buffs that I'm getting all gooey over the Krauts and the Japs, but you'll be glad to know I'm still holding on to some tradition (and by extension good old-fashioned English xenophobia) and reserving some ire for the Italians. This group is the equivalent of a Stoke-Wigan weekday Carling Cup fixture. In the rain.

Group G

Jose Mourinho claimed recently that the Champions League is a better competition than the World Cup as all the best players are basically in it and the systems are worked out better. One thing is for sure seeing Ronaldo and Drogba (albeit briefly) in this context doesn't suggest it brings out the best in players. But its ok, because...

...here come Brazil to save the tournament! Oh Jesus fucking Christ, here we go again. Roll out the random cliché generator. Every time! It's like greeting every McCartney solo album as though it's going to be Sargeant Pepper all over again. They're not a super race of master footballers. They're a global corporate sports brand managed by man dressed like a fisherman trying to fit in at a gay bar. A fluke is a fluke! Just because its a Brazilian fluke doesn't make it some kind of genius.

And besides, North Korea's coach is like a nostalgic throw back to a simpler time that still had iron curtains. His elusive and occasionally bizarre statements and activities hark back to times with proper propaganda - not slick media-ease. At times he evokes Iraq's Comical Ali warning of impending defeat while opposition tanks roll on in the background. In spite of that they have a team of players that actually break down in tears as the anthem plays, have no sponsorship deals to lose, and may not even have any supporters to watch their games, and they still stretch the favourites. Quality!

Group H

The other favourites Spain, who Arsehair Wenger describe as being from another planet, looked fancy, zippy and twisty turny, but like his Arsehair team there's a lot of style and talent, but while they spend the whole game showing off their new tricks and spins, workmanlike cloggers nick a sloppy goal. Taking nothing away from the Swiss who made it a cracking second half. Suddenly it's alive!

And although the tournament needed an upset you can't see Spain not going through. They want to watch out for Chile, mind you, who looked good coming forward and gave an entertaining performance against Honduras. Tidy.

So what next? I'm still loving it, even if some of the quality could be a little improved - and of course the tension will be ratcheted up when we start seeing teams getting knocked out. And it's two days away from England-Algeria and we'll see if I'm still allowed to drink in the local Algerian bar after that one.

World Cup Listening Post: 'The Grunt (Part One)' - The J.B.'s

World Cup Diary: YouTube Football Comedy Bonanza

2010-06-15T18:55:00.012+01:00

Alan Partridge (The Day Today)

David Mitchell (That Mitchell and Webb Look)

Peter Cook as Alan Latchley (Clive Anderson Talks Back)

Ron Manager (Fast Show)

Indecisive Dave (Fast Show)

Arsenal (Fast Show)

Charles Charlie Charles (Harry Enfield)

Football Manager (Harry and Paul)

Wayne Gerrard (Harry and Paul)

Ricky Gervias (with a lovely coda from Ian Wright)

World Cup Diary: America

2010-06-13T18:19:00.011+01:00

"Look at our current situation with that camel fucker over in Iraq. Pacifism is not something to hide behind." - Walter Sobchak

Group C
England 1 (Gerrard)
USA 1 (Green own goal - effectively)

Goalkeepers make mistakes. It’s not unique to England. If football always went to form it would be as dull and predictable as the Premiership. Green fumbled all right. He fumbled badly. But that doesn’t mean England’s World Cup chances are all going to come crashing down around our ears. No one really thinks that we can win the bloody thing, not without a large chunk of luck and voodoo magic. But it was Green’s effigy that seems to had been stuck with pins on Saturday. I suffered no such ill fate. I felt surprisingly good when I got to Cousin Flipper’s house at half-term during the Argentina-Nigeria game. Friday’s Guinness intake begun at four and went on to the early hours. Yet I woke up, fried some pig and egg and even managed to get a haircut.

All the kids were there and all the cousins and aunties and uncles and even me dear old mum had come to the Big Smoke as a surprise. Cousin Buck cranked up the grill, Cousin Woodrow showed off the new baby and we steadily made our way through the water butt full of beer. I hadn’t been blown away by the quality of the football so far. But this was England against the USA, so I knew quality could wait. I wasn’t expecting a master class in silky skills. I was expecting a scrappy draw.

I called Brother Kono over in America and was reminded that the best thing about America is its people. Sadly the worst thing about it is its people too, as evidenced by some of the arsewipes who’d made it to South Africa and found themselves in front of a camera. Then some fucking genius at ITV reminded us just how shit English people can be by plopping human turd nugget Diddy “Dave” Cameron on our screens and get him to shout out the most unconvincing noise ever emitted by a human in support of a national team.

A funny thing about football is that it only takes one early goal to enable complete hysterical delusion. Gerrard’s fourth minute strike had twisted the atmosphere from crackling edginess awaking some malignant expectation that England deserved to take these “lesser” teams to pieces. It garnered, certainly in me, a barely containable fervour for blood. It was hard to suppress my burgeoning desire for American humiliation. But sure enough, the Three Lions tempered it for me as they sat back and invited pressure. It was obvious that England weren’t going to take the US seriously from the off – no matter how scared they were of Capello - and the early goal seemed to harden their sence of entitlement to victory. Sure enough they equalised and although it was a weak shot, for my money they probably deserved it.

The second half evolved into a bit of a party with all of us calling for the release of the Crouch and getting our robot on. That’s the only logical way to support a team as baffling as England: loud, ludicrous and lagered up. When Crouch did arrive it only served to highlight Rooney’s fruitless endeavour as something akin to a possessed animal, making the team seem closer and closer to the cartoon jungle team in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, especially with those collared shirts.

After the final whistle and that incredibly familiar feeling that nothing is ever going to be easy in a World Cup campaign, a spontaneous kick about erupted in the garden and I took a knock on my shin before my mother took the ball away. Nothing changes.

Did you see those Germans?

World Cup Listening Post: 'Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys' - Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson

World Cup Diary 2010: The Build Up

2010-06-07T17:17:00.004+01:00

“Calmer than you are.” – Walter Sobchak

Little Kick About Before The Real Thing
Platinum Stars 0
England 3 (Defoe, J. Cole, Rooney)

So, only a few days to go before the big kick-off and everything’s pretty much par for the course. I’m violently bouncing between manically elated and terrifyingly suicidal. This of course has little to do with football and a whole lot to do with potentially lethal sunshine related alcohol binges. It can only get better once football is on all the time and everyone wants to go to the pub, right? Right?

So anyway, battling on unfazed by black-outs and blood poisoning, the World Cup spirit is alive and well in my house. There’s a wallchart above the fire place (like all good married 37 year olds with no kids should have) and I’ve been watching all sorts of World Cup related crap on the telly. Firstly I started watching BBC3 (yes 3) on the off-chance I’d be entertained by Richard Bacon and Peter Crouch running through the ‘Most Shocking World Cup Moments’. Which served to remind me just how much I do actually find Mr. Crouch entertaining. I felt a twinge on my heart-strings as I wistfully remembered drunkenly balling out FREEEEAAAK at the top of my lungs to him many years ago from the Arthur Wait stand before I knew who he was (and finding it hilarious). And as I watched the wee skits they were performing (which consisted essentially of Crouch acting retarded) I couldn’t help but recall how entertaining he can be. And it re-ignited my dream of him scoring a winning hat-trick in the final and becoming an unlikely national hero. Fuck the fourth plinth I thought, that column's looking a bit old hat. Let’s have a solid gold giant animatronic Crouchie forever doing the robot looming over Trafalgar Square. Let’s make it twice the size of the Statute of Liberty for a start. That’ll learn ‘em.

Next, a few days later, I watched something on ITV4 (another station that sounds made up). Here I found ‘How to Win the FIFA World Cup’. Which involved a bunch of Dutch and English “scientists” investigating the “science” behind every World Cup performance since 1990. This involved mapping each team’s DMA. Yes, that’s right DMA. It stands for Defence Midfield Attack, and it's totally proper science and everything. And after an hour of footage of varying quality from various competitions, Brazil were shockingly science’s best team – or some shit.

Then last night I watched ‘Soccer Aid’ which was all right 'cos it had a really long penalty shoot out which made Jamie Theakston look like he should have been on the plane and in which Woody Harrelson proved that not only can white men jump, they can score the winning penalty too. Then I watched something about Piers Morgan and his World Cup Something or Other. It was getting desperate. The proper tournament couldn’t start soon enough. This involved Piers Morgan’s insights into football, South Africa and the African continent in general. It included such startling and illuminating facts as: Piers Morgan has Frank Lampard’s mobile phone number, black people were treated frightfully by white people in somewhere Piers Morgan calls Suthufrica. This all changed when Nelson Mandela came along, if you don’t believe Piers Morgan you can watch that rugby film that came out, or even better, Piers Morgan can show you a picture of when Piers Morgan used to edit the News Of the World and there’s a picture that Piers Morgan approved that changed the world. Not like that picture that Piers Morgan put on the front cover of The Mirror faking Iraqis being pissed on by British soldiers. Anyway nothing prepared Piers Morgan to find out that the opera singer he met had died. But Piers Morgan thought it was great telly.

Can we start the football yet?

World Cup Listening Post: 'Let Me See Your I.D.' - Artists United Against Apartheid, Feat. Brian Jackson & Gil Scott-Heron

World Cup Diary 2010: Predictions / “Segments”

2010-05-31T22:49:00.008+01:00

“Am I wrong?” – Walter Sobchak

Last warm-up match:
Japan 1 (Tanaka)
England 2 (Tanaka own goal, Nakazawa own goal)

At the end of the last World Cup we here at Toxic Towers suggested that it would be remembered for being a tournament with: “trigger-happy referees where its one true star was sent off for reacting to allegedly being called a son of a terrorist whore.” The truth is all I really remember is England going out on penalties, Chistiano Renaldo being called a “winker” and the headbut to the chest.

So what will this one have in store? England have not exactly impressed with their warm-up games, frankly they've looked shit despite winning both. The best things about the games have been Mexico's tiny squat and bald goalkeeper Oscar Perez and Japan's late sub Keiji Tamada (because his name sounds like Cagey Tomato). But you never know, their route to the latter stages seems potentially a little less rocky this time around. And the defining moment? Could be anything at all couldn’t it? Someone is bound to lose the plot, severely mess something up, or do something otherwise bananas. It’s just a case of watching as much of it as you can.

In the meanwhilst, here’s a few easily digestible “segments” including our predictions:

How to Spot a World Cup year:

You can tell it’s a World Cup year due to the following tell-tale talking points:

A. Are the range of World Cup songs shit?
B. Are the new World Cup adverts “great”?
C. Is this England’s year? / Is [insert player] fit?
D. Is the ball too light?
E. What new and exciting rules will FIFA introduce?
F. Will the stadia be full of soulless corporate husks while the streets outside will be filled with starving “real” fans forced to drink something other than Budweiser?
G. Are they going to ban the St. George’s flag?
H. How much beer/ice-cream will be sold this summer?

Answers to follow.

Who to Watch:

Avid readers of TMMOBA will know that we have certain allies in certain places in the world, and our greatest fear in the build-up to this competition was that they were all going to be drawn in the same group. Sadly, thanks to French Terry Henry’s basketball skills, one of those allies was taken out of the equation. Maybe even more sadly the others were indeed all drawn in the same group, which means our heroes this time around are 75% of Group C.

Heroes:
England – for obvious reasons
Algeria – for all my Berber cousins at the bar up the road
USA – for all my Yankee friends and The Wife

Here’s a top World Cup tip: pick some teams to particularly dislike. That way you can follow any teams they’re playing at any given time, giving you many more reasons to pop in for a pint. Here are our picks of the teams we’ll love to hate...

Villains:
Brazil – for being a smug bunch of super-skilled bible-thumping Swoosh jockeys from a country not only beautiful, but one of the only places on Earth that seems to be improving
France – for that handball
Ivory Coast – Drogba

Who Will Win?

As we said here four years ago predictions are a sure sign of dementia, so my totally arbitrary picks for Round Two are as follows:

South Africa v Nigeria
England v Australia
Germany v USA
Argentina v Mexico
Holland v Paraguay
Brazil v Switzerland
Italy v Denmark
Spain v North Korea

And my overall winners are Brazil, sadly. Beating Spain in the final. Not very imaginative I know.

Answers to World Cup Talking Points:

A. Yes
B. No (well maybe)
C. Doubtful / doubtful
D. Yes
E. Well I’ve heard that you can get sent off for simulation, shirt pulling, winking, over celebrating, bad hair, drinking anything other than Budweiser, and descent. But that’s just me
F. Yes
G. No
H. Lots

World Cup Listening Post: 'Bee Charmer' - Esrevnoc

World Cup Diary 2010: Little Timestamps

2010-05-26T18:30:00.013+01:00

“Fucking Germans. Nothing changes.” - Walter Sobchak

Wembley Warm Up Match:

England 3 (King, Crouch, G Johnson)
Mexico 1 (Franco)

The above quote is from The Big Lebowski. And what better way to start our coverage of this year’s World Cup. Nothing really does change. And as you get older World Cups act like little timestamps to remind you that the world is still hurtling around and things are moving on even if your life feels like an endless stuck groove in a Barry Manilow record.

It’s time to take stock and see if anything has changed in the last four years. Well, the world completely ran out of money. We’ve had three leaders (or is it four with this two-headed freak at the helm?). America has a black geezer in charge. In football, it was all about The Big Three, Four, Five or Six depending on what was going on, but really it was only ever about The Big Two.

Out of the Average Four that lagged behind The Big Two, Arsenal limped around being “attractive” in their ever-so-fancy-fancy home not really achieving anything like the ghost of some previously glamorous fallen movie star. Manchester City were bought out by some unfathomably rich bloke who promised to buy every player in the world in order to fulfil his evil plans, failing to realise that no-one really wanted to play with Craig Bellamy. Tottenham became the team Portsmouth always wanted to be (while Portsmouth themselves have won the FA Cup yet managed to virtually eat themselves alive). And who were that other team? The ones with the moustaches?

The Big Two had comically became a cartoon version of the Cold War with the Russians and the Americans fighting it out for global supremacy by stockpiling unfathomable amounts of overpaid arseholes in their squads. Chelsea currently have the upper hand, not only by having the most arseholes and current trophies, but by magically not being in debt due to their owner buying their debt off himself (or something very clever like that). Manchester United on the other hand are in insane amounts of debt despite apparently being the most popular team in the world - which has led to many of their fans evidently beginning to believe they’d rather be Norwich City and buying up all their scarves en masse.

Down in the belly of the English footballing beast known as The Football League, things continued to be about money. It has, at times, felt like almost every team outside The Premiership is on the cusp of going totally broke. There’s a distant commonly held dream that, maybe they’re team will be OK one day, but no-one really believes it. It’s an odd feeling that the vast majority of English football teams are living on borrowed time. It can be quite disheartening to follow your club knowing that no matter what realistically their fortunes can only really get worse.

But the fact remains the same, supporting a team is not a choice. It’s not rational and it never has been. You’re stuck with them and no matter how bad it gets you’d rather be stuck with them than anyone else. You begin to enjoy that stuck groove on the Manilow record and even get into it. Even though they’ve banned drinking, smoking, swearing, standing-up, and general fun from the games and decided to charge a fortune for it, it’s still your game, and your team.

And as this World Cup dawns, despite the concentration of arseholes in the England team, these little timestamps only happens a certain number of times in your life. It’s time to start thinking about enjoying it. People will have opinions, girls will like football, work won't be quite so serious, we’ll learn useless trivia about countries we’ll never visit, and there will be some fantastic games and magic moments of football. So, for those of you who still think the game has nothing to offer, I refer you again to our good friend Walter Sobchack: “Fuck the tournament? All right, I can see you don't want to be cheered up here, Dude. Come on Donny, let's go get us a lane.”

World Cup Listening Post: 'Minas De Cobre (For Better Metal)' - Calexico

23. 'Moon On Your Pyjamas' - Paul Weller

2010-05-25T16:17:00.003+01:00

I seem to remember that Paul Weller has been quoted as saying that he can see Jesus in the face of children (which makes a change from the old fella cropping up in toast or dog's backsides). It also brings to mind that quote about how Glen Hoddle had found God, and what a great pass it must have been.

Art about your kids can sometimes be a bit shaky. I often think parenthood is where stand-up comics go to die. After a comic has a kid, his/her routine is invariably about the things he/she finds adorable and irresistible about his/her kids. And everybody knows that nobody’s kids could ever be as adorable or irresistible as a parent thinks they are. If they were humanity would be full of adorable and irresistible people. Which it is not. Which is kind of what this song is about. As despite the fact that Paul can see stars (and possibly even magic carpenters) in the child’s eyes he is genuinely fraught with the prospects of the little one growing up into a shitty world and wishes it might work out better.

David Bowie’s 1971 track ‘Kooks’ from Hunky Dory about parenthood is an altogether different take. He takes up the position that with mad parents like him and Angie the kid had no chance of ending up normal and that they might as well burn his homework. That kid went on to make a film, called, of all things Moon.

22. 'Dancing in the Moonlight (It's Caught Me in Its Spotlight)' - Thin Lizzy

2010-05-25T15:48:00.004+01:00

When I moved to Dublin at the tender age of 18 in the autumn of 1991, I used to walk around aimlessly a lot, frittering away the meagre monies I earned from shitty tips in my job as a “lounge boy” on Guinness and Major cigarettes. I’d get off the bus in town about halfway up O’Connell Street and walk passed the hawkers selling disposable lighters five for a pound and “binanees” (bananas) by the bunch. I’d stroll on down there looking like a melon with my ponytail tied up in a lurid yellow scrunchie and my green furry coat.

I’d wander around by the Ha’penny Bridge and up that way toward Temple Bar before a Stag or Hen party had ever thought of tossing their guts up there. I’d swing up to Harry Street where I had a penchant for a little boozer called McDaids. Here I met a Spanish girl who asked me what animal I would be if I wasn’t a human. I thought that it was about the smartest and most enigmatic question ever asked – it must have been her accent. I said I’d be a dolphin ‘cos they’re all smart and peaceful and shit. I thought it was the smartest and most enigmatic answer ever given. She seemed to like it too – must have been my accent. She agreed to meet me there the following day. Her name was Manu. I went home to my auntie’s house and dreamt of being all spiritual and talking about dolphins with Spanish Manu and her hairy armpits.

The next day I repeated my usual walk and arrived at McDaids at almost the exact same time. I was wearing a Stone Roses ‘Fool’s Gold’ t-shirt with a John Squire painting of a dolphin. I was a bit rubbish. In the seat where Manu should have been sitting there was an old grey-haired bloke with a really, really big dog. I sat down and ordered a Guinness and lit a Major. The old bloke asked me if I was there to meet Manu. I said yes. His dog put its paws up on my shoulders rather casually. It had pink nail varnish on and its breath was bad. The old bloke told me that I wasn’t going to meet Manu, not today, not ever. I agreed. I finished my Guinness stubbed out my cigarette and went about my day.

I never saw Manu, the old man or the dog again. But they have built a statue of Phil Lynott (pictured next to me above) on Harry Street, who according to this song, always gets chocolate stains on his pants.

And for the record, if I could be an animal other than a human, I’d probably be a sloth or some kind of murderous monkey that eats psilocybin and steals liquor from tourists. Or a bear who does the same kind of thing – like Yogi gone wrong – with an eye patch or something – to let the audience know I’d gone bad. Or maybe I would still be a dolphin, but a murderous one... with an eye patch...

21. 'Crimson Moon' - T Rex

2010-05-21T13:07:00.001+01:00

Speaking of glam rock and falls from grace here’s Marc Bolan. In so many ways a virtual parallel to David Bowie. Both hail from London, changed their names, started out as mods, went folk, worked with Tony Visconti, wore make-up, shaped UK glam, sang a load of funky bollocks, had kids with rhyming names (Zowie Bowie and Roland Bolan) went to America and flirted with plastic soul, shovelled industrial amounts of nosebag up their hooters... the list goes on. The difference seems to be what happened after the bugle ran out.

Dave went to Berlin with Iggy and embarked on his Eno trilogy. Marc went back to London and went on tour with The Damned. Somehow Bowie managed to feel better after that and went on to be a super blonde quiff and day-glo zoot suit clad 1980s pop superstar. Our Marc wrapped his Mini round a tree and died.

‘Crimson Moon’ was taken from his last LP before the fateful drive and has some of his best tunes on it, not least of which is the title track ‘Dandy in the Underworld’ which rates alongside any of his earlier works. Around this time David performed on Marc’s kids telly programme Marc and during a duet Bolan fell off the stage much to the amusement of Bowie. The writing was on the wall.

20. ‘Moonage Daydream – David Bowie

2010-05-20T16:20:00.007+01:00

After the success of ‘Telstar’ back in 1962, it was only a matter of time for another space race linked recording, and as we’ve seen with Derrick Morgan’s ‘Moon Hop’ Whitey landing on the moon was a perfect opportunity for such a record. The Dame had spend the majority of the 60s twatting around pretending to be in charge of The Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Long Haired Men, flirting with mod and releasing songs about gnomes.

His second LP as David Bowie (as apposed to Jones) was called, imaginatively enough, David Bowie (the first one in 1967 had been called, erm, David Bowie). When the song ‘Space Oddity’ which was used in the BBC’s footage of the lunar landings and subsequently hurried out as a cash-in single (ker-ching!) the LP was duly rechristened Space Oddity and a star was born. Although it’s pretty clear that Major Tom’s escapades had very little to do with actual inter-stellar travel and more to to with getting off one’s nut.

Space (and getting off one’s nut) remained a recurrent theme in Dave’s work throughout the seventies and beyond. Particularly with his 1972 seminal spazzed out sci-fi glamfest The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ‘Moonage Daydream’ was evidently one of the first songs he wrote for this whacked out story of the leper messiah’s fall from grace. The lyrics contain some of the best imagery on the LP, with rayguns, space faces, electric eyes and someone ‘squawking like a pink monkey bird.’ You could almost believe he was an alligator.

19. 'Pink Moon' - Nick Drake

2010-05-19T13:22:00.002+01:00

Three years after 1966's banner year for music, Whitey was flicking peanut shells all over the moon’s surface. In those three years we had begun to see the death of that 60s dream - what Hunter Thompson described as: "the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Between ‘66 and ‘69 The Beatles had tripped out on flower music, got mystic in India, played businessmen, ended up subsumed with acrimony toward each other - their split a mere formality. The Stones, although riding the wave of that purple patch which would take them into the 70s, had begun flirting with some seemingly malevolent forces and death seemed to following them - first with Brian Jones drowning in his swimming pool in mysterious circumstances. This was followed shortly by young fan Meredith Hunter getting stabbed in the skull in front of the stage by the Hell's Angels they'd hired for security at the Altamont concert. Dylan had crashed his motorcycle, and seemingly changed his mind about being the lysergic guru for the new age, went into hiding and unleashed his Kermit crooning persona on the world culminating in the baffling Self Portrait LP. Otis had met the maker in a plane crash and Stax broke off from Atlantic leading the label to lose all the rights to their own recordings. The Beach Boys' chief architect of their epic sun drenched sound, Brian Wilson sent himself crackers with a combination of pot, acid and trying to top The Beatles and was left with permanent mental scars. While other members of the band got involved in the sinister and murderous Manson “Family”.

