Posts from September 2010

JIVE BUNNY AND THE MASTERMIXERS – “Swing The Mood”

#632, 5th August 1989

Where does one even begin?

How about this: back at the start of the “late 80s phase” of Popular I wrote about how the charts became a free-for-all between radically different visions of what pop was for: a futurist, bricolage-driven club music? A cheap production-line soundtrack for the everyday? Or a time machine for grown-ups to travel back to when music meant something? These strands in 80s pop seemed to be aimed at utterly estranged audiences, so the idea of something pulling all three together was insane. But isn’t this exactly what Jive Bunny is doing?

Time Reconsidered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Who Eps: #9 FOUR TO DOOMSDAY

or “Ah! Conformity! There is no OTHER freedom!”

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community and from now on also crossposted at FT.

First from actual real 5IVE in this project (that isn’t just me miscounting), and also first with Adric! Where oh where is my trusty MAXIMUM CONTRARIANISM GENERATOR? (First stab: at least he’s better than K9). In 1982’s FOUR TO DOOMSDAY, a giant big ship travelling back and forth between Urbanka and Urth, where STRATFORD GODFROG & HIS TRILLION TINY CHIPS are set to unleash tyranny (and then the bad kind of time travel), via the waves ofandroid slaves fashioned from four key stages of human civilisation (“here’s one we abducted earlier!”): Oceanic, Aztec, Medieval and Industrial Aboriginal, Mayan, Athenian and Mandarin… Now read on

i: First I should note I am v.fond of P.Davison, who was a welcome relief after so many centuries of POPEYED JELLYBABYBOY: and (maybe as a consequence) I started watching regularly again, and enjoying again: 4tD follows straight on from Castrovalva, which I can’t recall at all now but back then liked a lot. Tegan has not yet worked out she will NEVERMORE SEE HEATHROW…
ii: … which I guess leads into the the problem of COMPANION FOURSOMES (this four inherited from the end days of PJ, I believe). It’s like a double date: it’s a really hard dynamic to sustain; you also end up with stories drumming up busywork. The story begins with a competition between Adric and Nyssa to prove who is the mathsiest (oddly enough: by reading B.Russell’s Principia Mathematica, a book about as useful as The Technological Horizons of Phlogiston. Clever Nyssa is kept busy doing clever things; clever Adric is kept busy saying clever thing, and being flattered (by STRATFORD GODFROG aka MONARCH) into inadvertent treachery. His massive — and instantly obvious — wrongness in this regard actually shunts Nyssa even further out of the limelight, by demonstrating that Tegan’s irrational intuitions about the frog people are correct, from the very start. (T thinks they’re ugly, so they must be evil…) (and btw has a startlingly run-on-the-spot escapade in 4tD, ftb having nothing to do otherwise: she escapes to the TARDIS and tries unsuccessfully to fly it on her own) (she’s an air hostess, so her failure is shockingly unrealistic)
iii: OK this is a much-mocked tale, but the set-up and mise-en-scene are pretty good, and all unwinds well enough for two and a half episodes. The team meet the aliens and the androids, including a philosophical greek, and are given the runaround in various ways; and threatened with being chipped and enslaved themselves. The final ep is a bit of a shocker in terms of staging, too much action and too many lowgrade stunts packed into too short a space, and bad basic science… BUUUUT
iv: I shall argue that the chaotic rubbishness of the final scene actually suits the story well (in one sense); it’s really let down by poor comedy choreography
v: And so, BRING ON THE DANCING GIRLS (and boys)! In a 4-ep story, some 3.734 eps is given over to ANDROID DANCING ROUTINES (very occasionally interrupted by whispered plotting), in ALL the styles. I’ve seen complaints abt this in Tom’s polls: the hatas are WRONG. Well, actually they’re not quite wrong — the dancing isn’t very good, and this is a blunder. But the time spent watching dancing — and the stagespace packed with dancers — is EXACTLY RIGHT. There is not enough non-contemporary non-human dancing in Doctor Who: it is a window to the muscle-soul people! Or would be if choreographed with a bit of imagination (cf NOT the stupid lame music of the stupid Ood).
vi: — and quickly past the bad science, since it needs nailing. Tegan has moved the TARDIS a cricket-pitch length off-board. 5IVE jumps out halfway in a spacehelmet but gets marooned — he uses the throw of a cricket ball to get him the rest of the way BUT gets the main impetus from its bouncing off the spaceship and him catching it. CONSERVATION OF MOMENTUM TEACHES US that most of velocity he would get from the throw itself (as the ball goes in one direction he goes in the other). Even if the bounce occurred with perfect elasticity (unlikely with a cricket ball off metal, even in a vacuum) this would only double his
velocity when he caught it. Bah.
vii: OK here is my argument. Frog-God — travelling backwards and forwards alone in a vast spaceship for hundred of thousands of years, surrounded only by androids he has programmed, is very very VERY shut in and mad. His favourite activity is watching Mayan dancing girls doing the SAME ROUTINE for the millionth time: like some loser loonie who has seen The Sound of Music 347 times EXCEPT plainly derangedly worse. Obviously he thinks he’s God and can engineer time: he hasn’t met ANOTHER LIVING SOUL for centuries (exception, the Greek Philosopher, who even as an android despises him so much he’s soured towards nihilism) . The dramas being played out here is — as so often — a certain arid kind of intellectualism, good with machines and machine logic, terrible with social interraction, and poor old Frog-God ends up deciding Adric is a genius bcz he agrees with Frog-God. So it’s totally appropriate that his defeat is a clumsy humiliatiing silly run-about, with everyone having to push through milling dancers, and Monarch turned into a pin-point nothing with a hat placed over him. Tegan’s EMOTIONAL abreaction is on the money from the off: the villain is a plump numpty. She knows, as much as anything, because he takes her little fashion sketch as a blueprint: NOTHING more sinisterly worrying than when someone who thinks themselves smart adopts a notion you know is rushed and lame.

