Monday Toonage #3

This week's choice was inspired by 'The Forgotten Eighties' thread over at Urban 75. The Mersey Mouth's finest three and a half minutes:

Head-on: Memories of the Liverpool Punk Scene and the Story of the "Teardrop Explodes", 1976-82 by Julian Cope (Thorsons 1994)

A bunch of guys I'd seen loads were going crazy about Subway Sect. Actually, most of them were standing looking at just this one guy, who was going crazy on his own. This guy was a bit of a loudmouth. I'd noticed him in Probe before. But his face was so animated, I stood and gazed at him. He wore a black leather jacket and black combat pants. He had a Clash T-shirt under the jacket, which was zipped halfway. His hair was a natural black and gelled into a boyish quiff. In fact, everything about him was boyish. He was the most enthusiastic person I had ever seen. Beautiful. On his leather was a home-made badge. It said: "Rebel Without a Degree".

Skinny Ties and Jean Jaures Shoes

Morphing Into A Music Blog (1)

A recommended 'on this day in post-punk history' blog, The Post Punk Progressive Pop Party, is my new daily must read.

A labour of love, where someone does all the labour, and I can supply the love and admiration from afar, it's for all of us who wanted our Simon Reynolds 'Rip It Up And Start Again' in digestible bite size chunks. (I came away from that book as 1 Angry Man, mimicing Henry Fonda, with Devo & Pere Ubu placed on trial . . . Cleveland was going down for a 25 stretch.)

Love the wee snippets of history, and my misbegotten nostalgia is kicking into overdrive with the record sleeves lovingly uploaded but come on lads, where's the mp3s for sampling purposes? Grainy YouTube clips are vastly overrated unless it's for a lost classic that you foolishly passed onto some smirking wanker in Notting Hill Gate's Record and Music Exchange about 9 years ago for the price of a hot bagel and butter. (The wanker rubbed salted butter into the wounds by immediately playing the CD on the shop's sound system at full blast. Never found that track again on vinyl, Cd or mp3.)

That blog is just screaming out for its daily posts to be piggybacked with mp3s placed on this blog . . . for sampling purposes, of course . . . but I'll leave it for now.

In the meantime, a few links to posts of interest from the blog:

Wah! - The Story Of The Blues

The Jam - This Is The Modern World

M - Pop Musik

Theatre Of Hate - Original Sin

The Pretenders - I Go To Sleep

ABC - Tears Are Not Enough

Heaven 17 - Let Me Go

A Flock Of Seagulls - Wishing (I Had A Photograph Of You)

The Associates - The Affectionate Punch

The Undertones - Teenage Kicks

The Ramones - The Ramones

Lene Lovich - A New Toy

Beats Dead Socialist Watch any day of the week.

999 + 1

Thank christ. I've finally stumbled over a particularly annoying blogging figure that has been taunting me these last few weeks, and I can once more think about putting the blog back on a low gas.

I have to pause for a moment to stop myself from welling up when I think back to the good old days when five posts a month necessitated a lie down and a mug of hot sweet tea. When it comes to matters blogwise, more is generally less.

As it's a time for counting backwards, a few facts and figures lies and links:

4/17/04 First ever post on the blog:

No Title: I was hiding behind a pseudonym at this point. The absence of a title for my first blog post reveals the fact that I had yet to got my head around the abc's of blogging.

5/28/04 First ever post on the blog to receive a comment

For God and Country: Still struggling with the abc's of blogging, it took me over a month to discover how to enable comments via the dashboard. Yeah, I know what you're thinking; I also thought my first comment would be from Reidski. Quickly followed by a comment from Will accusing me of being a wanker. Turns out it was from someone called Jess L. She hasn't written or called back since.

3/12/06 Post that has received the most comments on the blog

Cliff Notes: For the longest time I was labouring under the mistaken impression that it was this post that had received the most comments on the blog. Naturally, I thought it was apt that it was the post where I wrote jack shit that would generate the most interest. Turns out I was wrong. It was the 'Cliff Notes' post that sparked off the most interest, but only because it was quickly taken over by one of those 'how long can we keep this comment thread going' ablogimations. Seemingly I was very excited by it all at the time. Knowing now that a Socialist Unity Blog post gets that many comments in the time it takes for me to take a piss, I've been overcome with the feeling of the loneliness of the long distance blogger, and has left me feeling like the loneliest man on the planet.