It's little wonder that Nick Drake's music and life was tainted with depression when you consider it was borne out of this landscape. He made his debut of lamenting maudlin folk in ’69 and was brown bread by ’74. ‘Pink Moon’ was the title track off the last LP he made and despite his imminent overdose, and although the lyrics do seem to impart impending doom, it’s actually quite a cheerful number with him chirping, ‘pink, pink’ over and over again.

I am aware that this picture is of Charlie Drake.

18. 'Moon Dawg' by The Beach Boys

2010-05-18T21:40:00.008+01:00

It’s 1962 in England and, inspired by the burgeoning space race, the proto-sci-fi warble of Joe Meek's 'Telstar' crackles from the wireless. In Liverpool Epstein signs The Beatles, leading to Ringo and ‘Love Me Do’ within ten months. Down here in London Mick and Keith meet Brian and form the embryonic Stones.

Across the Atlantic in New York City Bob Dylan's debut LP disappeared virtually without a trace. In Memphis, Otis Redding meets the MGs and the Stax journey moves into its golden era. And over in California, possibly oblivious to all of this, the Wilson family released their first LP as The Beach Boys (containing the fine yet simplistic 'Moon Dawg'), which hardly creates the sort of waves needed for surfing.

Within four short years The Beatles were releasing 'Paperback Writer' b/w 'Rain' shortly before the stellar Revolver LP. The Stones released an astonishing string of darkly thumping Jagger/Richards composed singles, including: 'Paint It Black', '19th Nervous Breakdown', 'Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow', and 'Mother's Little Helper'. Dylan released what turned out to be last and most electrified of his electric albums, Blonde on Blonde. Otis and Stax were world renowned as purveyors of perfect southern soul and he released his Dictionary of Soul, which was to be his final studio LP. And The Beach Boys released their majestic masterpiece Pet Sounds (along with the single 'Good Vibrations').

In, what was in Earth years merely a short skip and a jump, musically was a quantum leap that would transform the diet of our lugholes forever.

Incidentally, England went from getting beat by Brazil in the quarter-finals to world champions. Four bloody years!

17. ‘Child of the Moon’ – The Rolling Stones

2010-05-18T12:07:00.012+01:00

I know some of you have been filling our metaphysical mailbag here at Toxic Towers demanding to know when the perennially misunderstood Electric Toenail Moonsongs segment will be completed. Well, the truth is we just don’t know. But here’s number 17...

I’ve just returned from the Algarve, where I had my very first proper beach holiday, which was somewhat like wandering slightly drunk through a Sergio Leone film painted by David Hockney all the while being flanked by roaming gangs of stag parties in matching outfits evoking a Mediterranean Clockwork Orange. Truly marvellous!

Being, as I am currently, deeply immersed in the harshest throes of a Keith Richards obsession, I took to wearing dark glasses and a Bedouin style scarf whilst chain smoking. During the course of the week as I soaked up sun, Stones tunes and Keith biographies, my hair morphed to imitate his style circa 1966. I attracted more than my fair share of local hash dealers as I blinked past the shaven headed, Primark attired lads on tour.

'Child of the Moon' (with Brian Jones on saxophone) was released on the b-side of 1968’s seminal ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and was an apparent favourite of Johnny Marr’s on his youth club's 45s jukebox. My old man also often tells the story of first hearing the a-side on a juke in Soho upon its release and being blown away by it and repeatedly playing it the whole evening. The Stones themselves saw the song as dagger through the heart of what they called flower music - arguably a somewhat bitter move after the tepid reaction to their ill-fated embracing of it with the Her Satanic Majesties Request LP. But whatever the motivation, it ended up being the opening riff to start one of the greatest purple patches of any band, encompassing Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street.

The b-side, however, sonically at least, harks back to a slightly more trippy era. The song, to my ears at least, sounds like a Stones take on my two favourite Beatles tracks (‘Rain’ and ‘She Said, She Said’) which themselves could possibly be described as “flower music” yet were about the rather darker reactions Lennon had to LSD (elitism and fear respectively). None-the-less, this lesser known Stones track is a great song to listen to whilst sitting in the sun on a people table on the beach intermittently peeking at the Atlantic Ocean as it gently crashes onto the sand.

My Next Job

2010-03-23T16:56:00.011Z

If there’s one thing Bruce Willis has taught us it’s that the only constant in life is inconsistency. For every thing he’s ever done with any value, there has been an equal and opposite product that stinks like Sunday guff. This leaves us in a perpetual state of indifference to him. It’s impossible to be in awe of him, but at the same time, you don’t get any specific desire to hate him in any real sense. An example of the latter product is ‘Disney’s The Kid’ in which a grown-up arsehole meets his irritating childhood self to learn how to become the grown-up he always wanted to be.

I assume that most people get to a point when they begin to feel like the grown-up arsehole that the child version of them never wanted to be. It makes you consider the gap that exists in your head between who you think you are and who you are perceived to be. For instance, I don’t think of myself as someone who wears a brown corduroy jacket, but I have been wearing one for the last ten years. If I were to think about casting someone as me, I would hate for him to given a brown corduroy jacket. Is that my uniform? Is that like my signature?

Socially, I’m pretty sure I’m simply perceived, with varying degrees of tolerance, as a drunk. Which is fine, as that is essentially true. But scratch the surface, and you get into what I do for my living. I have become a careers adviser. This has been gradual, but has felt quite sudden. Like lung cancer, I imagine. But is it too late? Some time ago I watched ‘Say Anything’ again and I noted that Lilith from ‘Cheers’ played the careers adviser who is shown bowling up to the end of year party at Eric Stoltz’s gaff about to seemingly get drunk with the students – like she’s forever bound to some kind of eternal hipness / arrested development enigma. She chastises John Cusack about not showing up for his guidance session before presumably going off to do a keg stand and blow some teenager.

This, of course was followed later in the flick with Cusack’s speech about career planning to his prospective in-laws: ‘I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.’

This made me think the general portrayal of careers advisers in popular culture. I thought of the bloke having a breakdown cracking eggs in the aisle in 'Clerks'. The careers adviser in ‘The Simpsons’ is a constant irrelevance to both Homer and his children. In short, it’s a job for either pathetic perma-children petrified of adult life or eternal extraneous bores on the brink of a nervous meltdown. It’s no job for a grown-up.

The cliché goes that you still feel like a seventeen year old inside no matter how old the body gets. I don’t. I don’t feel seventeen. I don’t have a great deal in common with me at seventeen. I wouldn’t want to be seventeen. When I was seventeen I wanted to be forty. And now I’m not that far off, the problem is, like the snivelling mini-Bruce Willis, I’m not sure I’m going to be the forty year old I wanted to be.

Some people say that youth is wasted on the young. This implies that if they were seventeen again (I think that’s another Disney film isn’t it?) they would go about things differently. I doubt they would, for the same kinds of reason they’re not the grown-ups their childhood selves wanted them to be. There are always be other people that think they know better than you and what is good for you. There are always things that are deemed to be too “important” to neglect. And there will always be people relying on you being how you are.

Bruce’s character in ‘Disney’s The Kid’ starts out as a heartless but wealthy image consultant. His fat, lisping little shit of a former self persuades him to become a moustachioed, dog loving jet pilot. The film does not show how he achieves this transformation, but I assume he had to lose friends with, or be considered insane by, anyone who thought they knew better than him. He had to lose all the “important” things like his job, mortgage, and health insurance. And let down just about anybody that was relying on him for anything up to that point.

So now I know how to change, it’s just working out what I want to change into. Ostensibly, I think that you can tell what you really want by looking where you direct your hatred. Dylan said he didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. And I tend to agree. Every time one comes on the telly I can barely contain my rage. It’s not even that I hate them because they’re always wrong (which they are). And I have nothing against the older generation like Michael Fish and Ian McCaskill with their mismatched plaids, coke bottle glasses and unkempt hair. Those weathermen were great. They had the dishevelled look of someone so aware of the thanklessness of their task, they bordered on a warped Zen. And don’t think I’m bad-mouthing cinema’s greatest weatherman: Phil Connors.

My contempt is reserved for the kind of weather forecaster that has begun to appear in this country in the last decade or so. They are by and large vacuous empty-headed fucklets pouting and grinning in front of green screens between “hilarious” skits relating to corporate sponsorship that somehow suggests a link between drizzle or sleet to shampoos that find the g-spot or power conglomerates that love nothing more than adopting seal cubs. The female presenters more often than not appear to have stumbled onto the set in a party frock on their way to a red carpet event, with their mouths flapping out rehearsed lines while waiting to pick a batch of coke. The BBC has even employed some hapless product that doubles up as a topless male model for gay lifestyle magazines. It’s like this whole thing is some kind of irreverent reality show contest. That shit might wash in Los Angeles, but this is England and the weather here is bad news. It deserves to read to the public by someone who can express the sheer relentless existential hell of what weather really is. It's unfathomable, endless, and ultimately out our hands. It’s a job for someone in a corduroy jacket with a terrifying hangover. Now all I need to do now is get a degree in meteorology, buy a dog and grow a moustache.

My First Job

2010-03-11T18:10:00.009Z

I spent the last night of the 1980s at a house party. The kids from school with electric guitars were jamming in the garden. I was drunk on cider and copping off with any girl drunk enough not to care. Me and my gang ran down the hill back to my mum and dad’s house just in time to hear U2 announce on the radio that they were pissing off to learn how to be less irritating. Heady times.

I remember actually writing the following day that if the 80s were all I ever experienced that would be enough for me. And with hindsight my life would have been about perfect if I had cracked my skull open running down that hill. I was sixteen and back then, until you’re sixteen your parents decided where you lived and the state decided that you go to school. And straight after that, you’re in charge. Time to decide whether to go to school or get a job or get dole or go to jail. I’d made it through one term of non-compulsory education before the 90s. But within two months of the new decade I was unemployed, growing my hair and fermenting a rather self-destructive and peculiar Irish delusion.

My first job came courtesy of a kid who lived up our street. It’s not what you know it’s who you know, they always say. And it’s true - that living near a kid who so lacked joy and loved money, that you can be jettisoned into a career so unfulfilling it feels like you’ve fallen into a dream-quashing machine. It’s who you know, and my curse of proximity was Simon. A kid that he had taken to tagging along with the milkman for pennies before it was legal for him to work. And by the time he was eighteen he was managing a small car insurance brokers in the village where I went to school.

Thanks to his mum and my mum bingeing on boxes of Liebfraumilch every weekend, Simon had offered to take me on as an office junior. If I wasn’t going to school, I’d have to get a job, and this was a good job. In an office. With something called “prospects”. I could be just like Simon! If... I played my cards right.

Only I didn’t want to be Simon. I never had wanted to be Simon. I’d see him whirring past on the milk float in the mornings and pity him his ambition. I didn’t want a car. I didn’t want streaks in my hair. I didn’t want opinions. I didn’t want a George Michael CD. I didn’t want a job.

But the way I was raised made me think it was rude to turn it down. And besides, I considered going to the job would be comparatively less hassle than explaining why I didn’t want to. This has been one thing that has remained a constant in the subsequent twenty years.

So one Monday morning in 1990, I woke up on the floor, got up and had a wash, put on the shitty suit I’d been bought to go to the sixth form and began my working career. To get from where I lived to where my school was you would take a designated school bus. As a worker that bus was off limits, so I had to take two buses. So all the kids that were still in school would leave 40 minutes after me and get to where I was going at the same time – and I was paying for this.

I got there early on the first day and walked around for a long time. I didn’t want to be early. I didn’t want to look keen. What could be worse than looking keen? What if no one was there? But walking around was dangerous, because the last thing I wanted was for anyone from school to see me wondering around in my sixth form gear, knowing full well I’d dropped out. What kind of a lunatic would do that? So I hung back in a side street for half an hour and then walked down to the office worrying about my breath or my hair or some shit that sixteen year olds worry about.

The first thing that struck me about work was the unbearable and overwhelming sadness of it. Its finality hung in the air like dead gravity. Simon, in his cheap Miami Vice suit putting out his Benson & Hedges cigarette with his plastic, almost toy-like, shoes before heading in to tackle the challenge ahead. There were three of us. Me, Simon and a secretary. The secretary with her painted face like a custom motorbike's petrol tank, bubble permed hair and a power suit so cheap the polyester sparked. She must’ve been pretty once, I remember thinking, but the way she looked at me that first day I knew her life was a perfectly potent blend of wasted maternal instinct and dreams broken by the cock of some local Lothario before she even had a chance. She must have been younger than I am now, but she looked like an ancient rock splattered with nail varnish.

Simon was proud of the office, he was cock of the snoot. But the very look of the place showed it for exactly what it was – a hole. Even the carpets seemed to want to disassociate themselves from the place by unsubtly crawling away from the walls. Everything looked a bit tainted, a bit second hand. The computers, phones, typewriters, filing cabinets, and furniture looked jaded like a used car given away to a kid who’d just passed his test, by a sleazy friend of his dad’s who’d used it for unthinkable things. Everything looked orphaned and had a strange molested feel. Lights flicked on and tarnished beige monitors groaned as their sickly green screens ached into life.

These days we’re enveloped in an avalanche of some of the most fetid advertiser’s squit in the name of online car insurance comparison websights – from the subtly suicidal “actor” wheeling himself out in with a stuffed parrot in the Admiral ads, to the poor crack whore dressed as an elephant, or the utterly civilisation-eroding concentrated dumb of confused dot com. These incomprehensibly awful commercials have the seedy air of having been created by the advertising company’s most pathetic lackeys, but I fear that the truth is that there’s an altogether more sinister truth. That a series of psych studies have revealed that floating faux opera singers with corkscrew tasches actually appeal to the human soul more directly than anything tainted by subtlety, humour or sophistication. Having a conversation these days can feel as though you are communicating with a lobotomised automaton enthralled only by the charisma of a CGI Russian ferret.

And before this tsunami of sewage poured from our screens, the way to compare insurance was to trundle down to the brokers and ask some tragic school kid like me to type your personal history into a glorified calculator. Simon enjoyed showing me the high-tech ins and outs of how the system linked to major insurance companies, but he loved the subtle head voodoo techniques that would ensure a sale. Never give them the cheapest option first. Give yourself a chance to act like you can cut them a deal. My immediate thought was to wonder what I gained from someone paying more for the same product, but Simon gave me one of those looks that I’ve seen a million times more in work. Those looks that say: ‘See?’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘See?’ and I always think: ‘No, I don’t see’ but say: ‘Oh, yeah!’

There were other chores too, renewals were the main thing. That involved looking for files in the endless array of rickety old cabinets that gave off that stink of old coins. Then putting them back. After 16-and-a-half years of education, why didn’t anyone ever explain to me that all I should have ever done was study the alphabet? Renewals involved angry people. Punters furious that they’d driven into someone or something without realising their insurance was up, and we hadn’t reminded them. Uncleared cheques that meant folk had been arrested for being uninsured. Arseholes who thought it was my fault that I hadn’t returned his loyalty over the last ten years – when I’d been there two weeks.

I took to doodling a lot and finding out how much it would be to insure myself in vintage American cars. The secretary hated this. She liked Simon. I think she liked his drive. I think he wanted to bone her. I think she would have let him. She hated me. She thought I thought I was too good for the job. I wasn’t sure. I hoped I was. That’s probably worse. She would just snap at me some days. If I was dragging my feet, or not smiling, not ecstatic that this was what adult life turned out to be – a long slow grind in the arse for the next fifty miserable years. She had real hate in her eyes, and she would sometimes snap at me: ‘if you hate this so much then leave!’ I was bewildered. ‘I don’t hate it,’ I’d say. ‘But you have to admit there are better things to do with the day. Aren’t there?’ This would infuriate her more. It was as though the fake pearls on her ears and neck were going to go off like popcorn from her hatred.

Simon, for his part, wasn’t all that driven. He was quite a silly little daydreamer. He was only really motivated by the extremely occasional enquiry from someone with an expensive car. Something that couldn’t be left to the minnows. Something that made him feel important. For the rest of the time he was just as bored as me. He developed an idea that we were buddies, or that I was his apprentice. Back in those days there used to be a presenter on Radio 1 that would do a feature called ‘Our Tune’ in the afternoon. He would read out a story about some forlorn couple from a shithole town whose inconsequential relationship had broken down through death or infidelity and play Jennifer Rush’s ‘Power of Love’. Simon would call me into the filing room and stoke up a Benson & Hedges. He’d listen intently while flicking ash into a stolen pub ashtray until at the climax as the story revealed that the girl in question had died of lung cancer before the boy had the chance to declare his love, Jenny would strike up the band, and Simon would allow a solitary tear to roll down his cheek.

I went to the pub one lunchtime to avoid this display. Working across the street negated the need for ID. One day my English and sociology teachers appeared in the pub. We began to chat and agreed to meet the following day. And so it went that I began drinking around three Guinness a day at work and talking about what I was missing at school. Not a lot it seemed. The teachers were just as fucked off and bewildered at teaching as I was at selling insurance. I quit a month later. It felt like I’d been reborn. The euphoria as I turned my back on that spiteful secretary, the crumbling machines, the cheap suits, afternoon tears, and self-righteous punters was immense. The unfettered joy that coursed through my veins and animated my limbs to the point of losing control as I walked away into a brilliant uncertainty is still the greatest buzz I know. And I’ve been hooked ever since. And no matter how responsible I get, I know I won’t be able to resist dipping into that nectar again.

Waking Up Listening to Curtis Mayfield and Going to Bed Listening to Hank Williams

2010-02-24T16:37:00.003Z

Bob Dylan once said: “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.”

Sometimes when I’m hurting from the drink or the other things in life I think about how it would be if the day I’m in is a test. The test. Like, you know, the Christian test of opposite extreme eternities depending on your behaviour? And I imagine that the past is just implanted in order for me to take the test. And by the same token, the future is just as much part of my imagination. And there really is only now. Not like in a meditation sense, but more like a penny dropping sense.

You ever get that? And think, if this was true, you would have to ask yourself how much of it have you spent doing stuff you didn’t want to do? If you woke up with a woman, did you just get out of bed and ignore her? Did you chose to put on those clothes or are you in a uniform? Did you take the time you needed to wake up and eat and drink tea enjoy that shower/shit/shave? Did you look at anything or anyone? Did you call your mum? Did you bother to learn anything? Did most of the words in your head tell other people to either move out the fucking way or shut the fuck up? Did you go home and let the TV decide what you were going to think? Like you’re already dead, or waiting for death. Did you eat shit food prepared in a factory by miserable people and were you forced to use a public toilet? Did you make anything worth making? Even if it was just making someone laugh? Did you kowtow to some prick who dresses so bad you know they’re waiting to die, even if they don’t know it?

Did you turn around and go home, or duck into a boozer, did you deny yourself food, cigarettes, or some other shit that you wanted but think you shouldn’t? Did you volunteer to go to a gym?

Or did you wake up listening to Curtis Mayfield and go to bed listening to Hank Williams and all points in between?

Now That's What I Called Music: My Top 15 LPs of the 1980s: Part Three: 1987-89

2010-02-08T19:04:00.008Z

The third and final instalment of LPs released and acquired by me in the 1980s.

11. U2 - The Joshua Tree (1987)
I took this album very, very seriously. U2 were a “serious” band. I remember talking to a mate of mine about coloured vinyl and him saying that even if records were available in a variety of colours, U2 would still choose there's to be sombre black. Even the paper the LPs came in was matte in a time when everyone else was gloss. Bongo and the boys look sombre, serious and moody to the point of constipation on the bleak monochrome cover. The lyrics are impassioned and about big serious stuff, like America and heroin and religion. There’s no room for jokes or anything like that. No room for more much of anything other than seriousness.

And the music is intended to be a rootsy tread through an American landscape, but Brian Eno’s glimmering synth programmes are what actually gives the record its panoramic cinemascope feel that the band so successfully mined in their subsequent stadium tours. Until the momentum wore their music right down to the nub of their current output.

Key tracks: ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ ‘Running to Stand Still’

12. Various Artists - Atlantic Soul Classics (1987)
Again, this isn't technically an 80s LP, although it was released in 1987 and totally changed my attitude to music as soon as I heard it. Although I take it for granted now, the whistling at the end of Otis’ ‘Dock of the Bay’ or the spiky guitar licks on ‘Green Onions’ sounded incredible when I first heard them. The syncopated rhythms that had once sounded so new on so many of the songs I was listening to on Sunday night's Radio 1’s chart countdown began to sound flimsy and inauthentic.

The vocals on all the tracks sounded more real and warm than anything on the radio. From the moment I heard this collection I developed an unending fascination and affection for the genre that shows no sign of going anywhere. From Carla Thomas to Ben E. King this LP opened up worlds.

Key tracks: ‘(Sitting On) The Dock of the Bay’ Otis Redding ‘ ‘Soul Man’ Sam & Dave

13. Billy Bragg - Workers Playtime (1988)
‘Mixing pop and politics, he asks me what the use is?’ sings our Billy on ‘Waiting for the Great Leap Forward’. But this LP isn’t as politically charged as his previous work. I got into it on the basis that it is actually a near perfect break-up album. And it was the first time I really appreciated music that was unabashedly English. Not just English, but workaday English.

As a kid I tended to lean towards the slick and the polished. 'Workers Playtime' talked about Hoovers and punching walls. Whereas so much of the music I’d heard in the 80s was supposed to be listened to with a Martini, Workers Playtime should be enjoyed with a cup of tea and a digestive.

In many ways, it was like an antidote for Phil Collins’ slickly bombastic tax-intolerant divorce rock. Collins’ over-produced drums and multi-tracked warbles sounded as sterile as his Switzerland tax haven, while Billy’s use of double-bass and Hammond added warmth and homeliness to the record despite the sometimes unhappy themes of the lyrics.

Key tracks: ‘The Price I Pay’ ‘Little Time Bomb’

14. The Cure - Disintegration (1989)
I wasn’t a fan of what I would have called “students” at the time. And gothic kids took the biscuit. I’m not having anything to do with black make-up, trench coats, really, really tight jeans or even more pointy shoes. I still can’t cope with people wearing pointy shoes. And the vast majority of the music they listened to left me cold. It was all a bit Halloween party for me. And they never looked you in the eye.

This album, however, changed my mind about at least some of their the music. Despite the lyrical themes of depression and ageing, there was a warm, gooey opiate feel to this record, built around effects laden guitars and layers of synthesiser. If you ever have problems falling asleep, this LP works like a juicy tranquilliser floating in a warm brandy - in a good way.

Key tracks: ‘Prayers for Rain’ ‘Plainsong’

15. The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses (1989)
I’ve written about this record many times before on here but I’ll simply reiterate that this is an Earth shatteringly good pop record. It changed my view of what music could sound like, and should sound like. It was new, yet had its feet firmly planted in its influences. At a time when the prevalent Stock, Aitken and Waterman machine was churning out tinny identikit chintzy ditties farted from the mouth hole of strumpets like Kylie and Sonia, to have an LP that had pedigree combined with a progressive outlook was nothing short of mind-blowing.

Ian Brown’s non-conventional vocals delivered in an unabashed northern accent challenged the prevailing fear that modern pop music was destined to be squeezed out as cleanly and antiseptically as bars of soap on a production line. And the 80s, it seemed, were over.

