Posts from February 2007

IHM Lyrics Watch – The Klaxons

Klaxon is a trademark for an electromechanical horn or alerting device… they alert listeners of the vehicle’s arrival and possible danger… derives from the Greek verb klazo, meaning “to shriek” – Wikipedia

I have discovered a way to improve the image of sixth form poetry. It has cost me dear, so I would like to share it with you. It is to expose the lyrics perpetrated by “nu rave” (“no hope”, more like) band Klaxons. Their migraine and nausea inducing sounds are backed up with the most ill-thought-out pseudo-intellectual lyrics you are ever likely to witness. Unless you are a particular fan of Jimmy Page (more fool you).

Now much as I HATE MUSIC (in capitals for the commenters who seem to still miss this basic point), I have a fondness for the written word (like most ‘web-loggers’) and a disposition for what is grandly termed literary fiction. As these Klaxon boys pretend to. However with all of literature to choose from they seem, predictably, hung up on male ‘cult’ authors (I said ‘cult’) beloved of adolescents. Books such as these are like drugs: fun to experience but tedious to hear being talked about, let alone sung about. Just as each generation fondly imagines they are the first to discover marijuana, every moping goth thinks they are the only person to have read Herman Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game” under the covers with a torch. The Klaxons might actually be the first to have read it under the covers with a glowstick, alternatively they might have been doing something else with their “glowstick”. In any case it is we, the innocent public, who deal with the horrendous aftermath: the resulting regurgitated purple prose. Usually this is locked away in the sixth form common room along with posters of Che Guevara and Roger Dean album covers. But when this prose starts to gain a wider public profile, swift action must be taken.

“It’s Hot” and tepid celebrity comic strips

Minorly incensed at lollard Magnus’s deliberate snub of “It’s Hot” magazine (see the recent Lollards episode), specifically the Busted cartoon strip therein, I have bought the latest issue of this BBC mag as a catch up. (Fortunately my work colleagues are used to me distributing the free gifts from magazines like this, and the Lindsay/Paris/Christina nail gloss was actually well received.)

They’ve really scaled down the comic strips from the height of pop-love when i bought it semi-regularly 2 or 3 years back. It used to be a separate “pull out” section featuring Busted, EastEnders, “back stage” at Top o the Pops, “PopSchool” and a variety of low-level teen ‘sleb stuff usually featuring people like Peter Andre and Fearne Cotton playing practical jokes on each other. Quite different from the “Look In” era of “The Story of ABBA”, near-documentary, strips, but still part of the “so important they merit a comic” canon.

[UPDATED with extra scans now]

Weighing in at a (mc)flyweight 8 sides, here’s what you missed in the February comics pages:

Guinness Red – Salad of all the Guinness! (hott pictoral evidence comix)

Guinness Red, in it’s unnatural environment, yesterday.

Your reporter’s verdict is v similar to existing feedback, tasteless and quite unexciting. Had to follow it up with several other pints of normal Guinness to shock tastebuds back into sensation. Didn’t notice any Guinness Red beermats/bar towels etc for limited edition merchandise grabbing either! Freaky Trigger’s earlier reporter mentions Guinness Red tasting similar to Caffreys – I didn’t believe this could be so, being quite a fan of Caffreys now you mention it – but it seems Caffreys (or at least the stuff in the O’Neils) has suffered by watering down of not only percentage but also taste and creaminesss. Wah!

Freaky Trigger and the Lollards of Pop – Week 8

The most up-to-date episode of popular pre-reformation non-conformism, as originally transported to the wireless sets of London between 12 and 1pm via the luminiferous aether stimulations of Resonance 104.4FM. Amidst the usual tomfoolery and idle speculation, this week’s transmission features the process of (d)epilation, wine coloured football strips, cheap corn snacks and Radio 1 DJs in comic form.