I enjoyed this, and think people are a bit hard on it. The FX and physical comedy ARE a bit sketchy, and — philosopher Bigon aside — the acting is generally below par. The potential offered by the set-up IS thrown away, but this is really the point: the villainous plan is paper thin and unravels into higgledy-piggledy absurdity. (This is written up ten days after I saw it, as I’ve been laid up with bad
back — I suspect I’ve forgotten quite a lot, good and silly.)

UPDATE: During a lull at work, I rescued from my scribbled notes some of the VERY awesome dialogue in this story (not always clear who said what, but makes clearer I think the two buried idea-lines that we’re offered but never quite get):
1: “How can earthlings have penetrated us? Have they learnt the error of their ways?”
2: “You are very kind!” “I am merely civilised!”
3: “This artefact is too primitive to defy my technology” (sed by MONARCH of the TARDIS)
4: “”We’re all going to heaven!”
5: “He is too jocular!”
6: “We have no comparable culture — such concepts are for the primitive” (sed by one of the Urbankans, of dancing)
7: “You weren’t made immortal to engage in gossip!” “There is no Ultimate to find!” “BLASPHEMY!” (exchange between Monarch and Bigon)
8: “What a fatuous remark!” (one of the Urbankans, annoyed when 5IVE explains something thus: “Must be the altitude”
9: “A class system is essential!”
10: “Monarch overthrew the greatest tyranny in the universe — internal and external organs!”
11: “Love? It is the exchange of two fantasies!”
12: “Can you arrange a collective activity?” “I do not see why one thing should not lead to another” (fnar! this 5IVE and Bigon, respectively, fomenting REVOLUTION by programming a MASS SWINGERS’ ORGY: for some reason when all the robots are doing the same thing, their programme CAN NO LONGER BE OVERRIDDEN! This is described as a “failsafe”, though it’s rather hard to work out why, at least from Monarch’s PoV…)