Key tracks: ‘Waterfall’ ‘I am the Resurrection’

Now That's What I Called Music: My Top 15 LPs of the 1980s: Part Two: 1983-87

2010-02-08T19:03:00.005Z

6. Pink Floyd - The Final Cut (1983)
I didn't understood anything that was going on in this record when I nicked it off my dad. I understood that Roger Waters was pissed off with Maggie Thatcher and wasn’t keen on war. I knew he was upset about his dad. I also assumed he wasn’t keen on Japanese ship builders.

Despite not fully getting the themes or even knowing what some of the words meant, I always liked the sound and feel of it. It’s not that much different to the sound of ‘The Wall’ or even ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ but there’s a little less about being a mental case which was a bit less frightening for a ten year old. As time went on, I kept coming back to the LP as I began to understand it more and more, I liked it more and more. This culminated on seeing him perform parts of it live in Hyde Park a few summers ago, which was very good indeed.

Key tracks: ‘The Post War Dream’ ‘The Gunner’s Dream’

7. Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Welcome to the Pleasuredome (1984)
There's a line in The Commitments where expound Jimmy Rabbitte's supposed cultural genius by being the first person to spot FGTH and the first person to realise they were shit. I decided they were shit as soon as I heard their second LP. I have remained a fan of this one though since my mum bought me what I suspected to be a fake or stolen copy of it from the market one Friday when I was supposed to be at school.

It’s like a kindergarten concept album played for kicks. It’s a sprawling mess of weirdness, but it’s tied together somehow probably due to Trevor Horn’s production. The album infers through its track listing, oblique packaging and knowing marketing that it’s about heavy themes of sex, death and war. But really it’s just a collection of some harmless titillation and Ronald Regan impersonations, and it’s all the better for it. It’s a bit of a joke, but essentially it’s a good one.

Key tracks: ‘Welcome to the Pleasuredome’ ‘The Power of Love'

8. Various Artists - Then Came Rock n Roll (1984)
This may seem like a bit of a cheat, but this was the first LP I bought on my own and it was released in the 1980s. Just walking into Woolies with some pocket money, I wanted ‘Johnny B. Goode’, I’d heard it on the radio. I’d loved the original rock n roll look for a long time, probably due to watching too many movies, but also because there was a gang of Teddy Boys who used to hang out on the camp site in Camber where we spent summer holidays that we looked up to.

I listened to this record over and over again and read the nominal biographies of people like Gene Vincent and Fats Domino. I loved the simplicity and exotic nature of those records. There was nothing in there that sounded anything thing like real-life. All these American place names and cars and girls sounded like they were singing about another planet. Even the pop records of the 60s didn’t really seem to link in with the kind of outer space-ness of these punchy little dance numbers. And I think they still stand on their own as unique products of a very particular time.

Key tracks: ‘Blueberry Hill’ Fats Domino ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love?’ Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers

9. Various Artists - Street Sounds Electro 6 (1985)
My old man still tells me of his relief when I turned my back on 'all that electro crap'. The truth is I never really have, they just don’t make it like this any more. My introduction to Morgan Khan’s pioneering mixes was a fourth generation cassette of Electro Crucial 2 with Tyrone Brunson’s ‘Smurph’ and Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’.

Street Sounds’ Electro sets were not easy to find in my neck of the woods which added to the exotic feel of the music. The fact that older people refused to see any value in it and didn’t care to learn how it was made added to the appeal. I imagine its the closest I’ll ever get to feeling what it was like for kids on the 50s trying to get hold of early rock n roll.

The sixth instalment was my personal favourite due to the battle-rap narrative on Side A between UTFO and Roxanne Shanté. Sadly by volume 10 I’d had enough, but for a brief time it felt like the future.

Key tracks: ‘Roxanne, Roxanne’ ‘Roxanne’s Revenge’

10. Paul Simon - Graceland (1987)
This was the last record my old man ever bought before he gave up on new music. It was also one of the first ones I listened to using headphones – which might explain why I liked it so much. The lead single ‘Call Me Al’ had come to my attention due to the presence of a certain Chevy Chase in the video and the line, ‘ducked back down the alley with a rolly polly little bat-faced girl’.

But it was the incorporation of South African sounds on songs like ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ and ‘Homeless’ that made it for me. The general atmosphere that was created across the record made stand out from a lot of what was going on at the time and made it feel quite mysterious in an odd way. Or maybe that was the new headphones.

Key tracks: ‘Graceland’ ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’

Now That's What I Called Music: My Top 15 LPs of the 1980s: Part One: 1980-82

2010-02-07T18:26:00.013Z

Evidently there's been an 80s revival going on. The kids all look like they've borrowed their clobber off of Trevor Horn, the synthesiser is back on the Christmas list, there's a whopping great recession on and there's even a sequel to Oliver Stone's 'Wall Street' coming out.

It's a little weird for me having been there first time around. Unlike the various 50s and 60s revivals that I have probably been guilty of falling for, this time I can see just how much is romanticised, how much is nostalgia, what is swept under the carpet and what is pure fiction. There’s a lopsided view of the decade that suggests a simple narrative and a uniform fashion. Whereas, my memory was of an incredibly divisive time with a sharply splintered culture – even in school. The world was split between East and West and England was divided between North and South - rich and poor. And there were so many different youth cults that determined what records you bought that it makes it hard for me to envisage a distinct 80s "look".

I was seven when the decade dawned and I left it as I was about to start my first job and leave home. It was the last time I spent without responsibility - as a teen. That time in your life that pop music was invented for. Another thing that makes the period unique for me was that it the last time music was almost exclusively contemporary. So here they are. It's not an arch and trendy list compiled with hindsight suggesting that these are the 'best' or 'coolest' LPs of the period. It's my personal top 15 LPs that came out in that decade, was bought by me in that decade, and to a greater of lesser degree I still listen to now.

1. Adam and the Ants - Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980)
Christmas Eve, 1980, my Aunty Trishie’s house, Wainscot, Kent. Someone dressed as Santa with a cotton wool beard pulls an LP shaped gift from a black plastic bin liner. A little seven-year-old me thinks he knows what it is but can’t be sure. You never really know how much Santa knows about what you've been up to. I read the gift tag out loud to the amassed adults. It was from Santa, of course it was. The other kids look on patiently, desperately suppressing their excitement and natural raging greed. I tear off the paper and reveal, printed on that glossy 12” by 12” piece of cardboard, a picture of the wild man with the white stripe on his face whose been splattered all over ‘Look In’ magazine and ‘Swap Shop’. And I have my first LP and the rest of Santa’s performance is duly ignored as I read and re-read the track listing and sleeve notes.

Despite what may have been a a cynical attempt to woo younger music fans after his disillusionment with punk after McLaren stole his first band, ‘Kings...’ is still a marvellous record 30 years on, with Ant and Marco Pironi blending the guitar sounds influenced by Link Wray and Duane Eddy with Burundi drums. And so what if he was targeting his work at kids rather than the snot-nosed elitists in the punk set? I was seven years old. And what greater appeal to a kid than his taking the outlaw myth of rock n roll back to the pirates, highwaymen and Red Indians? The very staples of the 1950s culture that more than likely inspired the childhood versions of people like Keith Richards and Bob Dylan in the first place.

Key tracks: ‘Dog Eat Dog’ ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’

2. Bill Conti / Frank Stallone / Survivor - Rocky III: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1982)
The music on this LP is too often used for the purpose of parody, especially the opening bombast of Chicago cock-rockers Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’. In truth, the Rocky II soundtrack was better as it featured more of Conti’s orchestrations but this is still something very special.

At first it seems that the inclusion of Sly’s little brother Frank smacks of nepotism, and that’s because it is nepotism, but I’ve been humming ‘Take You Back’ for nearly 30 years. Conti’s score for the first three Rocky films are some of the best soundtrack work ever made and it is virtually impossible to listen to ‘Gonna Fly Now’ without getting a little bit excited which is why I want it played at my funeral.

Key tracks: ‘Take You Back’ ‘Gonna Fly Now’

3. Dexy's Midnight Runners - Too Rye Aye (1982)
It's sad to see how Dexy's are portrayed on American telly. They crop up on VH1's One Hit Wonders of the 80s being ridiculed as a dungaree clad novelty troupe of wallies outside a corner shop clanging out the wedding fave 'Come On Eileen'. They are even mocked on an episode of the Simpsons in a piece pointing out the worthlessness of Grammy awards. This is the problem of the MTV generation. Beware the image you create for yourself, for in a decade of dress-up, if you manage to score that international hit, your life can be remembered by something akin to a Polaroid taken at a fancy dress party. No matter how many wonderful achievements you may have, or great art you have made that picture is all that remains. The thing with Kevin Rowland was that it was not so much an image that he cultivated as a philosophy - however ham-fisted. The blend of brassy soul punchers and Celtic fiddles mixed matched perfectly with his unique world view. Whether he’s channelling Van Morrison or Jackie Wilson himself managed to produce a full LP of massive tracks that deserve more.

Key tracks: ‘Plan B’ ‘Let’s Make This Precious’

4. Madness - Complete Madness (1982)
This LP was as essential for a kid where I grew up as a Han Solo figurine. This had a lot to do with their pantomime video performances and the fact they came to our home town every years to play in a charity five-a-side football tournament. The ‘M’ with a pork pie hat was one of the most commonly graffitied images in my school.

This compilation coincided with, again what seemed to be a deliberate attempt to target the younger audience, which I was a part of. Although as I got older I moved towards the more serious and grown up themes of The Specials as a kid the zany cartoon of the songs felt like flipping through The Beano. Despite this infantilisation of pop they did manage to cover some more significant themes such as interracial relationships with ‘Embarrassment’. Although by the time I went to see them in 1984 with my uncle, the audience looked a lot like a school assembly.

Key tracks: ‘One Step Beyond’ ‘My Girl’

5. Michael Jackson - Thriller (1982)
I thought of writing an obituary on here when Jackson went the way of Elvis last year. It was going to say that Jackson had been dead to me for a long time, and that his life in the last 20 years had been like some ghoulish living afterlife. His life appears to have been one of the most tragic examples of how global fame may be one of modern life’s saddest perversions. It’s also true that Michael has done more to single-handedly destroy soul music than any other musician, bringing in the age of hyper-choreographed super video, and the use of heavy rock histrionics, but when your nine years of age and a man is making the paving stones light up with his feet, global superstardom like that is hard to ignore.

I rented the Thriller video from my local video shop, paying the amount you’d pay for a feature film for what is effectively a commercial for a record. I was a huge fan of John Landis and watched it so many times that I began to learn the routine. Jackson invented a certain kind of musical event around this time that was hard to ignore. Until the music starting getting weird and he was surrounded by more and more children that is.

Key tracks: ‘Billie Jean’ ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’

Remakes We'd Like to See. One: The Matrix

2010-01-31T13:27:00.008Z

Re-makes are dogplop and indicative of Hollywood's alarming creative redundancy. Everyone knows this. Why do the studios insist on taking perfectly fine flicks and turning them into shit. Why not take shit films and turn them into something I can watch drunk? I've only watched The Matrix once and thought it smacked of missed opportunity.

The original

An oddly green-tinted action flick with new special effects, ruined by shit sunglasses and Keanu Reeves. The overall effect of its attempted “cleverness” is akin to getting stoned with an eighteen year old with one of those "magic eye" posters.

Our remake

1967. Swinging London. Drugs, free love, mini skirts, great tunes. An ageing William Shatner plays divorced American alcoholic Bob R. Feinfeld. And while the city swings, he is depressed and waiting to die working in crippling solitude in an outpost of GloboBioCompuMegaTech. Bloated and suicidal Bob is shuffling along on his way from the lab late one night, swigging from a flask of scotch. He looks on at the beautiful people filing into fashionable clubs and considers that maybe tonight is the night to end it all.

Not looking where he is going, Bob bumps into a young girl called Marion played by Goldie Hawn’s daughter, looking exactly like Goldie Hawn in 1970’s ‘There’s a Girl in My Soup’. Essentially the next portion of the film is pretty much ‘There’s a Girl in My Soup’ as Marion takes Bob to a nightclub called The Matrix to see the house band played by The Flaming Lips (did I mention it was a musical with all the music written by The Lips?).

In the nightclub, Bob is introduced to a drug dealer based on Keith Richards personal dealer “Spanish” Tony Sanchez played by Bez. Bez persuades Bob to take a hit of what he thinks is acid. And soon he is transported into a wild and crazy world nothing is quite what it seems.

Here he meets a character called The Brother, who is a CGI recreation of Richard Pryor voiced using archive clips from Pryor’s films, stand-up and interviews. He explains that aliens (or whatever) are fucking with our heads and only Bob can save the day. He’ll need to find a character called The Governor to find out how to do this.

The following morning, thanks to cutting edge CGI, Bob wakes in the morning to find himself looking for all the world like William Shatner is his 60s heyday (still voiced by the real Bill). Bob and Marion head out to the East End to meet the infamous Governor (a nightclub owner and infamous gangster played by Michael Caine). When they meet with him however they soon discover that the real guru is in fact a talking Jack Russel (voiced by David Bowie) who sings them a song explaining that the world can only be saved by Bob.

They are then interrupted by a horde of swarthy moustachioed French kung fu agents played by Eric Cantona. The ensuing musical martial arts set pieces take place in not only London, but also San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury and locations in India. Culminating in a spectacular global freakout, where everyone drops Bez’s acid and has a really good time. There are no sequels.

My 50 Favourite Jews: New Entries

2010-01-13T19:10:00.003Z

Well, as part of our New Year celebrations here at Toxic Towers we thought we'd induct five new members into our pantheon of favourite Jews. Here goes, new in at number four is...

4. Debra WingerI was heavily mocked by Cousin Steve-O for renting and watching Terms of Endearment last year. I'd got hold of it to check out a supposedly legendary performance from Jack Nicholson. As it turns out I was enthralled by Debra Winger. She has the perfect blend of sassy, foxy and moxy. And the film was proper sad. The next thing I did was get hold of a copy of Urban Cowboy, which I'd been a fan of since my peculiar John Travolta obsession when I was about twelve. Urban Cowboy may be the greatest film ever made, and much of that is to do with Winger. The stories about the giant cocaine mess that accompanied the production are part of the reason why Debra turned her back on Hollywood (and not in a sulky way). I don't remember her being in Wonder Woman snd I've not even seen Officer and a Gentleman yet.

10. Steven Spielberg

Ignoring the irritating obsession with seeing everything "through a child's eyes" (he even felt the need to include a wee girl in a red coat prancing around inexplicably in his story of the holocaust), the pleasure the world has got from films like Close Encounters, Raiders, ET and of course Jaws means that only a fool would deny Steven a place in their favourite Jews. I'm not sure we can hold the deluded sentimentality of his latter films against him any longer, especially when the kids in his early flicks were actually a whole lot more likeable than real children. Altogether now: "Zero charisma! Cintus suprimus!"

20. Ike Turner

Yes, he converted to Judaism. A regular in the pages of Toxic Monday Morning Office Blues, Again, Ike gets a bad rap for beating Tina to death (see New York Post headline) but what is overlooked is just how much of a pivotal figure he was in the birth of rock'n'roll and soul music. It helps that he was as mad as a bag of ankles and lived that particularly outlaw lifestyle, replete with too many drugs, delusions, paranoia, guns, misguided politics, and bizarre sartorial choices. There are many musicians that have done far less and given more credit.

36. Amy WinehouseAlright, so I'm bored of reading about her and hearing her music from the headphones of idiots, but ubiquity should not tarnish her musical achievements. She is as genuine, eccentric and damaged as Ian Dury and she is the best British female soul singer since Sade, or even Dusty. Although Boy George was good too.

50. Randy Savage

Ooooh YEAH! Leaping Lanny Poffo's brother is one of my all time favourite eeejits. When I watched wrestling, his gimmick is wife-beating and his arch rival was a man with a hairy back. His peculiar twitching, lip licking interview technique brought to mind the actions of a particularly greedy connoisseur of cocaine. And the WWF thought it was a good idea to sell him as a hero to children. And in turn he sold highly processed meat products on telly. Only in America.

Sadly with these new inductees, it means we have to say goodbye to: Jerry Springer, R.B. Kitaj, Stephen Malkmus, David Beckham and Moses who have dropped out the bottom of our list. Shalom mothertruckers!

Welcome to Music Town

2010-01-07T16:08:00.011Z

This will definitely be filed under those posts that nobody reads, but we’re tickling our music geek gland here at Toxic Towers by building our own Music Town, just like the city that Jefferson Starship built using only rock’n’roll. So no more introduction is needed to this spiel. Here goes…

Streets
• Positively 4th Street - Bob Dylan
• Across 110th Street - Bobby Womack
• Dead End Street - Lou Rawls
• The Dark End Of The Street - Percy Sledge
• Dead End Street - The Kinks
• Soul Street - Eddie Floyd
• Beat Street - Grandmaster Flash
• Sunny Goodge Street - Donovan
• The 59th Bridge Street Song (Feelin' Groovy) - Simon & Garfunkel
• Shaking Up Orange Street - Prince Buster
• Fascination Street - The Cure
• Rain Street - The Pogues
• Late Night, Maudlin Street - Morrissey
• Friday Street - Paul Weller

Our Music Town has fourteen streets winding through it. It has two classic American numbered streets. One is Positively Mr. Dylan’s 4th Street and second is Bobby Womack’s ominous 110th Street, which leads nicely into one of our Dead End Streets, suitably the one where Lou Rawls grew up (I Imagine this is where Percy Sledge is having his illicit rendezvous at the Dark End of the Street). The other cul de sac, home to Ray Davies and co., hasn’t quite got that soul heritage, but is no less bleak. Unlike the self-explanatory soul food bonanza on offer at Eddie Floyd’s Soul Street. Grandmaster Flash’s Beat Street is full of the sort of political portent you d expect from the classic era of hip-hop.

Obviously in a sunnier part of town, Donavon’s violent hash smoker is shaking a chocolate machine in his Sunny Goodge Street, and Paul Simon is talking to lampposts and feeling groovy on 59th Bridge Street. Meanwhile, Prince Buster is shaking away on Orange Street.

It’s opening time for The Cure on Fascination Street, just in time for The Pogue’s to leave Rain Street and have an ale or twenty. When the pub closes no doubt it’ll be time for Morrissey to get all weepy on Maudlin Street. Which will be a usual start to the weekend on Paul Weller’s Friday Street, which leads us neatly to the roads…

Roads
• Stanley Road - Paul Weller
• Thunder Road – Bruce Springsteen
• The Long And Winding Road - The Beatles
• Why Don't We Do It In The Road? - The Beatles
• I've Been Down That Road Before - Hank Williams
• Take Me Home Country Roads - John Denver
• True Love Travels on a Gravel Road - Percy Sledge
• Back Road into Town - Staple Singers
• Road To Nowhere - Talking Heads
• (There's a) Break in the Road - Betty Harris
• Joppa Road – Ween
• On the Road Again - Bob Dylan
• On the Road Again - Canned Heat
• On the Road Again - Willie Nelson

Weller’s second residence at Stanley Road, leads right into the Boss’ Thunder Road and through to Macca’s thoroughly depressing Long and Winding Road (where he’s wondering why we don’t “do it” there). Hank Williams has been down that road before and has learnt not to be a bully. John Denver’s on his way home via those country roads, and Mr. Sledge reappears taking his true love down the Gravel Road.

The Back Road into Town tells its own sad tale for The Staple Singers, while Talking Heads are getting lost on the Road to Nowhere. There’s a Break in the Road where Betty Harris lives. Ween are thinking you look great tonight on Joppa Road, while you can find Dylan, Canned Heat and Willie Nelson on one of these roads most of the time singing different but brilliant tunes.

Crossroads
• Crossroad Blues - Robert Johnson
• Standing at the Crossroads – Elmore James

Of course there needs to be the obligatory crossroads for old black fellas to make Faustian pacts, or we’d have no music to build a town on. Robert Johnson and Elmore James are happy to oblige.

Avenues
• Electric Avenue - Eddy Grant
• Cyprus Avenue - Van Morrison

I’ve always felt a little sorry for Eddy Grant when I think about the Happy Mondays stripping his Barbados recording studios of equipment and selling it bit by bit for crack. Having Electric Avenue in Music Town is probably a minor compensation, if any. Meanwhile I doubt Van Morrison cares as he’s conquered in a car seat on Cyprus Avenue.

Alleys
• Tin Pan Alley - Little Milton
• Razor Blade Alley - Madness
• Gasoline Alley - Rod Stewart
• Down In The Alley - Elvis Presley
• Down In The Alley - Memphis Minnie

We need back alleys and sidestreets for the seedier aspects of music's essential nourishment, and we’d be nowhere without Little Milton’s Tin Pan Alley. I would have thought Madness’ Razor Blade Alley would be an offshoot of Prince Buster’s Orange Street. Rod the Mod is getting back to where he was born in Gasoline Alley, where he might be met by The King is on his way to meet Janie, Janie, Janie Jane Jane and where Memphis Minnie is charging a dollar to get your business fixed all right!

Drives and Lanes
• Life In The Fast Lane - The Eagles
• Penny Lane - The Beatles
• Moonlight Drive - The Doors

In the more salubrious parts of town The Eagles are living in the Fast Lane while nurses are selling poppies from a tray in The Beatles’ Penny Lane and The Doors are penetrating the evening that the city sleeps to hide (or something) on Moonlight Drive. Whatever!

Highways
• Down The Highway - Bob Dylan
• Highway 51 Blues - Bob Dylan
• Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan
• Highway Patrolman - Bruce Springsteen
• Plastic Flowers On The Highway - Drive-By Truckers
• Route 66 - Chuck Berry

Thanks almost exclusively to Bob Dylan (who’s providing quite a lot of our infrastructure) Music Town can be accessed by various Highways (namely The Highway and Highways 51 and 61). The Boss provides the cops and Drive-Bu Truckers fittingly leave the Plastic Flowers if there’s an accident. Chuck Berry's Route 66, of course would also lead here.

Fields, Parks, Lakes and Valleys
• Strawberry Fields Forever - The Beatles
• Cotton Fields - Creedence Clearwater Revival
• The Green Fields Of France - The Fureys
• Madman Running Through The Fields - Dantalian's Chariot
• Rock Creek Park - The Blackbyrds
• Itchycoo Park - The Small Faces
• Beechwood Park - The Zombies
• Sitting In The Park - Billy Stewart
• Boogie In The Park - Joe Hill Louis
• Up At The Lake - The Charlatans
• Pleasant Valley Sunday - The Monkees

Every town needs green spaces and thankfully Music Town provides quite a few of them. The Beatles, obviously provide Strawberry Fields, while CCR have their Cotton Fields, and The Furey’s are marking remembrance in The Green Fields of France. Zoot Money and Dantalian’s Chariot are on something as their Madman seems to be running through all of them.

The Blackbyrds, Small Faces and Zombies provide our three main parks (Rock Creek, Itchycoo and Beechwood) for us to sit or boogie in (depending on whether you’re more inclined to hang with Chess Records’ Billy Stewart or Sun Records’ Joe Hill Louis). The Charlatans provide a nice lake. And the local rock group the Monkees are trying hard to learn their songs this Sunday in Pleasant Valley.