11/22/06 The post that generated the most page views

Sick Fucks: It has to be this one. How else do you explain that for that month, the blog received 11,457 visits and 15,780 page views? And I still think they're sick fucking wankers a year after first seeing the clip.

6/15/04 The Calvin & Hobbes and Photoshop do not mix post

The Socialist Party Discuss Their Campaign Strategy For The Next General Election: Wasn't Robert Kilroy-Silk supposed to be the 21st century Mosley?

6/11/04 The first 'I really just want this to be a music blog' post

Alternative titles for the book 'Socialism or Your Money Back': It was the book that became the blog, but in the beginning it was an excuse for me to indulge in the worst type of hipster muso bullshit.

10/13/05 Favourite ever post on the blog

"Blinkmummy Went To London . . . ": Come the future workers revolution planned and executed by the International Communist Current - you know, Laurie and Pierre - I'll be one of the first up against the wall (MF). I will have died for the most just cause of all. Laughing at one of my own jokes.

6/13/06 Second favourite post on the blog

From a Rooftop in Kings Cross: I'll keep linking to this post until someone other than myself actually find its funny. If the ICC don't deliver me to revolutionary justice, the Aufheben collective - you know, Justin and Marcus - will.

MIA and (dis)honorable mentions in dispatches

Running gags that ran out of breath after 100 yards

Whatever happened to that image of Marco Tardelli that I used to link to in every other post? A running gag without the gag bit, I can't actually locate on the blog the first time I used the picture as my shorthand explanation for ecstasy and joyous euphoria but I'm guessing it was about 45 seconds after I first discovered how to insert hyperlinks in blog posts. Nice to see that Tardelli has carved out an alternative career in Hollywood inbetween his chairing duties for Juve.

Whatever happened to that bloke in Russia?

She was wonderful in Wonderland, a respected stage actress and noted political activist but for one bloke in Russia he was only interested in the bare essentials, and, in the process, I stumbled across the strange fascination of sightmeter sightings.

11/14/06 The part time commentator, full time legend post

Get Y'r Bank Account Fitter: The eighth comment: Was it really him or some other gobby bastard pretending to be the crucial one? If it really was him, how did he find the blog? Is he one of those types who google searches his own name? (Admit it, we've all done it. Turns out that I like to spend my weekends riding a BMX bike around a concrete eyesore in Chesterfield. ) I immediately issue a post-it note to myself to mention Sarah Silverman in at least three posts a week in case she also likes to google search her name. I'm still waiting. No matter, the blog is momentarily the recipient of a sprinkle of stardust via the visit of someone claiming to be Pete Wylie. Walking it like The Clash, talking it like Chicory Tip.

10/12/04 The piss off someone's mate post

Passport to Pittenweem: If you are going to be controversial, you may as well pick the right targets. I picked the wrong one in the form of Iain M. Banks.

8/8/06 Quoted in the papers post

News of my 15 seconds . . .: The surreal scenario of the blog being quoted in an article on the then crisis in the Scottish Socialist Party on the Glasgow Herald website. Yep, someone sitting at a computer desk in a den in central Brooklyn supposedly has a special insight into the machinations of 'SheridanGate'. Maybe the trainee journo who penned that piece should have checked where I was blogging from before citing me as a credible talking bloghead on such murky machiavellian matters. Maybe I should have screen-grabbed the mention of the blog on the website, cos it's since disappeared from the Glasgow Herald's revamped website. *Sob*

6/1/04 The claiming credit post

"Two Hooses, Diver! Not Even Elvis Had Two Hooses": Only three years ago John Byrne's 'Tutti Frutti' was languishing in the vaults of the BBC and in the frontal lobe of my skull. Fast forward to today, and it's a National Theatre of Scotland stage production and, after twenty years, there are tentative plans to finally repeat the series again on the BBC. Throw in the possible release of the series as a DVD, and I'll claim my finders fee. It's amazing what a teenage crush on a Scottish accented Emma Thompson can do for the preservation and commemoration of a tv classic.

And what's in store with the next thousand posts? Well, if the 68 posts currently in draft are anything to go by, more of the same old shite. But memo to myself: I must up the mentions of Sarah Silverman on the blog. She is as human as the rest of us, and one day she will google search her name. The blog has to be there when it happens.

Must publish and go. Regular visitors to the blog are hosting a celebration party to mark the special occasion of the thousandth post.