OK, so the two threads of contest I think hinted at here are world-of-atomised logic versus fleshtiems (“the flesh time” being what the Urbankans call their own ancient past, when they weren’t all programs on chips); and REASONED DESPOTISM versus squishy democracy. And up to around the middle of ep 3, we may be anticipating a genuine highminded drama of same, feat.the historical characteristics of Aborigines, Mayans, Chinese and Athenians; what we instead get is a hilarious (if clumsily staged) chaos of deflating silliness, and a stange full of milling dancer-extras. For this very good reason: when it comes to tyranny MONARCH is not one of the shrewdies; he’s a fool surrounded by (engineered) yesmen (he tolerates the strange Greek philosopher for his bizarre refusenik strangeness, but punishes him by deprogramming him if he ever tries anything on politically). He is not in a position to ensure the arrival of high intellectual drama; his regime is as hopelessly adolescent as Adric’s admiration implies.

So anyway: some other good or awkward stuff
a: the MONOPTICON! This was a minor running gag — all the ways to disable the floating robot eyeball (plus all the silly non-dirty jokes you can make about it)…
b: the dinnerparty of the salad of all the civlisations! (at which Tegan excellently proved to be able to speak the Aboriginal tongue of c.25,000 years ago…) (naturally, since she is an airhostess)
c: three excellent cliffhangers — as tom says on LJ, only one was an actual “with one bound he was free” classic (when the doctor’s head is not cut off); the other two were more like promises of plot excellence (promises reneged on somewhat in both cases: see above); when the two junior Urbankans arrive at the dinner party looking exactly like Tegan’s drawings of modern human fashion; and when Bigon reveals he’s an android
d: 5IVE calling Persuasion “Percy”; Monarch calling Nyssa and Adric “the children”
e: Adric’s very adolescent excitement that a world without organs will mean no more wars or hunger!
f: How is this collective-activity failsafe setting not a preprogrammed “DANCE YOUR WAY TO DEMOCRACY” setting? This bit was hurried over and I didn’t get Bigon’s explanation why the robots had the feature. In a way the problem of the story is that it becomes a mess of layered allegories when the plot needs (and gets!) a PUNKY DANCERIOT; the allegories (about the stupidity of tyranny, and how different human eras tackled the problems of leadership and social decisionmaking; about the ethical grounding of for regime change) are abandoned. He is called MONARCH: he encounters ANARCH. But the transition is not a logical (narrative) development, it’s a rupture — which we experience as an intrusive disappointment in a promising high-table debate…

The Horticulture of Happiness

A few weeks ago, the Guardian published this (very lovely) piece on the work of botanists at the Herbarium in Kew Gardens: “Plants are not just beautiful, they help us to survive.”

It is a good piece and it discusses a field that is often overlooked, frequently patronised and generally treated as an irrelevantly twee “soft option,” largely confined to colonial-era eccentrics. This article, in the same week, highlighted that Botany has disappeared as an A-Level subject and only ten of the 115 universities in the UK offer any qualification in Plant Science. This is partly because Botany is not well-suited to universities, of course; it requires large, specialist facilities and preferably gardens like those at Kew. It needs funding to undertake huge trips across the world and although it has wide applications (medicinal science, agriculture) it doesn’t always commercialise them very well. It happens in buildings called ‘the herbarium’ or ‘the nursery’ or ‘glasshouse number nine.’ It is sometimes a little ‘hullo clouds, hullo sky.’ And if I’d told my parents I wanted to do botany at university I can’t think they would have had a reaction better than confusion; “Hazel is continuing her study of the False Banana” is hardly the stuff of round robins, that great whistle test for academic respect. So in defiance of all that an article arguing that plants are not just beautiful or twee, they help us to survive is a very good thing.

SONIA – “You’ll Never Stop Me Loving You”

#631, 22nd July 1989

A theme we’ll come back to relentlessly when we reach the 00s: people assume reality pop talent shows are (or rather, ought to be) about talent, when in fact they’re about narrative. The records sell initially because we’ve accompanied the singer on a story whose ending requires that they sell: it’s what happens next that’s the problem. Of course, this has always been part of pop’s dynamics – Sonia’s career runs along similar lines, only without that pesky four months of television to sit through.