Hills
• Up the Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire - The Small Faces
• Solsbury Hill - Peter Gabriel
• Running Up That Hill - Kate Bush
• The Fool on the Hill - The Beatles

The Small Faces’ ode to kipping gives us a series of hills in Music Town known as the Wooden Hills. One of them is probably called Solsbury Hill after that brief period where Peter Gabriel took a break from being a twat. Our Kate is Running Up That Hill to make a deal with God, but she’s likely to only bump into Macca’s Fool.

Rivers and Bridges
• Moon River - Louis Armstrong
• Green River - Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Weeping River - The Golden Toadstools
• Ohoopee River Bottomland - Larry Jon Wilson
• Big River - Johnny Cash
• Somewhere Down the Crazy River - Robbie Robertson
• Down A Different River - Super Furry Animals
• Caught By The River - Doves
• At The River's Edge - New Colony Six
• Cry Me A River - Marie Knight
• I'm Gonna Cry a River - Little Milton
• River Deep Mountain High - Ike & Tina
• Bridge Over Troubled Water - Simon & Garfunkel
• Misty Morning, Albert Bridge - The Pogues

Pittsburgh has three rivers and just over a million bridges so that enables us to buck wild here. Our little town seems to have at least seven rivers. The inimitable Louis Armstrong provides Moon River. CCR’s is Green while The Golden Toadstool’s is Weeping, Larry Jon Wilson’s is The Ohoopee, Johnny Cash’s is Big and Robbie Robertson is giving an enigmatic monologue somewhere down that Crazy River. The Super Furry Animals are down a Different River. In fact it seems the riverside is a hive of activity: Doves have been caught by one and New Colony Six are blowing their collective harp At The River's Edge. The source of these rivers may be due to Marie Knight’s instructions to Cry a River, and Little Milton acceptance of the challenge. Whether this is how the rivers became deep (or the mountains high) is Ike and Tina’s guess. Sadly we only have two bridges: Paul and Art’s Bridge Over Troubled Water may come in handy and The Pogues’ Albert Bridge is being transplanted to Music Town. We may need some ferries (but let’s not go there).

The Seaside
• Echo Beach - Martha & the Muffins
• Sideshow by the Seashore - Luna
• Under the Boardwalk - The Drifters
• (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay - Otis Redding

Of course Music Town is a seaside town. Why not? And why shouldn’t the beach be Martha’s Echo Beach, after all her job is very boring, she’s an office clerk. Luna are providing a Sideshow by the Seashore, The Drifters are hanging out Under the Boardwalk, and Otis is whistling away On the Dock of the Bay. Anyone fancy an ice cream?

Five Suggestions for 2010

2009-12-28T12:21:00.004Z

1. Revoke the Foxhunting Ban

But this time urbanise the game by arming and training bored and disaffected youths to hunt and kill the bin-content strewing, cocksure and rampant squealing-whilst-fornicating vermin on mopeds using crossbows. If the prospect of training youths this way leads to fears of creating a mutinous highly skilled insurgency like the one we're facing in Afghanistan, in this instance I'm happy to go down the mechanized slaughter route.

2. Introduce American-style Yellow School Buses
But not just for the school run. I envisage them being a compulsory mode of transport for anyone under 25, or those who cannot comprehend the function of earphones or the concept of privacy or shame whilst revealing their personal lives either to friends or on a mobile phone.

3. Discover a New Flavour
I don't know about you but I'm a little bored of the existing flavours on offer. I'm not just talking about discovering a new foreign cuisine from some far-flung corner of the planet. I think we need an entirely new ingredient. Isn't there something new we can farm? Like gryphons or gnomes? Or a new fruit or vegetable? And actually, isn't it time someone came up with a new drug? And while we're at it can we come up with a new colour, some new sounds and maybe a new type of weather.

4. Reinstate the Three-Day Week
I was too young to remember this last time round but logic suggests this leads to a four day weekend, so I never really understood why people were complaining about it.

5. Declare Someone the Winner and Hit the Re-Set Button
Most people at this time of year have been involved in some kind of friendly competition with people they know but don't see very often. Whether it was a family board game or drunken charades, I can't help thinking this is a little like global economics. And like the average game of Monopoly it's all got a bit messy and many of the players are beginning to feel something between frustration and abject depression. The easiest thing to do in this situation is to declare someone the winner. The problem being that we can't simply stop playing and get pissed in front of telly and wait for the day to end. So as there's another year to kill, why not start again from scratch allowing the globally acknowledged champions to defend their crown until this time next year. When we simply restart the whole pointless process from scratch again without all the crippling debt and starvation.

Happy New Year!

Fantasy Christmas Party Guests #5: Dock Phillip Ellis, Jnr

2009-12-16T17:37:00.001Z

Guest Number Five: Dock Ellis

The final guest to show up before we plop the prawn salads on the table is perhaps surprisingly a baseball player. But I’m not inviting him to discuss his athletic achievements per se (although there would seem to be many). In fact, despite the fact that I did live in the city where he made his name, or perhaps because of this, I’d like to sit down and pull a cracker with him because of one particular sporting accomplishment: throwing a no-hitter on acid.

It’s perhaps enough to say that playing any sport involving solid spheres hurtling around at high velocity whilst tripping is tricky enough. But considering a no-hitter statistically happens, on average, twice a year and usually once in a pitcher’s lifetime, this says something about a) the man, or b) the drug.

There’s plenty of stuff about Dock’s infamous achievement whilst pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1970 already on the web (including an ace animation). Essentially, the story goes that he visited a lady friend in LA thinking he had a day off and dropped acid and then, on realising his error, jumped on a flight to San Diego, scored some speed and had the game of his life. He claims that the ball changed size throughout the game and that at one point president Nixon was on the field.

That alone is reason enough to have him over, but a quick look into the life of Mr. Ellis, who ended up as a drugs counsellor who died of alcohol related illness, and you’ll notice that he shares a certain something with the rest of the guests: a wilfulness and contrary nature that may have hindered their careers – or possibly defined them.

Dock was also known for being maced for trying to get into Cincinnati’s stadium without ID and subsequently trying to hit every player on their side while playing them two years later. He insisted on wearing hair curlers to training and is said to have never played a game in the majors without being high one way or another.

So sit down with the masked comedy soul singer, the arch-antagonist civil rights wrestler, the proto-Ziggy Mateus messiah, and the lonely communist cowboy and have a slice of turkey. Merry Christmas!

Fantasy Christmas Party Guests #4: Dean Cyril Reed

2009-12-16T16:16:00.002Z

Guest Four: Dean Cyril Reed AKA Red Elvis

So the dinner party is warming up, three guests are already tucking into some mince pies and cheeses on sticks. Next to arrive is an all-American singing and acting sensation with over 18 films and 13 LPs under his belt, but unless you’re from the Soviet Bloc you may not have seen or heard any of them.

Our Dean was a handsome young buck from Denver, Colorado with initial plans to be a local TV weatherman until he set his sights on greater glory and stardom in Hollywood. He had some minor success there with some heartthrob hits but he was impatient and distrustful of the machine. But instead of going all Charlie Manson, Reed noticed that his tunes seemed to be going down well south of the border. Reed began working the South American markets of Argentina, Chile and Peru where he was amassing popularity and became increasingly politicised.

He began speaking out against poverty and promoting the tenets of international communism. He then moved to Italy and starred in spaghetti westerns and began touring the Soviet Bloc. The people there were enomoured with him in a way he was never received at home. A particularly popular trick was washing out the “blood of the Vietnamese” from the US Flag and then hanging it upside down. Eventually he moved to a ranch East Berlin given to him by the state in exchange for community projects. The whole time, his act remained stubbornly old fashioned and quintessentially American.

In 1986 Dean went on American telly’s 60 Minutes to bang on about what a good idea the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was and how the Berlin Wall was errectected in "self-defence". Anyone who’s ever watched Rocky IV can imagine that that went down like a shit sandwich with bum gravy. But the real tragedy, however was that his popularity was waning on the other side of the wall, as disillusionment with the system and a love of David Hasselhoff would eventually lead to the fall of communism in Europe.

Poor old Dean was found floating in the lake near his ranch in East Berlin. Some said he was taken out by the CIA, KGB or the Stasi, but the truth seems likely he just offed himself by driving after munching sleeping pills. It seems a shame really that he never seemed to get in step with anyone. It just goes to show that Dylan was right when he said: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Fantasy Christmas Party Guests #3: Brian Maurice Holden

2009-12-15T15:58:00.007Z

Guest Three: Brian Maurice Holden AKA Vince Taylor

The third person picking up a present from under the tree was born in Middlesex, raised in New Jersey, reinvented himself as the leather clad proto-punk rock’n’roller in London, was adored in France and died in Switzerland.

I first heard of Vince and his band the Playboys via the wireless in ‘97. I was living in a rented room in an old lady’s house in Norbury. It was cold and Mary Anne Hobbes was interviewing Bowie for his 50th birthday. He was talking about his influences for Ziggy Stardust. He mentioned a time in the late '60s when Vince was spreading a map out over the rush hour Tottenham Court Road pavement explaining to Bowie where all the aliens would land and assuring him he was a Sun God. The Rise and Fall, you see…

Vince’s rise came courtesy of his sister marrying one half of the cartoon empire Hanna-Barbera. Joe Barbera agreed to take Vince’s unique take on the first wave of rock’n’roll back to the UK. The problem was that Vince's take on the scene, although it captured all the swagger, attitude and style, displayed very little actual talent – at least in the traditional sense. He was one of the first performers in Britain to jump on the piano, writhe on the floor, scream at the instruments, wave a chain around, wear make-up and simply go a bit mental - well a lot mental. His far-out and unorthodox stage gyrations and increasingly erratic and paranoid antics could be quite unsettling for the the audiences at the time, indeed even for his band members. He had a habit of going AWOL and was evidently an "unconventional" timekeeper. But he still managed to cut some fine records. His '59 b-side ‘Brand New Cadillac’ has been covered by The Clash among others.

His career in France began in the early '60 after he was fired by The Playboys but still impressed the French audience. He had a period of success there apparently fuelled by pot, booze and speed, even supporting the Stones in Paris. By '65. However, the story goes that he visited the UK for a party for Bob Dylan and dropped his first hit(s) of acid and never really came back. Evidently he returned to Paris for a show unwashed, wired, wrapped in a sheet drinking Mateus Rose declaring to an audience: "You think I'm Vince Taylor, don't you? Well, I'm not, my name is Mateus, I'm the new Jesus, the son of God."

Welcome to the party Brian. The Mateus is in the fridge.

Fantasy Christmas Party Guests #2: Rock Brumbaugh

2009-12-15T14:55:00.013Z

Guest Two: Rock Brumbaugh AKA Sputnik Monroe

As you might have spotted, we at Toxic Towers are inviting a selection of people to dinner for a Yuletide feast and second up is Mr. Brumbaugh from Kansas.

As a young man in the early ‘50s Brumbaugh started fighting in carnivals, state fairs and rodeos. When there wasn’t much call for a boxer or wrestler he would goad members of the public into taking him on by hitting on their ladies or simply punching them in the face. Antagonism became something of an artform as he reinvented himself as the androgynous Pretty Boy Rocque. This involved him wearing pink tights and shoes with sequins and most dangerously of all in the South at the time; growing his hair long. He said of having long hair in 1951: 'all you had to do to get into a fight was get out of the car.'

As time moved on Brumbaugh began to wrestle professionally and it was his shenanigans in Memphis, TN that has garnered his invite to the Toxic Towers Christmas bash. Evidently on the way to the auditorium one night, he picked up a female black teenage hitchhiker and decided to ask her to escort him to the ring. This enraged the all-white audience. so being the arch antagonist he took it upon himself to go one further and kiss the girl. Someone in the audience, desperate for the most damning insult they could think of called him Sputnik insinuating he was a communist. And so the persona of Sputnik Monroe was born.

The second of our guests to have a white streak in his hair, Sputnik Monroe took the multi-racial angle and ran with it for a few years. At a time with Memphis’ Ellis Auditorium was strictly segregated and Brumbaugh would head on down to Beale Street to hand out tickets to his friends in the black community, he would then bribe doormen to let black people into the white areas, thus integrating the venue. He then to took the unconventional step of teaming up with a black tag partner, Norvel Austin. The effect of this made him a bad guy to whites and a good guy to blacks.

Whether he intended to, or was just being very good at winding people up, he may have put some of the first chinks in the armour of segregation in Memphis. Certainly it has been said that it was a way of black and white musicians beginning to talk to each other which may have paved the way for mixed-race bands like Booker T & the MGs. I suppose we’ll never know, but if he’s invited to dinner for nothing else, it will be for uttering the maxim: “Win if you can, lose if you must, always cheat, and if you have to leave the ring, leave tearing it down.”

Fantasy Christmas Party Guests #1: Harmon Bethea

2009-12-15T14:12:00.016Z

Jesus the Magic Carpenter was born on December 25th approximately 2009 years ago, right? And we all know from our reading that Jesus’ birthday means one thing and one thing only: Parlour Games!

So as a treat for all you Parlour Game fanatics, we at Toxic Towers are playing a special seasonal version of the classic: Who Would Be Your Ideal Dead People To Invite To A Dinner Party. Instead of using our stock answers (which we keep to maintain my pseudo-bourgeois exterior, whilst talking to other people who’d rather talk about tits and football but figure this will make them more interesting) we’ve decided to go for five people that have been on our minds over the last twelve months. We think they’re all dead, corrections welcome. OK, here we go...

Guest One: Harmon Bethea AKA Maskman

No-one really knows what went on in the DC abode of veteran R&B performer Harmon Bethea the day he decided to don an oversized Lone Ranger mask and dye a white flash in his hair, but he did and his band went from being the plain old Cap-Tans to the altogether more mysterious Maskman & The Agents.

The Maskman made some big enough tunes with a voice not too unlike some up-tempo Otis Redding tracks. But the lyrics are the reason he’s having a turkey dinner in my brain this Christmas. The Maskman AKA The Love Bandito liked to declare to the world that he had, ‘$50 shoes and boogaloo suit and crazy hats’ because ‘girls like it like that. He seemed to have a fascination with women who wore wigs (in the song 'Wigs') and sung of his disappointment that the civil rights act didn’t extend to banning cockroaches from buses (in 'Roaches').

But he really came into his element with the ’68-’69 singles ‘One Eye Open’ and ‘My Wife, My Dog and My Cat’. It may be that Bethea invented a sub-genre of soul, that could be called "pussy whipped funk". ‘One Eye Open’ is a grooved out little ditty about a schoolteacher called Melinda claiming to be teetotal until he gets her to the big city and marries her. At which point she starts coming home tore up and sleeping with her fists balled up. The Maskman’s buddy on the record asks him asks him if he still sleeps with her, and he declares that he has to sleep with one eye open or risk of losing his life (hence the song title). She puts glue in his gravy to make him shut his mouth and variously tries to poison him, but still the Maskman stays.

This is topped by ‘My Wife, My Dog and My Cat’ whose sound is more akin to something out of Eric and Ernie’s That Riviera Touch than anything approaching serious soul. This time his wife is a nightshift nurse who has allied herself with the family pets to stop Maskman putting on his $50 shoes and his crazy hat and going round his buddy Bill’s apartment. Of course, Maskman can't resist a party and he's soon there to witness "a table full of booze, all kinds of food" and girls "as fat as country possums stuffed with sweet potatoes in mini-skirts and crazy sweaters'" Maskman declares suddenly that he wants a sandwich and the girls start doing a dance called the squeeze yer knees. Just as he's about to join in, you guessed it, the wife and the pets burst in and take him home.

Hopefully he can stay a little bit longer at the Christmas party.

They're Back!

2009-10-08T14:16:00.014+01:00

OK, I'm calling it! The Tories are back in power. Even before the formality of Diddy “Dave” Cameron making his conference speech or the little matter of an election, the blue meanies are back. And funnily enough, it feels kind of right, doesn't it? Like the whole last twelve years was just some convoluted dream sequence like that one in Dallas where the plot just got more and more unbelievable. When it all started, it looked so promising, what with Portillo's sour face and all. Britain was heading forward into some time bubble paradox of infinite neo-Sixties cool where the good guys had won and the dusty old senile unicorn and lion toffs were finally being sent out to pasture. The Beatles had taken over the train in Hard Day’s Night and there were free drugs for everyone. And then Di died and the florists made a mint and we remembered just how shit and tasteless we all were, and then the wars and the lies and the ASBOs and the CCTV and the rest of it. And before long we realised that the whole thing had been a PR stunt paid for on credit cards. And as the architects of the nightmare ran off into the sunset clutching satchels of stolen sunbeams, they left behind a dead political system in which ideologies had been replaced with an endless PowerPoint presentation of smug.

Ironically they left a man in charge who is so unpalatable, uncharismatic and lacking the sheen it takes to be a modern politician that his name has become so synonymous with shit that he may as well be a 1980s Skoda filled with Hi-Tec trainers - and shit. It isn't helped that Gordon Brown has a face like a collage of a thousand painful unwanted pregnancy smiles nailed to a wet fart with a hole in the middle. He never stood a chance.

And so on to his replacement. Diddy “Dave” Cameron is a man so devoid of conviction or ideas, so obviously in it for power for power’s sake, so much like a, well, a politician, that I find myself looking over his shoulder for the person who’s operating him. He looks like a hand cranked pre-pubescent Nazi lemon drop. He seems to have mutated the Tory annual conference from a vaguely threatening, stale-smelling, sexually repressed, cod-fascist rally with bearded old ladies waving Union Flags under a banner of an all conquering torch logo to something that resembles some mangled trip experienced by the gay one out of the Teletubies whilst having the opening credits from vintage GMTV injected into your cerebral cortex under the banner of a fucking child’s drawing of a tree! The man’s a maniac! And a maniac with such an anamorphic sense of purpose it’s impossible not to think that his brain must be a miniature lie factory so small, unimaginative and transparent it would be like those flashing lights you find inside novelty bouncy balls. Yet, every time he spews new lies, we vaguely marvel at how they get the lights in there, neglecting to acknowledge that he has never uttered a single word of truth.

It’s like the whole time he spent cycling around the North Pole pretending to be a husky humping environmentalist, thus distancing himself vaguely from the identikit policies he shared with New Labour and simultaneously trying to convince people that he wasn’t an old Etonian coke-jockey with a penchant for setting peasants on fire. This was all dropped like an unwanted irradiated mutant baby sea lion cub when the inevitable madness of our trinkets for chores lifestyle bubble burst into a thousand million shattered illusions and suddenly he was a serious political alternative and harbinger of Obama-style change and awe!

I wonder sometimes if Tony Blair is not the evil mastermind behind the whole thing. It all stems from him anyway. And now he’s somehow about to become fucking president of the EU. With his gormless fucking grin of a face looming over the whole sorry mess like some painted untouchable ninja aunt Sally on a Jack-in-the-Box spring powered by some misguided papist fervour. Or maybe even more sinisterly, they’ve all been little more than an instrument of Peter “Mandy” Manleson anyway, who might just turn out to be an evil ice queen exacting revenge on a cruel world after an irreversible botched cock job.

But it seems it has little to do with puppet masters and it will all seemingly come down to a battle of the Chancellors. Which is terrifying when you consider their collective ineptitude. When I think of Alistair Darling I can picture nothing but a pair of tiny frightened eyes staring out from under an unnervingly large single black arse hair stuck to the back of a withered and unloved piece of one of those blue bars of Imperial Leather soap left down the side of the toilet in a house where the owner has long since died. But George Osborne, he's just a clueless snivelling vacant arse-crawling career Tory cunt who’s just cut my fucking wages and extended my working life in order to get a box of Raisin Poppets from his fetid evil overlords.

They all show a pathetic lack of commitment to anything vaguely like virtue or ethic. But if we're honest, how can we expect them to be committed to anything when we, ourselves are so pathetically indifferent and fickle? I can barely sit through a whole song these days without getting the urge to hit the skip button, I've started more books than I'll ever finish and I fall in and out of love with football approximately every 3.7 seconds. I can’t even stay true the basic tenets of my life. I’m beginning to obsess about my job. I mean, I sometimes get excited about it and do it at home. I’m losing faith in the restorative power of cigarettes. I’ve lost the guts and passion I had for drinking.

And even now as the slicer falls at work another boss seems to get sacked every week and the emails come round that no one safe from the chop. I have this peculiar feeling – like pride or something – or that I’m vaguely relishing the challenge. Even though the people that came up with the very idea of my job have long since been fired, I continue apace. And even begin to define myself by their fleeting invention. Unlike Freddy Nietzsche after he ran into the Market square and began snogging horses I am unable to accept that God is dead. Our leaders are no longer even playing the game, yet we gladly scuttle around doing their bidding. And let’s face it, it's the natural order. It’s not only that there’s no difference between the politicians in either party, there’s no difference between us and them. Yet no one seems to be able to see it. Especially not me or why would I be spewing this drivel? Were all dead, we just refuse to lie down.

Nanktime, Bitchus! I'm Going All Rap!

2009-09-30T00:40:00.000+01:00

So, it’s time to think up something new, I thought. Hippetty Hop! It was staring me in the boatrace. I’ll become a rapper. Rapping is hip. Rapping is still crazy after all these years. And I’m going to reinvent myself as a rapper.

So, I needed a name, a “street name” like Turbo and Ozone (or even Special K). So I thought of Sank4Nank. Yeah boy! You got it! It’s got that mental number/letter mashup thing going. I could have gone for Sumfin4Nuffin but I wanted a UK “flava” to my sound, as I’m thinking I’ll be based here even though I’ll be from America. Like Chrissie Hynde or Madonna or Katie Puckrick only more male – and black, like.

When my first album “drops” those who pick it up will notice that it is called ‘Everybody Loves Sank4Nank’. And has a picture of me surrounded by foxy bitchus and hoes and bottles of shampoo and expensive choclits and shit. I’ll be being fanned with Houblons (£50 notes in case you haven't seen one for a while - like the rest of us) and I’ll be talking on a big phone wearing England cricket merchandise, shitty day-glo sunglasses and exposing my gold teeth with a huge smile.

My second album will explore darker themes with the lead single Dopesick Nutsack showing what to expect on ‘Nobody Gets Sank4Nank’. The cover shoot is effectively the same scene but the party-goers have dispersed the sunglasses are broken, a tooth is missing and I am surrounded by tabloids featuring lurid stories about the myriad controversies and scandals Sank4Nank has been involved in since being jettisoned to fame.

After a short self-imposed exile (and a greatest hits and remix CD called 'Do U Wanna Know Sank4Nank') the third album will be considered a heroic return to form exploring new areas in Hippety Hop, never before even imagined. Entitled ‘The Titanic Sank4Nank’ it will feature the oft-used rapper cliché of Sank4Nank dressed like a very posh aristocrat with a dinner suit and a monocle standing on the deck of the Titanic – cool as ice – as chaos breaks out around him.

Then I’ll get shot or stabbed or hit with a lead pipe and die – immortalising my status as king of the newly named Nank Hop. Questions will be asked forever as to whether I faked my death, due to all the clues about escaping on a life raft on ‘The Titanic...’ album.