Poptimism – Lesson Thirty – Extra time

Catch You – Sophie Ellis-Bextor

Tango – Lady Sovereign

Give It To Me (Dirty) – Timbaland Feat. Nelly Furtado & Justin Timberlake

Discotheque – Young Love

Redneck Woman – Gretchen Wilson (D-Bop Radio Edit)

Never Marry a Railroad Man – Shocking Blue

Free Your Soul – Supercar

Don’t Let Stars Get Us Tangled Up – Cortney Tidwell (Ewan Pearson remix)

Konichiwa Bitches – Robyn (Trentemoller Remix)

Peter Gunn Mambo – Jack Costanzo And His Orchestra

Yeah Yeah Yeah What’s Going On – Flying White Dots bootleg

Guinness Red: The Tasting

Guinness Red has finally arrived!! Despite claims on the website it wasn’t available in Great Queen Street O’Neills*, but we managed to trek the 400 yards round the corner to the Shaftesbury Avenue one where we saw the exciting new pump nestled between the Normal and Cold pumps. Here is my verdict:

Get your hands on as much Guinness Red ephemera (beer mats, glasses, bar towels, whatever) as you can over the next month or so, because this brand will NOT make it to mass market. It is inspid, flavourless, pointless and it’s not even red. I intend to hoover up as many beer mats as I can and make a killing on e-bay…

Imagine a pint a guinness, mmm guinness, everyone likes a restorative pint every now and again, it is the ale drinker’s friend when in a wasteland of lager and john smiths smoothflow. Steady, reliable, guinness.

Now take that pint of guinness, remove the taste and body and make it slightly more see-through and you have guinness red, except it’s not even that good. It’s just a creamy head (my least favourite part of said pint anyway) on top of some darkish, very vaguely beery liquid. I can’t see why a guinness drinker would want it, or why anyone who wasn’t a guinness drinker would want it, it seems to be without a market.

Sorry Simon (why doesn’t Simon have a biog on the about us page anyway? Poor Simon)

*conversation in GQS O’N
Me: have you got Guinness Red on?
Barstaff: Sorry no, you know, you’re the third person to ask about that today

That Bucket of Shit Has Got To Be There For A Reason

An annoying trend of current film and television is the set-up. By being aware of the set-up you can nearly always work out who the murderer and the method is in CSI (or at least one of these). The cast iron rule of the set-up is, anything which is given prominence or significance in an establishing scene, will be used later. Hollywood is terrible at this: Tony Scott’s Deja Vu is not so much named for its time-travel plot, as the fact you have seen everything in it more than once (including the plot). It works because it allows the viewer to feel clever, they remember the set-up and often anticipate the action just before it happens.

The All New SI Units Of Measurement

Its good to see that in the great GIANT SQUID story the BBC no longer trust the standard units of measurement, be they imperial or metric. Instead, as any good news story will have it, the all new SI Units* are being used. In this case the squid is being measured in Double Decker Buses.

Brandwatch: Civil War, 52, Countdown, and the future of “shared universe” comics

Unusually for a big event, there is actually an awful lot to say about Marvel’s Civil War series, the last issue of which hits UK shops today. I’m not going to say an awful lot in this post: basically, as a comic it was kind of rub, as a set of ideas it was interesting but problematic, as a repositioning of the Marvel Universe brand it was impressively ambitious, as a short term marketing move it was a commercial knockout, and as a long-term marketing move it might just be an absolute triumph. It’s this latter point I want to talk about in this post, which means revealing the ending, so watch out – spoilers below.

Pie Debate Solved

The pie debate has been rumbling on FT since the dawn of time itself. For the uninitiated, the positions can broadly be termed the performativists and the formalists.

The latter attempt to draw a line that encompasses the common or garden pie in pastry with the shepherd’s, cottage and fish pie are doomed to failure. Constructions such as ‘a filling touched by at least one starch layer’ cause us to include lasagne and pizza. Two say that at least two dimensions must be touched leaves the shepherd’s pie out, as well as the pie in a pot beloved of pub grub, but still leaves ravioli in the mix. To say ‘to the most part or totally encompassed by a casing’ opens us to the possibility that a boiled egg is a pie.

The hard formalists (I pin my colours to the mast here) escape this tortuous taxonomy by being brutal with the scions of pie. We insist that pie means pastry, immediately kicking out pasta and eggs and other non-pies from the family. Harder formalists insist on the essential slice of a silo shape, to exclude a pasty, but even I think this is going too far.