World’s Highest Expectations

I had to constantly remind myself before I went to see World’s Greatest Dad that when I saw Sleeping Dogs (nee Stay / Sleeping Dogs Lie) I had no expectations. Bobcat Goldthwait’s scabrously sweet dog sex satire turned out to be one of my favourite films of 2007 and when I heard of the premise of World’s Greatest Dad I was sold. Even with Robin Williams in the lead. But I had no expectations for Sleeping Dogs, and do remember that tonally it could easily shift, shimmy and sometimes undermine its nicely black content. The good news is that World’s Greatest Dad is still at its heart a pretty dark comedy with plenty of laughs and a world view like Sleeping Dogs that can still have heart in a misanthropic world view. But, and its a big but, its not as good as I wanted it to be.

Freaky Trigger and the Lollards of Pop – Series 4, Week 2

Is it safe? Is it safe?

Tim Hopkins, Steve Hewitt and Clare Spencer join me – Pete Baran – flying by the seat of our pants and talking about safety, danger, the extended mix of the Safety Dance, “if I scream if I wanna go faster what do I do if I wanna slow down”, driving lessons, ELEPHANTS = DANGER and far too much time spent discussing iron cords. With music from Half Man Half Biscuit, Alpha Blondy, Blahzay Blahzay and a rubbish Men Without Hats Song.

SOUL II SOUL ft CARON WHEELER – “Back To Life (How Ever Do You Want Me)”

#630, 24th June 1989

What’s remarkable about “Back To Life” is its self-sufficiency: surrounded by records so very eager to please, this is a track which stands out for its restraint. It’s become a ‘classic’ almost to the degree “Like A Prayer” has, but that record makes more sense the more public it is. Caron Wheeler, on the other hand, sounds more private and her song is more self-contained. It’s an ultimatum of sorts, but not a desperate one: this is real life, not fantasy, and integrity is more important than drama, so take your time.

That’s what the song sounds like, too: a voice, then a breakbeat, but no hurry. A switch to gospel vocalising just as that rich, rolling house piano line comes in – and then the strings…. there’s so much going on, but so much space too, and for all that Wheeler’s terrific performance centres the song, it’s worth thinking about how Soul II Soul construct that space.

JASON DONOVAN – “Sealed With A Kiss”

#629, 10th June 1989

Digging into the earlier versions of “Sealed With A Kiss”, I discovered two things. First that I really liked the song, second that it’s stretchy enough for nobody to have quite nailed a definitive take on it. It works just as well insincere as sincere, for a start – in the Four Voices’ 1960 recording (the first) the doo-woppers sound bereft and spectral, like parting for Summer is some kind of malign destiny and they’ll be holidaying in the Underworld this year. But by the time Bobby Vinton’s singing it in 1972, he’s got the full early-70s luxury pop treatment: bongos, flutes, wah-wah, strings and reeds in a gluttonous, glorious mix, and it makes him sound utterly insincere, like he’s phoning his abandoned lady while being rubbed down by hula girls.

Freaky Trigger and the Lollards of Pop – Series 4, Week 1

The Lollards return to Resonance FM 104.4‘s London studio with host Elisha Sessions. He’s joined by Alix Campbell, Magnus Anderson and Alex Macpherson for a discussion of KID POP – kids who sing pop and what pop kids like – not really the same category, as we discover (bling-eyed svengalis take note). We hear singles from our panelists, Frank Kogan talks about old television and why people fall out of love with music, we hear 9-year-old Willow Smith’s new single and of course we share the hotly anticipated results of the FT kid pop poll with you.

Produced by Elisha Sessions.

Untitled #2 (Instrumentals Question)

Today’s Guardian column is about song titles, and specifically how the titles on the new Gold Panda album work. Actually it was originally going to be more about the titles and less about the Panda, but in the end the specifics took the piece over – and that’s for the best: who wants to read me wittering on about titling strategy when they could be hearing about a really good new record?

Joe Tangari came up with a breakdown of song title strategies on his tumblr, and I also really liked Sabina’s points about Villalobos and Autechre.

So I thought I’d throw the floor open to the Freaky Trigger people. Who does instrumental song titles best? What kind of titles do you prefer?