They will continue to unearth rubbish I started in the studio and release them on cash-in CDs with pictures of me dying on the cover or airbrushed mock-ups of me in heaven. These will have shit names like 'Mo' Sank Fo' Yo' Nank' and 'There Ain't No Sank4Nank In This Life Anymo''.

But before I do that – to flesh out my new persona, I need a name that then could lead to my street name. A Charles Ridenhour to my Chuck D. Tracy Marrow to my Ice T. A Marshall Mathers to my Eminem. And Robert Van Winkle to my Vanilla Ice. So behind my gangsta exterior – ladies and gentlemen – meet the shy and retiring Barry Lacy. A computer science major from NYU who grew up in tough streets of Duluth, Minnesota.

Barry Lacy, I think I’ll get used to being Barry Lacy for a while before I truly unleash Sank4Nank on the world. Peace out Nankers.

Sank4Nank’s Covers Album

2009-09-29T19:23:00.002+01:00

Disc One: Sank

1. Sank - The Beatles
2. Sank’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart - Gene Pitney
3. Sank Happened - Billy Bragg
4. (There Is Always) Sank There To Remind Me – Sandie Shaw
5. He Was Really Sayin' Sank - The Velvelettes
6. When Sank is Wrong With My Baby - Sam & Dave
7. I Started Sank I Couldn't Finish - The Smiths
8. Everybody's Got Sank To Hide Except Me And My Monkey – The Beatles
9. Sank Changed - Pulp
10. You Do Sank To Me - Paul Weller
11. Sank in the Air - Thunderclap Newman
12. I Wanna Do Sank Freaky To You - Leon Haywood

Disc Two: Nank

1. Nank's Gonna Stop Us Now - Starship
2. Aint Nank Goin' On But The Rent - Gwen Guthrie
3. Girls Ain't Nank But Trouble - DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince
4. Ain't Nank Like The Real Thing - Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell
5. All Or Nank - The Small Faces
6. Do Nank - The Specials
7. William, It Was Really Nank - The Smiths
8. Talking Loud And Saying Nank - James Brown
9. Nank Was Delivered - The Byrds
10. Nank But a G Thang - Snoop Doggy Dog
11. Don't Say Nank Bad (About My Baby) - The Cookies
12. Beyond Here Lies Nank - Bob Dylan

Ten Great Reasons To Dig The End Of Summer

2009-09-29T17:07:00.007+01:00

1. Sleep
The nights are cooling down, the birds are fucking off back to where they come from. The beasties are beginning to hibernate. There’s no point in getting up early as it will be like the middle of the night

2. Darkness in general
It’s going to be dark soon for a really long time. By November the sun won’t be up till 8am and will be buggering off again by 4pm. That’s SIXTEEN glorious hours of nighttimes to snuggle up and dream and diddle in. And its cosy inside with the heating on and the lights. And telly. And tea. And you can wonder about doing loads of stuff without people seeing you. You can hide in the darkness. No-one is checking your expression or caring about what you wear. You can shuffle along smoking ciggies leaving plumes of smoke and breathsteam like anonymous steam train people. Alternatively it’s great for either: breaking the law or masked crime fighting. Take your pick.

3. Lights
The sky is titanium white or slate grey during the day and solid black at night. This makes lights look good. Especially those orange street lights that reflect off the wet floor that you look at while you shuffle along smoking and avenging crime. And while we’re at it, I like doodling in the condensation of bus windows.

4. Smell
The coldness stops my bins from stinking. Even the scumbags on the bus don’t pong as much as the temperature drops. Pubs, however, smell even more inviting.

5. Less arseholes
People guilt themselves into going outside when it’s “nice weather” even if they have no desire to do so. This causes a situation that fills pubs with people who don’t like pubs. People who don’t like what pubs are for. These are the people that cause things like smoking bans. Pubs are places for miserable people to go and fill themselves with toxic substances with other miserable bastards. They don’t need food or smoothies or board games. They don’t actually need anything other than booze and people who want to drink it. Everything else is a fad.

6. Less tourists
And even if there are tourists you can’t see them in the dark.

7. Coats and scarves and hats and parkas
And absolutely no chance of seeing a man’s foot exposed.

8. Booze
Might as well. There’s nothing better to do. And of course there’s more chance of sleeping it off.

9. Stew and soup
Proper food – salads remain on the side or inside your burger or kebab. Women are cramming their yaps with chocolate and everyone accepts we’re all going to get a little fatter.

10. Football
I can’t stop loving it. It’s back and it’s like bad junk. Sweet and poisonous. And floodlights are ace.

Improved!

2009-08-14T19:33:00.004+01:00

That's better!

Dave Jenning's Paradise Lost

2009-08-07T10:11:00.005+01:00

Donald Sutherland’s portrayal of Dave Jennings in Animal House is one of my favourite screen characters of all time. He smoked pot and knocked off his students. And not just any student but the Delta’s cool as fuck beer pouring beauty Katy, played by Karen Allen. Allen was the coolest chick in the flicks when I was a kid. In The Wanderers she was the beatnik older cool chick, in Raiders of the Lost Ark she was the sassy shot draining cool chick, Starman she was a cool cowboy boot wearing hillbilly humanist, and in Scrooged she was the idealist cool chick. And Dave Jennings was banging her in Animal House.

Dave is only in three scenes in the movie. There’s one where he bares his arse reaching for cornflakes wearing only a cardigan. There’s another where he gets a bunch of his students stoned and explains his ‘piece of shit’ book to them. Essentially, atoms in our fingernails could plausibly contain an entire universe, and that our universe could be contained in one atom in the fingernail of another giant being. Like, wow!

The other scene shows us Mr. Jennings actually working. Now, I’ve never read Milton’s Paradise Lost, and when comedy cleverclogs Armando Iannucci did a BBC documentary recently I thought I'd see what I was missing. It started with a vox pop on London’s Millennium Bridge and I wasn’t surprised that not many other people had got round to plowing through the epic poem. What did surprise me was that none of them had seemingly paid attention during Animal House. In the scene in question, Jennings stands in front of the class symbolically eating an apple and posits: ‘We all know from our reading that the most intriguing character is Satan. Now, was Milton trying to tell us that being bad was more fun than being good?’ Armed with that, I could have blagged it to Armando to look like I knew what I was talking about. I might have made it into the documentary, quoting a line from Animal House to an unwitting comedy writer dipping his toes into the highbrow pool. But, no. I wasn't on the bridge that day.

However, the documentary was good enough and I learnt one or two things. But essentially Dave Jennings summarisation will stick with me far longer, as he confesses that most people find Milton boring, even his wife, and that he goes on too long and his jokes were terrible. But that does not excuse anyone for their responsibility for the material. He wasn’t joking, it was his job!

The next thing you know Iannucci will be doing a 90 minute documentary on the possibility of miniverses existing inside fingernails. All the while not knowing that Jennings pipped him to the post 30 years ago in a piece of shit book.

John Hughes Mobile Disco

2009-08-06T23:50:00.003+01:00

So, I’ve been home for the last two weeks. I tend to take my holidays at home. I tend to fart around doing nothing. Drinking late, watching bad telly, cooking and making playlists like the incredible music nerd that I am. It’s the last vestige of, what was once, an irresistible creative compulsion. This week, I sprung upon the idea of compiling a CD of music from John Hughes films. Which is why the news tonight of his untimely death at 59 from a sudden heart attack in New York came as quite a shock. He was a filmmaker that through the power of four or five thoroughly worn out VHS tapes of a romanticised life thousands of miles away somehow helped to shape my teenage opinions.

My CD, entitled John Hughes Mobile Disco, started out in my head as an ambitious interactive DJ set with film clips and fancy dress. My innate laziness and chronic sense of reality downsized this into a CD with Scooby Doo on the cover. The inspiration for all of this stems from me buying a DVD of Pretty In Pink for my 14-year-old niece last year. Which led to me picking up a copy for myself. It quickly became a staple of my late night post-binge-drinking viewing - much to the consternation of some of my friends. But it was no simple nostalgia trip.

I first encountered John Hughes through the recommendation on my older cousin. He’d told me that Breakfast Club was being shown on telly that week, and a very rare alignment of stars ensured that my old man decided not to go to the boozer that night and decided to watch telly with his teenage son. I’ve subsequently come to realise that watching flicks with the parents skews your appreciation of the material. And considering the percentage of the material that was about how adults – specifically parents – are unemotional heartless moronic automatons it’s perhaps not surprising that I professed that I didn’t “get” it and shuffled off to bed. I didn’t, however rush to tape over the VHS I’d popped in before it started. Soon enough I was taking the tape with half-arsed zeal over to my mates’ house to see if they could get a better grip on the appeal. The first thing is, that the Bowie quote and that Simple Minds track at the opening just felt cool. Secondly there’s the unparalleled quotient of quotable lines from the five teen archetypes and the teacher. By the third or fourth viewing, we were quoting Carl the janitor. I didn’t fully understand the movie, but I certainly had an appreciation for Judd Nelson’s “criminal” John Bender that affected my wardrobe and the hots for Ally Sheedy’s “basket case” Allison. To my eternal embarrassment, there exists a photo of me and a four of my mates posing in the iconic group shot setting from the poster. Oh, the shame of it.

Less, shameful was Weird Science, mostly because it was simply cool as fuck to lust after Kelly Le Brook and the film was far less earnest. It was essentially a teenage lad’s masturbatory fantasy writ large. And Bill Paxton’s Chet is about as hilarious a character as I’ve seen on the silver screen. It also gave us a chance to see Anthony Michael-Hall repeat his – less than PC – black person on dope voice from Breakfast Club’s pot smoking scene. This time with the added bonus of the classic “fish out of water” scenario of middle-class white people stumbling into a hostile black bar – as done with such aplomb in Animal House. Incidentally Hughes apparently got an early break penning scripts for that flick’s doomed television spin-off Delta House. And much like that film Weird Science was a celebration of society’s misfits. My friends and I garnered much of our inimitable party behaviour during our mid-teens from both of those movies. You see, before Hughes, Animal House and Porky’s and other fratcoms were the closest thing we had to movies about younger people.

I caught Sixteen Candles at the video shop next due to my compulsive completist nature. Again much like Weird Science, it was more of a straightforward comedy affair. Again showing, Hughes’ appreciation for Michael-Hall and Ringwald and his sensitivity toward racial stereotyping with the outrageous Asian character Long Duk Dong – typical line, “No more yankie my wankie. The Donger need food.” But more importantly it showcased his unique use of music to underscore his movies. With a wide range of incidental music including The Specials, The Vapors, Bowie, smatterings of Beatles stuff.

Which leads us back to Pretty in Pink, which was back in the earnest mode of Breakfast Club. It’s essentially a chick flick and was certainly less revered among the lads. But I’d indulge guiltily with a girlfriend of mine who was obsessed with the fact that Hughes had initially wanted Ringwald’s Andie to end up with Duckie rather than the incomprehensibly douchie Blaine (she was also irritated by Sheedy’s makeover at the end of Breakfast Club). It did rankle a bit for a bloke who supposedly gave voice to the outsiders that so much pandering to the straights seemed to go on in order for people to be happy. I also never quite fell for the all-too-American kids as “cool”, you got bits of it but essentially the whole world was far too foreign. But, I certainly knew instinctively that I'd more in common with the poorer kids. And that being said, watching the film now and knowing a little more about the hierarchal nature of American High School and to a degree their workplace, the central premise of life divided along financial lines doesn’t seem quite as corny. For me I always had an affinity with Harry Dean-Stanton’s portrayal of her layabout dad and the incredibly sleazy Stef, played impeccably by James Spader. This time round the music included was truly stellar and archly contemporary, despite including Otis Redding, it showcased OMD, Psychedelic Furs The Smiths and New Order.

Next up was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And it was back to the highly quotable straight comedy again (‘Fry, Fry, Fry…’) with a smattering of tunes. The Lennon quoting cooler-than-thou kid with a penchant for bunking off may have had a slight influence on me, who can say? He had a talent for comedy and one shouldn’t forget his involvement in the Vacation franchise, but it was his work with the so-called Brat Pack that has the lasting influence for me. For a long time, due to the familiar faces in the cast, I thought that St. Elmo’s Fire was a Hughes flick, and that he’d taken his observations on whitebread High School insecurity and applied them to the insecurity of whitebread graduates. Alas this was not the case, he did have another pop at whitebread insecurity in Some Kind of Wonderful, but his career began moving inexorably toward the mainstream with comedies like Uncle Buck and Planes, Trains and Automobiles (‘those aren’t pillows!). Instead of growing up with his audience he infantilised his work using increasingly younger and “cuter” protagonists. The unfortunate truth is that his work descended into a morass of eternal shit that was the Home Alone-athon culminating in the diarrhoea fountain that was Curly Sue. This was followed by a self-imposed early retirement – possibly caused by shame.

But more importantly, I am still drawn to and inevitably shaped-by those early works. And as I go back to them, I get more and more of why those characters spoke to me as a kid. And funnily enough, I see myself more and more in the supposedly repulsive adult characters. I’m thinking specifically of the teacher Vernon and janitor Carl’s conversation over an illicit beer in the archive room in Breakfast Club. Vernon tells Carl that he lies awake at night worrying that when he gets old the very kids he hates are going to have to take care of him. Carl replies that he doubts it. I don’t know why this feels poignant, much in the same way I wasn’t sure why I thought these suburban American kids’ ramblings were. I dunno, I suppose, as those kids said, it’s unavoidable; when you get older your heart dies. Or, in John Hughes’ case suddenly blows up in your chest for no reason. Either way thanks for the memories Mr. Hughes. I’m going to drain the last bit of vodka in the house with some flat soda water in your honour and pop on the DVD of the Breakfast Club.

For Kono's memories, click away.

Ten Great Reasons to Hate Summer

2009-06-03T16:31:00.011+01:00

1. Lack of sleep
It’s too hot. If I leave a window open, crackheads wander in and jump on my bed and root through my shit. It’s too bright too early. And it’s too fucking noisy. Every kind of yelping frantically jubilant bird joins in with a cacophony of unbearable squawking and tweeting at 4:30am every bloody morning. There’s even a frikking woodpecker out there this year.

2. Brightness in general
Who needs this much fucking sunshine? Where’s the anonymity? I don’t want everyone looking at me. Long dark winters are not the reason why so many people kill themselves in places in the far north. It’s the incessant light of the summers. Check out the reaction of lab rats put under constant light. At first they love it, swanning around like they’re cock of the snoot, but before long their trying to gnaw their own eyes out and all their skin falls off. I can’t see the words on the page of my book and I can’t see the television screen for the reflection of the bloody eternal outside! With all the fucking people, stinking and talking and beaming about the fact that they love the sunshine. People often complain during winter that they leave for work in the dark and they go home from work in the dark. Well that suits me. The less I have to look at this shithole (and the rest of you in it) the better.

3. People being happy for no reason
What the fuck is it with the desire to gawp at the colour blue? So fucking what if the sky is blue? Who cares that you can do things outside instead of inside? I like inside. It’s what separates us from the animals.

4. Smell
People fucking stink. And I have to talk to them and sit next to them on trains and buses. Bins stink. Food stinks. And until people in England learn to shower, the only solution is to keep them at such a reduced temperature that it might render them virtually odourless.

5. Bleary eyed wondering happy arseholes
I don’t watch reality TV talent shows because I hate the public. The last thing I want to do is invite them into my home and have them sing and dance. By the same token, I don’t want to visit them. I like dingy pubs with no sunlight, preferably underground, that flaunt the smoking ban. Busy pubs are full of people. During the summer, everywhere is full of people. People not looking where they are going and getting in my way, especially...

6. Tourists
Stay at home, you permanently ruin everything as soon as you even look at.

7. Exposed skin
Dirty horrible fat oily people’s tits and men’s fungal filled toenails. Fucking great. Buy some clothes and proper shoes and wear them. As for my own skin? Well, there’s nothing better than a sunburned streak down the ridge of my Roman nose and a long thin bright blistered bar of pink down the outside of my pitiful forearms.

8. Pimms
Pointless.

9. Barbeques
Poisonous.

10. Summer football
Normal football ends and at best we’re left with a parade of amateur supporters gearing up for a summer tournament with plastic flags and bleating half-baked crap that ensures I despise the England team for another two years. At worst we have to listen to horseshit about how many mega-billions of unsustainably borrowed money every show-pony spoilt little cunt is going to be sold and bought for. The whole while they parade around the world’s private beaches in tin foil knickers surrounded by the worst kind of vampiric leaching whores. And people sit around writing about and talking about it. The papers even advertise “football gossip” on the television as though it’s the most important part of the game. Which of course it is now. Which makes the whole sport fucking pointless.

The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses. May 1989

2009-05-15T15:43:00.009+01:00

It was twenty years ago today... I first remember hearing that phrase twenty-two years ago when the telly did a programme about the 20th anniversary of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Marvellous! And then it came out on a special edition shiny new thing called a CD. I was fourteen and 1967 was a full six years before I was born. It seemed like a different planet when everyone was happy and music meant everything and it was sunny all the time and everyone got laid and high. Even after nerding out on Beatlebooks in the ensuing decades I find that image difficult to shake.

Flipping through the paper the other day, I was reminded that this year marks the twentieth anniversary of another seminal LP, The Stone Roses’ eponymous debut. And although the television ain’t doing a programme, there is a special edition CD coming out in November. Anyway, it got me thinking about what a fourteen year old kid in 2009 would think about the LP and the summer of 1989.

There’s an oft-quoted cliché that the world was black and white before Pepper and that it sprung into Technicolor that June. To set the scene for how things were in a pre-Stone Roses world one only has to think about just how awfully people dressed up to that point. People were still wearing their jeans like Bros and it seemed that every twat and his mate was wearing a Batman t-shirt. The shoulder pad was back but all the suits were bizarrely collarless. Everyone was wearing pleated chinos and blazers with brass fucking buttons – like Rick fucking Astley. Telly presenters wore pseudo-militaristic suits like they’d escaped from Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation. Even the brothers had lost it. They all seemed to want to look like Arsenio Hall. They either had those weird Damon Wayans hats with the tassel or that House Party extended flattop. There was more hair gel produced for the UK than dairy produce that year and people tend to forget the omnipresence of council estate moustaches that lurked on the top lip of every beaming idiot on Family Fortunes. Footballers led the way in fashion and they still had bubble permed mullets and vasectomy inducing short shorts. In short it was a lot worse than black and white.

They often say that The Stone Roses bought together the disparate strands of youth culture known as indie and dance, although sometimes I think they overlook the fact that some kids were neither. Some people were just sick to death of the amount of turgid shit that was being served up every week on the Pepsi Chart Show. It was a time of inconceivable shitness. I’d gotten so sick of everything by this stage I had started listening to an almost exclusively pre-1970 diet of Stax and Motown.

Indie had never been something I’d paid a great deal of attention to. On the outside it was for sensitive alienated intellectual outsiders, but my experience was that it was an elitist clique of affected indulged rich kids who all dressed exactly the same and used their uniforms as a form of exclusivity. It felt like the winkle pickers, backcombed hair and makeup were the teen equivalent of old school tie and the cardigan, quiff and NHS specs was coded precursor to the secret handshake.

As for dance, Acid House peaked in the UK the previous year and admittedly it was hard to avoid D-Mob’s ‘They Call It Acieed’ and Bomb the Bass’ ‘S-Express’ and I did have some friends that year that would drop acid in the park and think they were Yamahas or Mars bars for a couple of hours while I necked Special Brew. And it may have been something phenomenal for seasoned football hooligans who found out eating pure MDMA in an aircraft hangar was as much fun as kicking someone’s head in. But for me at fifteen, it meant that a load of berks were sewing smiley face patches to their jeans, necking Paracetamol while listening to a third generation cassette of some metronomic fart noises.

For most normal folk who didn’t subscribe to a tribe, The Stone Roses was a rock album. Rock back then (excluding American hair rock) could probably be summed up in two letters – U2. People tend to forget how big U2 were and how many people compared the Roses to them. I remember Shaun Ryder being asked by the NME what he thought of his fellow Mancs and he said they were, ‘like U2 on E.’ Incidentally, having listened to U2 on E, the Roses are far better. I’ll freely admit I was a fan of the band at the time but their most recent LP, Rattle and Hum had been the sound of two provincial virgins from Dublin, a prematurely balding Welsh physicist and a trustafarian from the home counties on holiday going through someone else’s record collection. The Stone Roses were something simultaneously more authentic, approachable, less contrived and genuine. They were like a street gang. No street gang wore cowboy hats, ponchos and leather trousers. They made U2 look like the dinosaurs they were.

The truth was that it was simply a phenomenal pop LP that sounded better with every listen. It seeped into the consciousness over a full eighteen months. Leckie’s production allowed one the tightest rhythm sections around in Mani and Reni to sound utterly organic yet maintain their funk. Allowing drums to sound like drums rather than sledgehammers hitting sheet metal or conversely like ticks in a Swiss watch sounded revolutionary. The prominence of lolloping breathy baselines on songs like ‘Shoot You Down’ and ‘Waterfall’ gave the LP a swing that is still rare in white pop. Squire’s guitar seemed to blend the textures or Marr with the bombast of Page showcased so magnificently on the extended coda of the album’s opus ‘I am the Resurrection’. Brown’s voice was utterly unique revelling as it did in its regional accent and despite its seeming limitations sounded unswervingly confident when demanding to be adored.

It was the perfect antidote the glaring shitness of the time. They talk about LPs blowing the doors off and opening up new worlds. They slowly eroded the norms of the day. The American influenced minimalist oddball fashions were slowly replaced with loose fit baggie casual wear. Europe’s land fills were brimming over with unused British hair gel and shorn tasche hair. Everyone realised just how shit things had been. And for me, I slowly lost myself in the record, the sound, the cryptic sun-drenched lyrics and John Squire’s artwork. In turn, I was turned on to Jackson Pollock, Situationism, The Byrds and even Sly and the Family Stone. By the time Fool’s Gold came out and they were on Top of the Pops it really did feel like they were what the world was waiting for.

It felt like the beginning of a revolution, but the truth is that by the time they released One Love it was all getting a bit shit. For every Pills and Thrills and Screamadelica there was a slew of suspicious copyists such as Candy Flip, Blur, Soup Dragons, and Mock Turtles. And frankly by 1991 it all felt a bit ridiculous. Grunge was lurking round the corner feeling sorry for itself and the Roses were caught up in their own personal hell. For the kids today, looking back at a time six years before you were born will mean that they only see the high water mark. Every dream is bookended with frustration and disappointment, but the bit in the middle is what makes it worth it.

Bob Dylan, The O2 Arena, Two Days After My Birthday, Last Month

2009-05-05T16:26:00.005+01:00

As I boarded the hippy boat out to the enormo-corpora-dome, it struck we what a lovely city London is. As the tourists trottled on and off the pods of the giant magic wheel by the river looking out over Parliament, the sun poked out the God-fingers through the palaces of the clouds. An Allman Brothers song popped into my head for some very strange reason. I bought a beer as we set sail. I watched monolithic monuments to the lumbering ghoul that once was capitalism popping up over the horizon as the startlingly middle-aged champagne-swilling Dylanite ex-hippies watched the adverts for Pink and Britney on the boat’s flat screens.

Something is happening here, but I don’t know what it is. We pulled up into the wasteland that surround the corporate big top known to us mindless fuckwads as the O2. Of course, it used to be known at the Millennium Dome – when everyone agreed it was shit – and now, well, everyone loves it.

I was 36 years and two days old and I lit a cigarette and starred into the mud on the banks of the Thames. One of the most frustrating things about the dome is the lack of anything near there that isn’t owned by the dome. It’s as though it has a mysterious force field around it that would cause any money not ultimately bound to the coffers of the Anschutz Entertainment Group would fizz into some kind of magic dust. As more and more venues in the UK and Ireland are re-branded with the 02 swastika one begins to wander how far we are away from the global homogenised hell of Rollerball.

I was hungry. There were queues for each of the commercially approved prepared food substance provider units. I chose to eat “Brazilian” as the queue was the shortest. It was good. I like meat. Although maybe I’ll skip the chicken hearts next time. I’m not sure quite how they have effected my mojo.

At showtime we were asked to plow through neon gates blinded by dot-matrix messages displaying an almost nauseating level of promotion of approved products. The venue is oddly familiar and comfortable. You get a feeling you've seen it a thousand times before. Which is probably the idea, in a weird McDonald's king of way it was comforting, especially as I was getting older, but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that any minute now motorbikes and hairy lumps on roller skates were going to shoot out through holes in the ceiling. Or that Stormtroopers were around every corner. Or that I was at some kind of quasi-dystopian executive political rally.

These feelings evaporated as the disembodied voice belted out the charmingly archaic introduction to the show itself. The greatest antidote to the venue's disinfected feel was the fact that Bob Dylan’s show remains entirely unaltered despite the facilities for fireworks, giant screens, inflatable vaginas and Rollerball. He may as well have been playing in a smoky Formica shack with a busted toilet. And as he exploded into a rough as grilled hedgehog version of ‘Maggie’s Farm’, the venue became virtually irrelevant. Dylan growled and grumbled through a set which transported those who were paying attention about as far away from this synthetic hell as is possible with hallucinogens.

I am always astounded that people come to see Dylan expecting anything other than a cranky approximation of a magic – almost ancient – kind of music. And his choice of songs including, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin'’, ‘Chimes Of Freedom’, ‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll’, ‘Workingman's Blues #2’, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, ‘Po' Boy’, ‘When The Deal Goes Down’, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘All Along The Watchtower’ and ‘Blowin' In The Wind’ were all top drawer. But still the usual suspects cough up expecting something similar to the Blue Man Group, only to be disappointed. But I’m glad they do because I’m sure as shit Dylan wouldn’t do this if it weren’t for their money, yet for me, it’s the closest thing I get to going to mass. It’s anti-slick. It’s the opposite of professional or perfunctory. It’s everything the enorma-corporo-dome isn’t. That is to say in this day and age of bleached out recycled crap, Dylan offers something that feels as though it was created out of passion or even artistic whim. And like London, despite the ferris wheels and big tops, still seems to manage to offer some kind of beauty.

David Byrne, Royal Festival Hall, Some Time Last Month

2009-05-05T15:43:00.003+01:00

I woke up not quite knowing where I was or what was going on. I had not desire to find out. All I knew was that I wanted to stay asleep. The Evil version of me must have done something terrible to put me here.

When I eventually woke up I realised I’d been visiting my mum and dad. I’d not gone to bed till 4:30am. I’d been trying to teach the two of them the words to Bob Dylan’s ‘Trying To Get To Heaven’. I realised my bag was at the pub. I went to get it. Standing outside a pub in my old home town waiting for the door to open after being the last one out the previous night bought back warm and fuzzy memories. Of when I was tougher. Fearless. The pub had that unmistakable smell of pub cleaner. One of the most alluring smells ever. It’s the only smell I’ve ever greeted at the beginning of a day’s work. It’s the smell of forgotten misgivings and forgiven misappropriations. If only there was an equivalent substance for the conscience.

The Good version of me drank a pint of orange juice and soda. The wee pub dog scuttled around smelling the shins of the three early birds. Two staff made small talk and idle gossip. There was a low chatter and I looked around at the pictures on the walls. It felt very comfortable. And then someone came in, ordered a pint and asked for the football to be put on. Suddenly everyone was transfixed on the Sky cathode pendulum. Like zombies.

I left. I went to eat in the town centre. There’s nothing like a full English in Strood. And that’s a good thing. Aside from the abhorrent addition of a glaringly incongruous Subway franchise that has sprung up like knotweed, there’s little else to chose from. I sat down to my plate of delicious bacon, sausage, beans, chips and eggs fried in those circular gizmos that make them the shape of ice hockey pucks. The cafe was run by Albanians or Turks. There was a Muslim greeting hanging over the counter. When I was a kid, this place used to be called Uncle Sam’s and had a cartoon American chap as its logo. I don’t think this says anything particularly insightful.

I’d bought my ticket to tonight’s show on eBay for face value. No-one else wanted to go. And why would they? I don’t know anyone who listens to his solo work and it wasn’t cheap. That’s why I was so sure I was going. I wasn’t about to waste forty quid. So it wasn’t the best idea to head back to the pub to meet me old man down the boozer. Guinness is good for you, and the combination of saturated fats and porter began to make me feel invincible.

I made it out of the pub and on to the train and off we went – how responsible of me! The late afternoon sun shone off the marshes made the Kent countryside look lush and idyllic. I’m sure the booze helped. I’d read good things about the current David Byrne tour and its theatrical accoutrements. But my life is essentially a struggle between the sort of mild-mannered Good Me that would enjoy sitting in the Royal Festival Hall stroking his chin, and the aforementioned malevolent Evil Me that calls Jacko on the phone to meet him in Victoria – knowing full well this would leave me approximately eleven minutes to get across London for the start of the show.

I’m always astonished by the level of organisation and cunning, Evil Me is capable of – considering he spends almost all of life drunk out of his mind with his flies undone throwing Good Me’s money down the drain. Evil Me sat down outside with a pint of Guinness and began giving small sums of money to the local homeless. Presumably Evil Me is so generous to vagrants as he knows that one day, Good Me will kick him out and he’ll end up with them. Whilst waiting for Jacko, the start time of the show came and went. I struck up a conversation with some bloke from Esssex. I’ve never quite trusted Essex people. I could just about make out Southend from where I grew up across the estuary. One got the sense they were plotting something over there. And I fear the disproportionate amount of them in the public consciousness compared to those from North Kent – is a result of this. When Jacko showed up we began talking to Australians and French people and enjoying the beer.

The long and the short of it was that I got to the show with about ten minutes to go and ran through the Festival Hall like Benjamin Braddock at the end of The Graduate, bursting though the swing doors in time to catch an astonishingly vibrant version of ‘Burning Down The House’.

Jacko waited in the lobby and we headed back to South Norwood for more ale. Evil Me had thrown me just enough of a cultural bone to satiate the cost. The following morning I woke up not quite knowing where I was or what was going on. I had not desire to find out. All I knew was that I wanted to stay asleep.

ABC, Royal Albert Hall, Some Time, Last Month

2009-04-29T16:27:00.005+01:00

‘The nostalgia circuit’, the very name of which sounds like it could be one of the New Romantic synth-pop outfits that populate so much of it. It’s all a bit gaudy and smacks of Facebook reunion School Disco naffness. Unless you tart it up as a pseudo-artshow billed as a chance to hear a classic album played live in its entirety. Which is what tonight’s extravaganza of luxuriantly orchestrated gleaming 80s pop is billed as. Everything about ABC’s 1982 debut Lexicon of Love was lush. From the glamorous drapery and graphics that adorned the sleeve to the sweeps of strings and extravagant production to the la-dee-da lamé boating blazer shenanigans of the accompanying videos.

To detract further from the idea that this is a cheap or desperate exercise in exploiting people’s memories of a “simpler time”, the organisers have chosen to host the show in the opulence of the Royal Albert Hall, invited the BBC Concert Orchestra helmed by Anne Dudley, wheeled out producer Trevor Horn to milk applause, and charged a rather classy entrance fee of up to £85. I went for the scumbag gallery tickets for a mere twenty-five quid. Which actually felt like a bargain until I got there. The Albert Hall is a beautiful building with incredibly nice older people working there. It’s all very English – in the older sense of being English. Before it meant being photographed in a shop doorway drunk off your face on bright blue fizzy toilet cleaner with your privates exposed.

What was even more English was the way that people put up with the absolutely atrocious scumbag gallery without complaining. There gallery was a bit like the railing in a shopping mall on the top floor where kids throw things at unsuspecting shoppers. By the time I arrived all the good spots were taken. The only place I could glimpse the show was from behind a pillar in a technically restricted area looking down from behind the band. I didn’t even have the vantage point to spit on the bastards in the good seats! I did however have a great view of Martin Fry’s bald spot and fat arse. But this had very little long lasting appeal, considering the fact that the sound reminded me of something of a cross between a party four doors down and the echo of a bucket of squash balls being fired into a giant Perspex bowl. If I had been allowed to nuzzle one of the venue’s incredibly overpriced beers, I might just have been able to convince myself it was bearable. Alas this was prohibited, presumably to prevent us oiks pissing in the bottles and throwing them at the amassed toffs below. I had not realised that an 80s nostalgia event have such an authentic whiff of class war about it. I decided to fuck off to the bar. As it was, the band were only playing a selected post-Lexicon “hits” package and I’d missed ‘When Smokey Sings’ outside smoking.

In the bar I toyed with the idea of leaving. When the interval crowd prevented me from getting another beer, I decided it was time to go. Outside, smoking again, I struck up a conversation with an equally dissatisfied punter. This guy was leaving in spite of having primo comp stalls seats. The long and the short of it was that the next thing I knew I was sitting on a luxurious plush swivelling chair in the centre of one of the most opulent settings of my life. And I had four of these seats to myself. That’s a £340 value! And in seconds, the 80s fizzed lucidly into life again as I went from disaffected to placated without a modicum of thought. Mollified with the illusion of self-determination, as though I’d been given the right to buy my own squalid council hovel, I immediately forgot about the plight of my fellow struggling proles in the gallery. Here I was with four, count them, four prime seats to myself, because I was willing to pull myself up by my bootstraps and get on my bike.

Trevor Horn wandered onto the stage to introduce the band. A piece of paper nervously trembled in his hand adding to him resembling an ageing loadsamoney yuppie about to give a best man speech with a hangover. As Fry and the band revved up into ‘Show Me’ the provincial Essex wedding feel was increased by the presence in my peripheral vision of a couple of bubble-permed lumpy old trollops galloping and wobbling along to the music displaying the sort of natural sense of rhythm usually reserved for terminal sufferers of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

It’s a good opener, expertly performed. The sound quality in my luxurious thrown is close to perfect. Yet I couldn’t help feeling a little embarrassed by the muted applause. If I were Martin Fry, on stage re-living my greatest artistic achievement in front of - what one would have thought – was the most partisan crowd he could have hoped for, I would have thought that frenzied mania was a given. Despite all the accolades in greatest British LPs of all time lists, I feared that even the biggest fans of the band had always skipped to the singles. Luckily then, next up was ‘Poison Arrow’. Personally I enjoyed one of my favourite call and response moments of my concert going career by being allowed to bellow out: ‘STUPID STUPID’ at an 80s icon along with thousands of others in what began to feel like a celebration for the first time.

The good timey feeling lasted well enough through ‘Many Happy Returns’ and ‘Tears Are Not Enough’. Then there was a clunky attempt at a witty intro to ‘Valentine's Day’ that suggested an assumed familiarity with the song was greeted with the same muted shrug that is normally received after a singer declares: ‘We’d like to do something of our new record’. Luckily for me it’s a personal highlight from the LP. All messing aside, Horn’s production throughout the LP is exemplary and Fry’s lyrics have a unique charm to them. I love the opening couplet about the postman not showing up on February 14th and Santa being a no-show later in the year. Stuff like: ‘Find destiny through magazines / Liplicking, unzipping / Harpers and queens’ is some kind of poetry too.

The mood changes after that, as everyone seems to know that the album’s twin money shots are on the way in the form of ‘The Look of Love (Part One)’ and ‘All of My Heart’. The filler in between is virtually ignored. Of the two, ‘Look of Love’ is really the only song of the night that gets the sort of drunken idiocy the entire show actually deserves. The whole place erupts into a sort of campfire singalong jamboree. Albeit surrounded by sumptuous theatrical chintz. The song is bona fide classic pop. It has a sheen of near perfection and a cracking hook. It also gives me the chance to shout out both, ‘hip-hip-hooray-ay!’ and ‘yippee-ai-yippee-aiay!’ without feeling like a total cunt. Martin Fry also displays a characteristic lack of shame during his spoken soliloquy about ‘finding true love’. It’s tacky, but its ace.

The song is a hard act to follow, and even ‘All of My Heart’ doesn’t really register a similar response. The show proper ends with the symphonic version, ‘The Look of Love (Part Four)’ which is expertly executed. As way of an encore Fry returns to the stage in his trademark gold lamé suit (only fatter). It’s good to see that he is willing to acknowledge the preposterousness of the LP and the videos from that time. The second performance recreates the atmosphere of the first. And I’m tempted to think he could have got away with knocking that out over and over again all night and we would have lapped it up like retarded half-cut Telletubbies, yelping, ‘again, again.’ After all, familiarity is the key component of the nostalgia circuit. Stupid, stupid! Hip-hip-hooray-ay! Yippee-ai-yippee-aiay!

On Time

2009-03-31T12:43:00.003+01:00

Time, according to David Bowie, ‘flexes like a whore / falls wanking to the floor’. Boy George bemoaned time for not giving him time. The Chairmen of the Board wanted just a little more of it. Indeed, time, along with sex and money, is one of those things that people just can’t do without or get enough of.

But still time stands apart. Sex is an urge. It’s not the constant craving that KD Lang would have us believe. Marvin Gaye only wanted sexual healing when he got that feeling. I’m pretty sure that even the most lusty of Lotharios has an off day. A bout of the squits, an inappropriate whispered urge, bad breath, or a suddenly revealed prosthetic limb will kill that prime motivator in seconds. There are fewer things that will prevent people pursuing money. Barrett Strong extolled that the best things in life may be free, and they may be distributed willy nilly to avian creatures and certain insects. And you’ll note that money can amputate people’s dignity or sense of morality in moments. But the truth of it is, even the greatest stockpile of lucre cannot buy additional portions of time.

Time is the great leveller. Whether there’s a logic to it or not, at some point each and every one of us is allotted a slab of it and there are no second helpings. It can’t be bent or broken. It’s constantly running away like a stream of water down the sink. Attempts to control it will result in more of it being wasted. Yet we volunteer it freely to people we have no care or respect for.

We guard our sex and horde our money but we chuck our time at shitheads every single day for the sake of this thing called work. And then we judge work on how quickly we waste that time. People complain of time “dragging” and claim to be happier when “the day goes quickly”. Why do we, as a species, want to get rid of our time so quickly? People are always coming up with more imaginative ways of “spending” their time. I can understand that maybe time is life’s currency and there’s no point in hanging on to it, but by the same token what’s the rush? What’s the rush to get to the end of it? Once it’s gone, so are you?

And I know, some say that there is an infinite afterlife and the way you spend this tiny allocation of “practice time” determines whether you’ll spend the juicy everlasting bit in ecstasy or agony. But these people are fucking mental. The people who made that shit up don’t even believe it any more and only carry on with the facade to get more money and sex than you.

Wasting time is an idea that seems to be quite prevalent in people’s minds. People begin to feel guilty if they “waste” time, by doing “nothing”. Firstly, it’s impossible to do nothing. And secondly who decides what a waste of time is? I’d like to set a challenge. Find someone productive. Follow them around for the day and observe what they do. Then think, what would be lost by undoing everything that they have done? The answer is, if you are honest, that nothing would be lost. Except both of your time.

My 50 Favourite Jews, Part Five: The Top Ten

2009-02-17T14:42:00.007Z

1. Bob Dylan

Robert Zimmerman may actually be from another planet but he certainly took the form of a Jew on this one. He once famously claimed he was little more than a song and dance man, but his recent licensing of ‘Blowing In The Wind’ to the Co-Op ads is just another example of what is Dylan’s actual role on the planet actually is - a provocative little mischief monkey. His day job may well be a continuing chronicle of the history of the more sincere forms of music (or robbing old music and claiming them as his own). His personality outside of work appears to be one that enjoys nothing more than being a contrary annoyance to anyone who dares to think they know him. If you read in Chronicles about how he invented the folkie persona that led so many earnest bearded muggy jug banders to think he was some kind of folk messiah, you'll note that this was simply the actions of someone who cannot resist a wind-up. One can view Dylan’s work and life over the years as a prolonged series of elaborate ruses designed to confound the pious hacks who try to analyse the life out of pop music. There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke, indeed.

2. Jesus Christ
No-one can talk with any real authority about Jesus of Nazareth, but if we take the Sermon on the Mount and stuff like that as an indication of what he was like, he seems like a top bloke. Turned water into wine, hung out with scumbags and outsiders, pissed off “the man”, didn’t own anything, suggested that people should be nice to each other. What’s not to like? We know he was a carpenter who liked fishing. What we’re unsure of is how much he would have liked the ideas of eternal judgement and damnation decreed in his name by celibate freaks in dresses. Guess we’ll never know.

3. Dustin Hoffman
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Dustin Hoffman is the world’s finest actor. Forget your endless Pacino and De Niro argument. Shelve your interjection that Jack Nicholson should be in with a shout, The Hoffman is the one! Right from The Graduate onward, his acting is pure gold. Benjamin Braddock was written as a handsome blonde preppy douchebag, but Hoffman’s audition forced them to change him to the three-dimensional character he ended up being. To confound expectation he followed that with the pathetic and lecherous cripple Ratso in Midnight Cowboy. He’s fascinating in Little Big Man. He’s fucking outstanding in Marathon Man. Great in All the President’s Men. Ace in Tootsie. Rain Man, Straight Time, Kramer Vs Kramer, Accidental Hero, I Heart Huckabees, Meet the Fockers, and the immaculate Stranger Than Fiction. Top work! He’s also a little unhinged.

4. William Shatner
Captain James T Motherfucking Kirk! T Motherfucking J Hooker! “I was just, thinking about the buffalos!” The man’s a genius and if you can’t see that there’s something wrong with you.

5. Gene Wilder
Gene Wilder is the Jew with the best hair since Albert Einstein. He is the original and by far the best Willy Wonker. His acting and singing in that production create a simultaneously unnerving and comforting character that half of you wants to run from and the other wants to stalk. Seeing Wilder in interviews suggests that it may not have been that much of a stretch for him to play the role. His work with Mel Brooks is just as fantastic. And his partnership with Richard Pryor created some magnificent set-pieces, not least of which the scene in Silver Streak where his character is forced to pretend to be an African American gentleman.

6. Brian Epstein
It is reported that during the recording of McCartney’s ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ John Lennon (being the ungrateful spiteful bastard that he was) began singing, ‘baby you’re a rich, fag Jew’ in reference to their manager. Eppy was quite an uptight fellow who was born with something of a silver spoon who developed a penchant for prescription pills and young boys in leather. It’s likely that these twin fancies contributed to him seeking out the early incarnation of The Beatles in the Cavern Club in Liverpool. Although it may also be seen as slightly odd that these aspects of the band were the first things he strove to eliminate from the public eye. It says a lot about how talented homosexuals in early 1960s England were at dressing the more taboo aspects of life up as palatable for mass consumption that he transformed a band of speed freaks with toilet seats on their heads to stalwarts on the Royal Variety performance in such a short space of time. Of course almost immediately after his untimely death the mischievous egotistical ramshackle bunch of scallies that lurked under the tidy collar-less suits re-appeared to tear the band apart from the inside out in the space of three years. That he managed to keep them together for as long as he did without any precedent in pop management to speak of is testament to his genius.

7. Joel and Ethan Cohen
Two headed mastermind that brought the world the immortal Big Lebowski. Despite my view that some of their canon is far from exemplary, despite their reputation, it should not detract from the blinding colossal genius of the Dude’s story. I’m not suggesting that they haven’t made other great films (Raising Arizona springs to mind) it’s just that they wouldn’t be as highly placed on this list without the bowling one.

8. Stan Lee
Where would our collective imagination be without Stan Lee? Superhero comics are what inspire madmen to greatness. Biographies of Elvis Presley and Keith Moon both site passions for superheroes as influences and inspirations for their larger than life characters. Stan began work in comics in the 1940s and went on to create many of the archetypal spandex-clad freaks that are as much a part of our common psyche as the Greek myths. Along with Jack Kirby and the eccentrically brilliant Steve Ditko they began exploring what it was that made heroes tick. He gave them depth by often adding fragility and vulnerability to their alter-egos.

9. Stephen Fry
Ahhh, Stephen. You crooked nosed old boffin queen. You are simply wonderful. Keep it up.

10. Woody Allen
Probably, to some, the ultimate in all what it means to be a 20th century Jew. That is they should probably be from New York City and in contestant therapy. Certainly according to some of the mad as batshit Iranian telly clips they’ve got on YouTube he embodies all that is wrong with Judaism today. For pissing them off alone he deserves every accolade he gets. His talent as a comic, film-maker and actor are not in question. His behaviour towards step-kids however is.

My 50 Favourite Jews, Part Four: 20 – 11

2009-02-17T13:26:00.002Z

11. Jerry Wexler

Although R&B has come to mean something altogether more sinister, when Jerry Wexler first coined the phrase rhythm and blues in the late 40s it replaced the more inflammatory “race music”. He went on to be involved in some the greatest soul music of all time. Working with Stax/Atlantic, producing Wilson Picket and Dusty Springfield, later working at Muscle Shoals and eventually working with Bob Dylan on his born again stuff. The word legend is probably overused and incorrectly applied more often than not, but in this case it’s justified.

12. Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut may well be one of the finest writers to ever scribble a drawing of a bunghole. His work was joyfully playful yet managed to be consistently insightful. Vonnegut studied chemistry at Cornell and science underpinned a lot of his fiction, yet it maintained a unrivalled level of humanity. As did his witnessing of the firebombing of Dresden. His brief memoir, A Man Without A Country, published a couple of years before he died suggested that, despite being amused by his time on planet Earth, he wasn’t that sad to leave it behind.

13. The Fonz
Heyyy! When I was a kid I had a Fonz t-shirt. I still love The Fonz, and deep down think I am him.

14. Carrie Fisher
Princess Leia went mental. As she transformed from plummy spoilt bra-less brat in the first Star Wars to clunky gold lingerie clad slug’s sex slave in the last, Carrie Fisher’s personal life was no less dramatic – or insane. When one is knocking around with John Belushi and suffering from bi-polar disorder it’s not long before you’re photographed sitting in a trashcan. Since then, mind you, she has gone on to write some very smart and funny fiction.

15. Paul Newman
Never has there been such a depiction of the futility of life and the lengths we go to in order to fill the void than Cool Hand Luke eating fifty eggs. In the opening scene, the harvesting the heads of parking meters portrays the restlessness that anyone who’s ever got into trouble for no apparent reason can relate to. He also persuaded Tom Cruise to make Cocktail, inadvertently creating one of the world’s lasting testaments to nonsense.

16. Neil Diamond
I suppose Al Jolson should have been on this list for being the original Jazz Singer but there’s all that controversy over blackface and stuff, and besides Jolson didn’t write songs for The Monkees. The strength of Neil’s song writing talent is demonstrated by the fact that people have overlooked some of the oddest hair and spandex/rhinestone combos in pop history. And listening to his live album Hot August Night shows him at the peak of his showman powers.

17. Alan Arkin
Youth is for arseholes. That’s my view. Admittedly sometimes there’s a snotty kid with a swivel in his hips and a killer sneer. Granted. But most of the time, young people are fructose crazed, blathering, self-obsessed, ignoramuses, with shit taste in everything fiddling with their bits in fetid rooms. As the granddad in Little Miss Sunshine, Arkin showed on the big screen that getting old can be far cooler than anything any squeaky anal lobe in the current crop of teen movies. Arkin is a massively underrated actor who’s back catalogue is all too often ignored.

18. Phil Spector
Ghoulish! Spector began as a sinister sunglass clad mad scientist who was responsible for the creation of the “wall of sound” and some of the most luxurious pop of all time. His relationship with the artists he worked with belayed a creeping lunacy that continued on into his work in the 70s with John Lennon where he is said to have held up the sessions at gunpoint and kidnapped the master tapes. More recently he was seen with insane fright-wig hair at his own trial for shooting a girl in the face in his evil castle lair.

19. Will Self
Self is one telly enough to be everyone’s favourite verbose curmudgeon. His writing is very good.

20. Andy Kaufman
The world’s first inter-gender wrestler was such an arch antagonist and serial prankster no-one really believed him when he died. Whether of not Kaufman was actually ever funny is a different matter, he certainly was provocative.

My 50 Favourite Jews, Part Three: 30- 21

2009-02-16T16:18:00.003Z

21. Albert Einstein
Dyslexic and charismatic, Albert spent the first half of his life not being able to understand anything that everyone else had written and then wrote a load of stuff no-one else understood. Great hair.

22. Sammy Davis Junior
If Sesame Street ever did one of those, “Some of these things are like each other, one of these things is not the same” bits about the Rat Pack, many people would point out that the difference was something of pigmentation. Sammy was, of course the only black Rat Packer. He's also the only black person on this list. Make of that what you will.

23. Terry Hall
Not sure quite how Jewish he is but I love him. I was working as a ridiculous lackey at a post-production company that used to make a lot of pop videos. I was working on the night shift one evening and was bored into submission and began making a dent into the booze that we were supposed to give the stars who came in. It must have been around 1am when I got a call from the top editing suit to bring up a selection of various herbal teas. I popped a mint in me gob and trayed up the teas. I got into the lift and hit the button for the 6th floor. As I arrived at the ground floor from the basement Terry Hall joined me. The booze got the better of me. “You’re Terry Hall!” I said. “I fucking love you!” He nodded at me in that sullen way of his. And he walked with me all the way to the suite. The tea, as it turned out, was for him.

24. Peter Sellers
Peter Sellers was stark raving mad with a penchant for impersonating Indians. I’m not sure this practise is still allowed (outside the Simpsons at least). He also did a good line in comedy French accents in the Pink Panther series of films. His musical exploits included a series of humorous takes on Beatles classics including a manic German Officer barking out the words to She Love You. He was big mates with Ringo and influenced Lennon immensely with his work with the Goons.

24. Groucho Marx
If only for his role as God in the acid drenched 1968 oddity Skidoo alone he deserves his place. But also a pioneer of one-liners and again an immeasurable influence of John Lennon, Marx oeuvre is one of those that is probably best measured by what it inspired.

25. Andrew Loog Oldham
Rebellious apprentice to Brian Epstein, Loog Oldham was the mastermind behind the early image of the Rolling Stones. Suggesting that the lads smoke, drink and piss in public and causing a manufactured furore that maybe even created the person Keith Richards is today. He formed Immediate Records and gave us the best work of the Small Faces and PP Arnold.

27. Karl Marx / Leon Trotsky
Commies! Pinkos! My view on Karl Marx is very different from what it might have been back when I actively encouraged the parts of The Communist Manifesto that I interpreted as justification for my idleness. My view now is that he was very good at diagnosis, but piss poor at prescription. Rarely has someone so accurately mapped the malady of the human condition. His solution however was utter fantasy and entirely counter intuitive. Trotsky was axed for trying to implement it like a loyal pharmacist.

28. Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks hired David Lynch to make the Elephant Man. Therefore causing my first cinematically induced tears when Merrick commits hari kari. Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein easily take their place near the very top in the pantheon of funniest films ever made. Spaceballs is pretty funny too.

29. Billy Crystal
Billy Crystal’s greatest moment is when he says, ‘mime is money’ in This Is Spinal Tap.

30. Steve Guttenberg
The Wife once got lost on the way from Pittsburgh to a Beastie Boys show in NYC. She ended up stumbling on a place called The Steve Guttenburg Memorial Pizzeria. It was too late to catch the show so she had a slice of pie and drove home again. That’s why Steve’s in the list and the Beastie Boys aren’t.

My 50 Favourite Jews, Part Two: 40 – 31

2009-02-16T15:14:00.003Z

31. Peter Falk
Just one more thing! As soon as he puts on his trademark rain mac and starts mumbling about his wife, Peter Falk is Columbo. And when you see his shambolic character amble into frame, you suddenly you realise that you’ve forgotten to go to work again. Some parts of the internet claim to put a number on the amount of episodes made, but the truth is only God really knows. All we can be sure of is that there are enough of them to fill an entire lifetime of unemployment. Especially if you include the marvellous turn in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.

32. Lenny Bruce
For a stand-up comedian he was not actually very funny. At least not to a contemporary audience. But he was responsible for breaking down barriers for all comics in the future by saying naughty words. Recent sensitivity to swearing on the BBC suggests the battle may be far from won. And with the increasingly choppy waters of making jokes about race/religion one wonders if Bruce’s battle was a anomalous victory.

33. Bette Midler / Barbara Streisand
I see no point in differentiating between the two. I fear they are the same woman. And they are ultimately a Jewish woman.

34. Franz Kafka
The myth is that of the unappreciated angst filled scribe in a humble hovel in Prague imagining himself as a bug. The truth, according to a recent documentary, was that he was a spoilt little bastard mummy’s boy, who operated within a clique of literary toffs and aspired to a Germanic ideal of bourgeois elitism. Great writer though.

35. Goldie Hawn
Goldie’s best work is behind her. And if you’ve seen her in There’s A Girl In My Soup with Peter Sellers you’ll know what I mean. But my favourite Goldie Hawn film is Overboard. Certain films have an almost opiate effect on me. There’s nothing clever or informative about it, it’s just hypnotic. And much of it is to do with the lysergic cuteness of Hawn’s face.

36. Jon Stewart
Despite the increasingly nauseating love affair with President Obama, Stewart and his compadres on Comedy Central’s Daily Show are consistently the funniest thing on telly. Considering we here in the UK can only come up with 30 minutes of political satire a week with Have I Got News For You, it’s testament to the writers’ talent that they can fill 20 minutes a night, four days a week. Stewart has an amazing talent for shoehorning intelligent questions into brief film/book sales pitches and creates the perfect antidote to inanity of the US news networks.

37. Serge Gainsbourg
FRENCH! There’s no-one more French than Serge. Funny looking, drunk out of his mind, cigarette sewn to his lip, traipsing from nightclub to nightclub with a bevy of belles. Sullen and melancholic, maybe even ugly, but chicks dug him. And he dug them. And he liked a drink. And a cigarette.

38. Perry Farrell
“I am skin and bone, I am pointy nose!” Carrying on in that great tradition of androgynous narco-hedonist showmanship pioneered by Bowie, Farell is the mind behind Jane’s Addiction who in the late 80s served as an antidote to the sterile poodle puff on American rock. Not something I got first time around but I like it a lot now.

39. Stanley Kubrick
Stanley sounded like a complete pain in the arse. He was infamous for demanding endless takes on any given shot. He is said to have caused permanent damage to Roddy McDowell’s eyes during the shooting of A Clockwork Orange’s most famous scene. Although the results of that and films like The Shining seem to suggest it was worth it. Although there were some duds too. Eyes Wide Shut is utter shit and 2001 can just as easily be enjoyed on fast forward.

40. Allen Ginsberg
The great beardy poet who wrote Howl and hung with Dylan and Lennon. Seminal among the Beat writers. Stupendous!

My 50 Favourite Jews, Part One: 50 - 41

2009-02-16T14:08:00.005Z

41. Burt Bacharach
There he is! Yeah! Without Burt, our musical world would be and arid bone dry wasteland of flat matte popless dirt. Burt is cool and no matter how many times he shows up on dogshit Pop Idol reality shows sullying his reputation and legacy in the manner of someone sent mad by syphilis, nothing can stop that.

42. Frank Oz
He’s a muppet. In a good way. He’s Yoda. He’s Fozzie Bear. He’s Animal. He’s Miss Piggy. He’s the clerk in the end of Blue Brothers. He’s the teacher in the exam scene in Spies Like Us. He’s in American Werewolf in London and Trading Places. He directed Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. What’s not to like? Oh, and he’s English you know?

43. Larry David
I didn’t like Seinfeld. I don’t like Seinfeld now. They all dress really badly and there’s those infuriatingly crap slap-bass interludes and generally shit theme tune. And it wasn’t funny. It was bewildering how far from anything I’ve ever witnessed which could be deescribed as vaguely like everyday life it managed to be. Who were these people? Curb Your Enthusiasm, however, is fucking hilarious. Larry David's portrayal of himself is beautifully selfish, infantile and curmudgeonly. Entirely more easy to relate to and empathise with.

44. Marty Feldman
Unforgettable in Young Frankenstein’s Igor with his trademark bulging eyeballs and comedy gait, the former Margate funfair man was responsible for some of the greatest comedy sketches of all time. He is said to have been frightened to death by Mad Magazine cartoonist Sergio Aragones on the Mexican set of the film Yellowbeard.

45. Lou Reed
My favourite thing about bitchy Lou is the story of how, after dismantling the Velvet Underground around his own ego, he sulked and went back to his mum and dad’s house. After years of waiting for his man, he got a job as a typist at daddy’s insurance firm. I love the idea of him sitting in the typing pool with a squadron of bouffant haired Long Island gossiping hags. There’s a sitcom in there somewhere.

46. Jerry Springer
He’s English you know? It’s almost impossible to imagine the current litany of sewage that flows from our television sets with the influence of the erstwhile mayor of Cincinnati. Although this influence can be viewed as an erosion of all intelligent discourse globally, the “opera” he inspired can be seen as a victory in the battle against censorship. Take care of yourself, and each other.

47. R.B. Kitaj
Born near Cleveland, went to art school in London, painted pictures of Batman. He blended literary text with painting and widely travelled. One of the greatest painters of the 20th century.

48. Slash
He’s English you know? I remember watching Saul Hudson on Irish telly years ago recalling just how, “dangerously gone” he was. He has a trademark hat which is something to aspire to.

48. Stephen Malkmus
I had initially had Slash here, but I prefer Pavement and the Silver Jews to Velvet Revolver or Snake Pit.

49. David Beckham
Apparently he’s a bit of a Jew. I think he deserves a place in the list just for that edition of The Sun when we all prayed for his foot to mend in time for the World Cup in 2002.

50. Moses
“MOSES! YOUR HAIR!” is the infamous reaction of the crowd as Big M comes down from his rendezvous with the Guvnor. Adopted into the Egyptian Aristocracy, he was the original trustafarian who went on to free all the slaves. He then became the first “Red Sea pedestrian” and was able to turn sticks into snakes. He also gave us the Ten Commandments and therefore without whom, no Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Jamadan 2: On Drugs

2009-02-11T12:03:00.004Z

Sobriety is like the cheapest and longest lasting drug I’ve ever had. I’ve been wandering around all elated and giddy. To the passing judge-ferret like the hideous lipless slab of foundation and lard reading the Daily Mail opposite me on the train this morning, it might appear that I am “on drugs”.

I have a little bit of a problem with the term / expression, “on drugs”. It’s often used to describe people who commit unfathomably abhorrent acts. It’s more than lazy prose, it’s lazy thinking. Its use negates the need to attempt to understand the darker side of human behaviour. And what’s worse it that it seems to be a term used by people who have no prior knowledge of drug use, yet it is always whispered with an assured confidence in its prognosis. Of course what they are generally describing is mental illness. Which is horrible and probably shouldn’t be mixed with lots of drugs. But what is really quite mental is the idea that a person can appoint themselves as an expert on a subject by stubbornly avoiding any contact with it. One of the main reasons why there is such a schism between supposed well-meaning clean-living people and those that do take drugs, in that it’s hard to accept a criticism of something from people who couldn’t possibly understand it. It’s almost like claiming to hate music having never heard it, but having witnessed a neighbour dancing in their living room and finding it rather peculiar.

As a general rule of thumb people should steer clear from verbalising opinions on subjects they know nothing about. It alienates people who could potentially be directly affected the negative aspects of drug use because it eliminates the trust in their opinion. In other words, if a relative is telling a child that smoking pot is exactly the same as shooting smack, two things will happen. Firstly, after smoking pot the child will realise that it could not possibly be as harmful as the hysteria suggests, thus negating any value to further advice regarding substance use. And secondly, by logical extension, if trust and respect for the authority figure remain, mainlining smack would appear to be equally harmless.

And here’s the nub, the term “drugs” is entirely relative. At what point does a substance stop being a drug and start becoming an acceptable aid to relaxation/social interaction/health? It’s an impossibly arbitrary umbrella term and entirely inadequate to describe the mosaic of effects and experiences induced by being “on drugs”. To continue with the music analogy, it’s a little like listening to a 30 second snippet of Brahms and assuming that that’s how Hendrix will sound.

The term “on drugs” is also often applied to the end of any description of an activity to add a lazy splash of colour. Like, it’s like opera ON DRUGS or they were like shop fitters ON DRUGS! The problem with this is that the behaviour of said shop fitters would vary wildly depending on which drugs they were on. Anything from wild paranoia, crashing over aching insincere yet well meant affection, catatonic shell shock, intense moronic playfulness, egomaniacal self-indulgent rambling or – oddly enough – NO CHANGE AT ALL!

I’m not suggesting that all drugs are altogether fun-filled and harmless experiences. The truth is that some drugs are better suited to certain people. I know people that are babbling mad-eyed fools after two shandies and others that can shovel half of Bolivia up their nose-pipe and remain eloquent and charming. A lot of this is to do with self-awareness. Know your drugs and then prescribe what you need to get by. It’s undoubted that damage occurs to both the mind and body from use of any number of drugs, but so does all aspects of life. Permanent abstinence can be damaging is that it seems to shrink tolerance (no pun intended) and empathy. One’s soul withers and dies if one spends their entire life judging whether other people are having too much fun or not. To me, that’s a fate far worse than addiction. If you are sitting around in a febrile state with your perfectly preserved mind wasting your spirit away scanning the scandal sheets evolving a beady Saxon mole eye never taking time to work out how you might want to cram a smile onto your idiot face, I have one question for you: what are you, on drugs?

Jamadan

2009-02-06T15:54:00.005Z

Right, quick one.

We all need a break every now and then. From everything. So I’m not drinking for February again. The reasons why I pick February for my sabbatical are as follows:

Lent is stupid. Why would Jesus place Paddy’s Day slap in the middle of Lent if he wasn’t a hateful bastard? Other fasting festivals such as Ramadan make people smell bad and pass out at the merest whiff of physical exertion. The traditional dry month of January is so densely populated with misguided attempts at self-improvement it makes alcoholism seem veritably virtuous. And lastly, if you’re going to pick a month to deny yourself of anything, pick the shortest one. That’s why in America Black History Month is in February. If the white man is going to surrender his crown as supreme example of the species of hairless spite monkey for any period he’s not going to pick one of the long months – with sunshine and stuff.

Talking of white stuff, I’m fucking bewildered again by my fellow hairless spite monkey’s reaction to seven inches of snow in the wee hours of Monday morning. For our international customers, London and the bits around it were sputtered with snow while y’all watched the Superbowl, leading to the entire city’s transport systems taking a Phelps-sized bong hit and sitting on the couch for the rest of the day.

Any sensible person’s reaction to waking up in the morning and being told to stay at home and inspect your own groin all day is one of unfettered joy. And it seemed at first glance, as though this was the common consensus. The streets were filled with hysterical dipshits building snowmen and flying down hills on tea trays, as though the brightness of the snow had seared off the majority of their frontal lobes. Brilliant! This is exactly the kind of idiotic depravity I want to live amongst. I considered Russianing up my tomato juice, but remembered my vows.

Then an odd thing happened, the freaks started calling the radio stations. Those same freaks who complain about radio shows they’ve never heard. I picture them as joyless naked mole rat people sitting on coaches wrapped in cellophane scanning the populous for laughter, thoughtful contemplation or vague vestiges of joy with the worlds’ media on speed dial. Their cages lined with a collection of the most frenzied frothing Daily Mail front pages. The first thing these sadistic pathetic cuntfoams started banging on about was the “economy”. This mysterious tote board with its runic symbols of “consumer confidence” trailing across telly screens like a collective psychic skidmark. It’s essentially a points system for people so detached from natural human emotion they need a score-line to let them know if they’re happy or not.

And then this was linked to a perceived bruising of our civic and national pride. ‘London is an embarrassment!’ they erupted like popping cysts of negative irrelevance. ‘Even the French and the Italians managed to keep their cities running!’ spewed one demented shitpan, whilst running on the spot on top of a map of Lisbon to give himself a sense of superiority and purpose. Who the fuck cares if Derby’s bus service is running? What does it matter if Luigi made it to Plumbase? You’ve got a day off. Read a fucking book or something!

And as it began to look as though our national pride could never recover from the perceived lack of ploughs and magic grit, the collective bile of the these human misery tumours spilled out over their front lawns and melted all the snow away. The subject of their ire was the perceived laziness of everyone else. One pleasant lady in an evening paper suggested that everyone who enjoyed their day off should be, ‘first in the job cull.’ So it wasn’t that people had a day off that bothered her, it was the enjoyment of it. Shit! That’s valid. I’m going to spend my next holiday self flagellating and then nail myself to a cross under a shower of hot vinegar just to ensure I remember how lucky I am to commute to work with a bunch of oozing fuckbags with hidden sores and stinky groins every other morning of my miserable life. (That’s Easter sorted.)

Just as I had finished emptying petrol over myself an my possessions with a Clipper in my hand in a desperate attempt to escape the mesmerising shitheadedness of my fellow fuckwits, the radio began to fizz with an even more baffling hatred. This time their unparalleled rage was reserved for teachers keeping schools closed for an additional day. What struck me as the most upsetting aspect of it was the horror people seemed to feel about having to actually spend time with their children! As though this was the some kind of punishment.

Have we really got to a such a stage where the majority of people think that going to a room somewhere to think up ways to sell Chicken Tikka Lasagna* or chlamdydia insurance is more important than spending time raising or enjoying the company of our kids? Work should be the unwanted distraction from life not the other way round. Work is not what you are. It is comprised of the mastery of three skills: compromise, deferment, and the ability to digest inconvenience without flinching. It seems some people have become so adept at these that they have entirely forgotten that a day in the snow with your parents can last an entire lifetime in the memory of a kid. And considering the vast majority of us are only ever really thought of with any affection, or indeed remembered at all, is by our offspring, it’s time we got our priorities straight.

21 days and counting.

* - actual product

16. ‘Mister Moonlight’ – The Beatles

2009-01-16T15:50:00.003Z

Right, I’m no quitter. Let’s get back to this stunningly popular segment from yesteryear.

Cousin Woody called me the other day to tell me that his favourite Beatles song is ‘Mister Moonlight’. You’ll notice elsewhere on the internet that it has been referred to as, ‘the worst Beatles song of all time’. Which is obviously untrue. It’s a beautifully bonkers, chintzy, calamitous slice of mayhem that shows a sense of humour that is lacking from a lot of their early work. I see it as the forerunner to the stoned madness of ‘You Know My Name (Look Up My Number)’ three years, and bucket loads of medicine, later. It’s like witnessing the birth of the character of the slightly unhinged nightclub singer Dennis O’Dell.

Fab Facts:

It was originally sung by Doctor Feelgood and the Interns (not the 70s pub rockers).
Brian Jones played sax on ‘You Know My Name (Look Up My Number)’.
The worst Beatles song is either ‘Revolution 9’ or ‘Obla-Di-Obla-Da’.

The Leap Second

2009-01-04T17:29:00.003Z

First Johnny Rotten is trying to hawk me butter and now Iggy Pop is an insurance salesman? Nothing should surprise me any more. It’s another year and I’m watching television. That’s the easy part. January again. That month. I hate that month. I light a cigarette. That’s all I do.

Gym month. It's the only thing people are buying. And this time they’re offering tips on how to exercise at home. I’ve never felt so out of the loop. So I turn off the box and head for the typer. I’ve had the same haircut for too long. My mirror got broke at a party.

The newspaper was a let down. All the journos are back at work. All the end of year review jamborees written before they went on holiday have gone to press and it’s back to the same old shit. Recession, the Israelis are blowing the beJaysus out the Palestinians, footballers are getting arrested for beating people up. Nothing changes. The clock just ticks over. There was a leap second this time. That’s all we need. The scientists adding more time to our stretch.

Maybe I should move back to the States. They got that Obama coming to power. That’s going to be a joke. But with the drink driving conviction it'll be harder to get a green card this time.

It’s cold outside. Might even snow tomorrow. Just in time for work. Two weeks ago people would have been rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of a “White Christmas” now all it means is an even more depressing squeeze than usual on the cattle truck tomorrow morning. Frozen toes and a queue to renew that travel card you don't want.

Drank a nice White Russian last night. Smoked plenty of smokes already. Too late for resolutions. Too late, even with that extra second.

The Palace drew in the cup. They got Watford to look forward to if they can do Leicester in the replay. That about sums it up. If you can be arsed to repeat the same nil-nil draw, you get that same inglorious bunch of sub-Londoners that knocked you out two years ago.

Cheer up you swine. Maybe this will be your year.

Jealousy is a Three Letter Word

2008-12-02T18:28:00.002Z

A couple of weeks ago we got a message on our textgun here at Toxic Towers from the inimitable Spanish Tony. It stated simply: "On the train with Bez". Then nothing. Then a follow up: "Going to Brighton with Bez". Then this picture (we've added Kato the Koala there).

Some guys have all the luck.

The Terrifying Chatter of the Posh of Monkey World

2008-11-26T14:44:00.004Z

I dug Monkey when I was a kid. I had a Monkey outfit. It included a painted broomstick to use as a “staff” that I bashed things with. Monkey was cool as fuck. I drew pictures of Monkey. I wanted to be Monkey.

So you can imagine my little Monkey ears perking up when I read that Damon Albarn and the bloke who did Tank Girl were doing a musical version of it. These are the people responsible for the Gorrilaz project - which has been laughably and pretentiously referred to by twats as the world’s first “virtual band”. Like Mike Batt’s Wombles or the Banana Splits never happened. It’s not new, clever or actually that good over the course of a whole LP. But the singles are good so my enthusiasm for the Monkey project remained fairly high. Even if it was mostly due to it stimulating my novelty gland.

By the time The Wife got round to buying the £50 tickets for us it was during it’s run at the purpose built Monkey World near that Millennium Dome thing that people all call the O2 now. I’d never been there, so my novelty gland was swelling up to the size of a cantaloupe. Firstly then, it’s a fucking horrible place. Nestling under the gaudy spectre of Canary Wharf – it’s a weird American mall-shaped cancerous growth plonk in the middle of London. Inside the big tent there are loads of really shit chain bars and restaurants in a fake “outside”. It’s an outside that resembles a nightmarish vision of the future where all the air has run out and we have to use recycled airplane oxygen and every building is called a “unit”. And all “units” are owned by a seedy murky organisation called “the corporation” or “O2” or something. And these “units” are filled with identikit soulless catering franchises for citizens to “enjoy” during allotted “recreation” hours. The “corporation” are in charge of all the music in the world. All bands and other artists will have to apply for a licence to distribute their “product” in the dome. Slowly the “corporation” buys up every band that existed before they took over to re-form with their logo tattooed on their faces. Despite all this, people volunteer to spend their time and money in this synthetic hell. I hurried through trying not to look any of the staff in the eye in case they realised I was a dissenter and sent me for “re-programming” or some shit.

Monkey World was filling up pretty rapidly as me and the wife sat down to a £25 Chinky served by indolent teenagers and foreigners that seemed to have been trafficked here for sexwork and took a wrong turn. This didn’t include wine. Considering the show had cost the wife £50 per ticket, this seemed a bit of piss take. I decided at this point that I was not going to buy a programme or t-shirt and that I was going to illegally email Blur’s back catalogue to everyone in China.

Everything I’d read about this show suggested that this financial amputation would be worth it. I’d read reviews using words like ‘absorbing’, ‘imaginative’ and ‘dizzying’. Albarn has been developing a reputation that is making certain posh oddballs to talk about him being some kind of genius. It soon became apparent that the Monkey World was infected by a plague of these very same posh oddballs. There’s something really weird about posh people. They all have an excruciating inability to talk below one million decibels and an even more embarrassing habit of talking about themselves with astounding assuredness. It’s like their shame switch has short circuited.

One particularly rara bint next to me belted out with some confused pride that she had: ‘NO IDEA THAT BIRMINGHAM HAD AN AIRPORT UNTIL I HAD TO GO THEIR FOR UNI! HAW HAW HAW!’

At this point a level of bile and hatred foamed up to my oesophagus sparking an incredible urge to set fire to the entire audience. This incessant plummy chatter filled the entire venue like a swarm of shitflies. I tried to drown it out but their voices are tuned to an impossibly irritating pitch that no human can physically ignore. It was like a million fingernails sliding down a mile of blackboard.

You can imagine my joy as the opening bars of music came from the orchestra pit and they finally subsided. It started promisingly enough. The “beats” were quirky, the acrobats were kung fu-ing away up bamboo poles, and the cartoons were nice to look at. But after ten minutes of it, I found myself against my better wishes, getting a bit bored and annoyed. I began to picture Albarn and Hewlett as star sixth form students being put in charge of a Christmas play with an unlimited budget. And it was like they took the budget and spent half of it on Pringles and skunk and came up with this spectacle of contortionists and plate spinners and jugglers. It all felt rather disjointed. After about the fourth song I started to feel like I was watching a UK Got Talent Glastonbury Special. But as it went on, it felt more and more self-indulgent.

During the intermission the incessant noise of the over-confident toffs returned. One voice loudly declaring that the way to enjoy it was to ignore subtitles, ‘like the opera’ apparently. I have trouble trusting anything that comes with instructions on “how to enjoy it”. I was gasping for a smoke to prevent me from throttling someone. Cigarettes are not a part of O2’s brave new world. In fact the little town of huge advertising screens and pretty fairy lights seems to have written cigarettes out of history and replaced them with smoothie stands. I began to feel like I was an Victorian opium addict stumbling forty years into the future.

My tobacco jones lingered throughout an increasingly grating second half where I quite literally stopped caring about anything that happened anywhere in the entire world. Briefly reengaging my brain during a period where Pigsy was seduced by some kind of sea sirens or some shit. For a brief second it felt like I was stuck in an enormous bourgeois titty bar. The end of the show was greeted with such a prolonged clapathon it felt like I’d signed up from some new bizarre hipster exercise plan.

In contrast we went to see an 82 year old Chuck Berry perform two days before. The only glitz or production involved in Chuck’s show was a sailor’s hat and a silver lame cardigan. He repeatedly forgot the words, the chords and seemingly where he was. But still, it was entirely engaging and entertaining to the extent that it provoked brief periods of mania. The staid clinical production of Monkey was shot down by an old man who claimed he didn’t even know what he was playing. But then again, he continued, all he’s ever done has played ‘any old thing and y’all like it’. Hail, hail rock’n’roll.

Groove to: Drive-In Saturday - David Bowie

The Sad and Lonely Death of the Tragic Clown Prince

2008-11-18T16:40:00.012Z

Dubya. King Dubby. Everyone’s favourite ‘Bible thumping Hamanzee’ has taken a bit of a kicking here at Toxic Towers over the years. I had moved to the States six weeks before he was “elected” in 2000. America was a funny place back then, all full of liberal guilt, coffee and blowjobs in the Oval Office. In short, it was funny. The prospect of this visibly backward imbecile getting elected on a platform of “compassionate conservatism” and “international isolationism” in order to bring “dignity back to the White House” seemed like the biggest joke of all. He looked so simian he was almost beyond parody. The way his arms waggled by his side seemed to suggest one of his advisers had stuck a broomstick up the back of his jacket to prevent his knuckles dragging on the floor. The very idea that America would elect a man with such an evident problem with the art of sentence construction seemed beyond belief. The Republicans had been gone for eight years. They were a bunch of crazy mentals who were bizarrely distressed by oral sex and prone to witch hunts. Similarly the Tories were in disarray on this side of the pond. We’d survived the ‘Millennium Bug’ and we’d learnt to clone sheep - life was good.

But he did win. And the next thing you know he’s dancing a satanic little jig on the White House Lawn with Enrique Iglesias. The world, overnight, seemed doomed. As the details of the election got more and more grubby, opinion of Bush went from mild bemusement and slight disappointment to something altogether more unsavoury. This man was a cheating, lying, evil bastard. He’d bullied and prevented minorities from voting in his brother’s state in order to allow succession of his dubious bloodline. Rumours abounded that his granddad had some shady links with the Nazis. America had a King. It was like some badly written medieval drama. It all seemed to fly in the face of the very idea of a democratic republic. Suddenly “Junior” began to be known by the ominous single lettered moniker of ‘W’. Like some sinister James Bond villain. King W.

Then things went really tits up. Just under a year later a bunch of pathetic dimwits took their fairytale view of good and evil to the world by burning 3,000 people alive in front of a global television audience. What kind of demented soft-skulled moron could entertain the idea that publicly killing people in eyeshot of their peers would make anyone understand your point of view? These dickheads were, of course, trying to bring down the supposed infidels. What they did was akin to whacking a wasp’s nest with a badminton racket whilst covered in jam. With their feet nailed to the floor. Under floodlights.

Only it wasn't a wasp’s nest, it was the largest army in the world. And the King WASP was W. Normally one would think it would be pretty straightforward as to what happened next. But nothing was straightforward under W. In the weeks after 9/11, America was an odd place. The first thing that happened was every inch of it was covered in stars and stripes. Every one was nice to each other and loads of people bought the Koran in an attempt to try and understand the cunts who had misinterpreted it in the first place. Things started to get bizarre and dark when W began hitting the lectern talking about shadowy networks, evil-doers, axes of evil, crusades, and being ‘with us or against us’. The result of this sinister malevolent rhetoric was that the goodwill and understanding morphed into a blind deferment of thought to the leaders and a surge in blind empty jingoistic patriotism. The flags hanging on the overpasses suddenly had misspelt ominous warnings to the outside world sloppily scrawled across them. People started cropping up on telly claiming they were happy to have their rights taken away as long as they were safe. They were, in other words, willing to surrender their freedom for the sake of freedom. All those copies of the Koran were suddenly piled high up on the bonfire of Homeland Security.

The first stage of the War on Turr was simple enough. As predicted, the wasps went after the jam-covered man. Blowing all fuckery out of mountain goats in Afghanistan. Then it got weird. The wasps started attacking the people who lived down the street from the jam-covered man out of some insane belief that one day he might lend him a cricket bat to hit the nest with. All the while, the jam-covered man had showered and settled down in front of Frazier for the evening.

During all of this we had begun to learn about the extent of Bush’s Christianity. Startling stories of how he had been told by God to run for office began to emerge. One particular favourite of mine was how he had seen the face of Jesus in his own puke telling him to quit the coke and booze. This man sounded like someone I could talk to. I pondered to myself about getting the chance to get him back on the ale and drugs. I would daydream about sacrificing everything I had to spend the rest of my life as his drunken flunky. We’d be like a shitty inarticulate version of Hunter and Oscar heading out in search of the American Dream whacked out of our skulls on Miller High Life and cheap DC crack. And the world would be saved from another religious zealot.

Alas W wasn’t going back to that. He went to bed at nine every night and prayed to Jesus that he could bomb the light of the Lord into the brown people’s hearts. The thing about Bush is that a lot of people in America think that they could drink with him, and that’s why they voted for him. It doesn’t help that all the elite rich arseholes that pay thousands of dollars at his fundraisers are handed plaid shirts and hardhats on the way in and fed hotdogs. This is true, by the way. It’s like a sickening Imperial party where all the inbred aristocratic toffs dress up as slaves to raise money for the slave trade. From the slaves.

It’s hard to imagine that the barely functioning collection of gloop that sloshes around in W’s skull could come up with such a Machiavellian scheme. And the truth is he didn’t. It’s easy to think the only King that W really resembled with any accuracy was Elvis. He is, after all, a good natured southern gobshite running on autopilot with an unfair dollop of charm. You could take this further by seeing Cheney and Rove as an amalgamated Colonel Tom Parker figure. Cheney with the exploitative and self-serving motive, Rove with the carnival shill’s talent for slight of hand. You could stretch it further by looking at the rest of the scum he surrounded himself with in that southern mansion as a bunch of vampiric good old boys lining their pockets while their cash cow ploughed headlong into the wood chipper.

Although it’s not quite as pleasant an ending for W. Having his heart explode with a turd hanging out of his bunghole whilst reading a starchart would be a sweet comfort in comparison. No such luck. Almost all of the assholes who helped him into this mess have fucked off to personal compounds to rub themselves down with the blood of virgin Arab schoolgirls and thousand dollar bills. He’s left visibly startled that all of this should have happened to him. Tears are never far from his eyes. Like Lenny holding the dead rabbit, he can’t quite work out how he broke everything so badly. His only hope of happiness is that the face of Jesus visits him in a particularly nasty bout of diarrhoea and persuades him to get back on the gear. He is a tragic man with a tragic legacy

Groove to: Death Of A Clown - The Kinks

A Holiday from Cynicism

2008-11-06T13:33:00.009Z

I was sitting in a bar on Venice Beach, CA looking out on the Pacific Ocean a few weeks ago. I was talking to a chap about the potential of Barack ‘Slim Slam Bamma’ becoming president. Despite the sunshine and optimism that surrounded us, I was offering a particularly rain swept British form of foreboding. Never expect, distrust hope, don’t dream. You see, I said to this fella, we had great hopes for Tony Blair in 1997. People really have forgotten just how fucking depressing it was in England under Major. It had been eighteen years since the last Labour government. Britain felt so intractably Conservative that it had began to feel like it would never end. Like the jackboot was permanently affixed to the face of anyone who didn’t sing up wholeheartedly for this bizarre antiquated Victorian view of the world and everyone in it. When Labour swept to power that night with such ferocity, I remember feeling an unparalleled optimism and relief that maybe the world wasn’t quite as mad a place as I’d begun to believe.

And of course, it was great, I told this chap, it really was. But, the inevitable happened. Power is like the 1980s, no-one is immune to its corruptible lure. All politicians are liars and murderers, said Bill Hicks, and the same came to be the case with Blair. The issue was style over substance. You promise the moon on a spoon if all you talk about is a better tomorrow. And it’s likely that your vagueness is hiding a dark secret. Whether that is lust for power for its own sake, or a fervent “Christian” belief in the redemptive power of pre-emptive war. California Man pleaded that I stopped killing his buzz and urged me to hop on the Hope-wagon to Change-ville.

I was having none of it.

The first thing that was ever written in earnest for Toxic Monday Morning Office, Blues Again was four years ago this week. It was reflecting on the first four years of W’s reign of turr. 1,001 days of which I’d spent in America watching the place get more and more divided, paranoid, aggressive, ugly and depressed. The era of Toxic Towers has been set to a backdrop to his second term. Won out of the increased domestic fear-mongering of Rove’s campaign against baby murderers and “fag” weddings. It’s been a time when each of his allies fell away one by one and we witnessed the horrific consequences of his ineptitude. It was made all the worse by having seen so many of these things coming. The rampant marathon of trinkets for chores collapsed in itself, hatred festered from every crack in the ground, and the bloated bodies of poor people bobbed up from the stinking flood waters. W went one worse than Nero, as his talents didn’t extend to musical ability, he faux tap danced on the White House lawn, bewildered that he could have been responsible for such chaos, and like Dorothy one suspected, all he wanted to do was go home.

Yet still I had a nagging feeling that the rampant Republican beast would not be defeated. Right up to Monday I was so hoped-out that I even put a bet on McCain winning with Ladbrokes (that the bookies had Slim Slam odds on to win should have told me something). And the cynicism was still coursing through my veins. What is “Hope” and “Change” without the specifics, if not nothing more than empty sloganeering for the logo idolising generation?

As luck would have it, I cracked the base of my spine off the pavement the other week, so the kind doctor gave me some glorious pain pills to see me through the election. The Wife had just returned from Virginia where she had casted what I suspected as a somewhat futile vote. So I settled down in my marshmallow sofa, fuzzy from Codeine and Kronenburg with a host of “correspondents” on the old text gun across key States.

Needless to say, through the fug and the smoke, my optimism steadily rose. My father-in-law went to bed as Pennsylvania fell. The correspondence started coming in thick and fast. What was this strange feeling in my gut? Could it have been optimism? Or was it the medicine? My old man was still up at 3am when Ohio turned blue and it was all over. Obama had won. And that strange feeling spread.

The next day I saw a young black lad on the platform at Victoria tube station. For a fleeting second I thought how much he looked like the President Elect of the United States. Then it really sank home to me what that “Hope” and “Change” shit meant. It’s not empty rhetoric. It is a new era. This kid has a role model outside of the empty-skulled consumerist bilge. The zealots who parade around as Muslims can no longer justify their murderous bullshit. The truth is that America has led the way here. Obama is not just a black man. His heritage is mixed. Just like the rest of the planet. From now on we’re in it together, for better or for worse. That makes a change, and that creates hope.

Codeine anyone?

Groove to: A Change Is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke

Back From The Dead - Halloween Special

2008-10-31T12:31:00.013Z

Right cunts, I’m coming out of retirement to get something off my chest. The subject of my ire? Oh, it’s the same as everyone else’s. The BBC. I’m sick to the back testis of their blatant pandering to minorities. Minorities with views dragged from the stone age and fervent hatred of all things civilised. I’m talking, of course, about complainers. Specifically the 30,000 gibbering shit snails that actually took time our of their obviously jam-packed fun-crammed lives to complain about a series of phone calls made by two TV personalities on the radio.

That’s right! Imagine Selhurst Park filled to the brim with agitated mental deficients clambering to get a phone signal in order to express their hurt feelings and emotional distress. What had so concerned these rational souls in order to prompt this rampant vocalising of their robust sensibilities? It seems that Jonathon Ross and Russell Brand had left a message on Manuel from Fawtly Towers's mobile to inform him that Brand had fucked his granddaughter. Oh, hang on, I hear you belch. That’s a bit strong, fucking someone’s grandkid? Man! Like, how old is she and stuff? That was before we all found out she was a goth career stripper from something called the Satanic Sluts. With a grandkid like that, it’s hardly likely to make grandpops spit up his Complan to find out that the nation’s most well-known goth career sex-addict had laid some pipe in her.

And this is the other thing. Why is everyone so eager to jump up and defend this bloke? These frenzied bloodthirsty masses are queuing up to point out that Manuel is 78! Like a man who’s went through World War 2 as a Jewish Berliner is about to be tipped over the edge by a voicemail. Firstly this is an insult to the resilience of our nation’s elder folk, and secondly what self-respecting septuagarian listens to entire phone messages on a mobile phone anyway? Any normal old bloke would simply hear the beginning of the message, consider it beneath them to endure any more of it and turn the infernal contraption off. It seems the reason why they were calling him in the first place was that he hadn’t bothered to show up to the studio. He hadn’t called to say why and his phone was off. Normal. Fine. Old person decides life is too short to promote some pointless nonsense he’d been part of and decides to give Joyce’s Ulysses another crack, or maybe some porn.

But no, this is a “living legend” that the likes of Brand and Ross aren’t fit enough to tie the laces of. Why? Because for a grand total of six hours on the mid to late seventies he impersonated a Spaniard and got hit with a frying pan. Now I love Fawlty Towers as much as the next man, but seriously, how difficult is it to take the piss out of Spanish people? Come on? Legend? Institution? He’s done fuck all since. It’s like this nation needs treatment for nostalgia addiction. It’s only when the Daily Mail whips them into action they break out of their benign narcotic wistful fug and get the dialling digits in a tither.

There was one such dimwitted yesterjunkie who was banging on all dewy eyed to a radio call-in about back when you could watch Dad’s Army and Only Fools and Horses all night without fear of being upset or “challenged”. The fact that these programmes existed in different time periods was not going to get in the way of his logic. Nor the fact that they were only on for thirty minutes a week. Although I do believe there are cable channels that are showing them on a twenty-four hour loop right now. Which is probably what this numpty was watching when the radio show went out.

Which brings me neatly to my next point, like all the gormless pugfaced goons who complained about the radio programme, I wasn’t listening to it. I was doing something else. Something I enjoyed. That’s the pure beauty of radio, unless you’ve got one of those mad fillings that picks up radio waves and transmits Radio 2 right inside your head, you can turn it off an any given time. And if you do, the welfare of Manuel and his granddaughter’s chastity are the least of your concerns. What kind of a maniac complains about something they haven’t heard? What possible mental condition would make you track down something that you might find offensive in order to get irate to the point that you have to call for someone to lose their job? Do these people deliberately wander around stepping in dogshit just to write to the council about the smell? And what is being “offended” anyway? What does it feel like? I imagine it’s a bit like being humiliated, only more imaginary. Maybe that’s the link? Maybe all these people are those highly moral types who enjoy being pissed on by women like Manuel’s granddaughter. Sometimes the only way they can get their kicks is by following the Daily Mail’s little Easter egg hunts to YouTube items in which things are said do not comply with their standards. Standards that are laminated and attached to the fridge door, or maybe even engraved on a brass plaque at the end of their driveway, to warn passers-by.

There are fucking millions of things on television that annoy me, I don’t know if I’m offended by them. I’d like to never see Simon Cowell or anyone related to Ozzy Osbourne ever again. I’d be glad if everyone who produces those vile ‘Sell All Your Old Shit To Sour-Faced Mugs’ or ‘Buy Some Other Cunt’s House And Do It Up Better Than They Could Ever Afford’ programmes were gathered up in a bendy bus and incinerated while I took pictures from the road. And all these programmes that involve humiliating and pissing on people’s dreams, can rankle me a bit. That’s why I don’t watch them.

Of course we’re talking about radio, and how it should forever be like listening to a water feature chugging out magnolia paint. So that will leave the entire airwaves staffed by someone who may well help me finally understand what the word offensive means: Dermot O’Leary! Happy fucking Halloween! Yes, that’s what this nation yearns for. The cunt from Big Brother. That vapid, pointless, amoebic fucking blob. The WWJD school dullard who you know owns the EXACT same four CDs that every one of the 30,000 frothing lunatics rubbing themselves down with peanut oil and Deep Heat scanning the airwaves with their beady little albino mole eyes looking for something to complain about. I can't believe 30,000 of you can convince the BBC to axe Ross' show for the rest of the year and introduce new guidelines on what's "acceptable". I'd like to complain about each and every one of you so that you all have your phones and any other means of communication confiscated. Better still, why don't you all just fuck off?

Some people don’t deserve this country. Yes, even this fucking country.

Groove to: Jump - Derek & Clive

A Culinary Tip For The Weekend

2008-10-24T12:26:00.005+01:00

When you are cooking your boiled eggs and dippy soldiers this Sunday morning with Tabsco and the papers.

Here is a list of 36 songs that you can use to measure the exact three minutes it takes to make the perfect boiled egg. You can choose a different every week from now until, well a lot later in the future some time.

Have a great time. All the time. I'm off to install a hangover.

1. Egg Timer- Gulfboot Johnson- 3.00
2. The Thang (Part 2)- Eddie Bo- 3:00
3. Soul Dressing- Booker T. & The MG's- 3:00
4. Leader Of The Pack- The Shangri-Las- 3:00
5. Goodbye Girl- Squeeze- 3:00
6. If I Told You Once (I Told You A Million Times)- Ben Aiken- 3:00
7. Reach Out I'll Be There- The Four Tops- 3:00
8. What'll I Do For Satisfaction- Johnny Daye- 3:00
9. Jacksonville Skyline- Whiskeytown- 3:00
10. Trust In Me- Etta James- 3:00
11. Bea's Flat- Chet Baker- 3:00
12. Memphis Soul Stew- King Curtis- 3:00
13. Sloop John B- The Beach Boys- 3:00
14. Liberty Bell- Super Furry Animals- 3:00
15. Crawling King Snake- John Lee Hooker- 3:00
16. Now She Cares No More For Me- Doug Pointdexter- 3:00
17. Rush And A Push And The Land Is Ours- The Smiths- 3:00
18. Cracklin' Rosie- Neil Diamond- 3:00
19. Shake Your Hips- The Rolling Stones- 3:00
20. One Bright Star- Paul Weller- 3:00
21. Gimme Good Loving- Big Al Downing- 3:00
22. Beardsman Ska- The Skatalites- 3:00
23. Another Girl Another Planet- The Only Ones- 3:00
24. I Can't Get Behind That- William Shatner- 3:00
25. Ohio- CSNY- 3:00
26. How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)- Junior Walker & The All Stars- 3:00
27. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow- Slim Smith- 3:00
28. Mindrocker- Fenwyck- 3:00
29. I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)- The Electric Prunes- 3:00
30. The Fool On The Hill- The Beatles- 3:00
31. Groove Me- King Floyd- 3:00
32. The Ballad Of John And Yoko- The Beatles- 3:00
33. Mardy Bum- Arctic Monkeys- 3:00
34. I'm Leaving On That Late, Late Train- Solomon Burke- 3:00
35. Pinball Wizard- The Who- 3:00
36. Ann- Iggy & the Stooges- 3:00

Two Beatles tracks. That proves it then.

Groove to: I am the Walrus - The Beatles