Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews by Simon Reynolds (Soft Skull Press 2009)
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Killing Bono by Neil McCormick (Pocket Books 2004)
Friday, June 08, 2012
The Next 30 Day Song Challenge - day 08
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Red Hill: A Mining Community by Tony Parker (Coronet Books 1986)
- He says it'll burn me up in flames one day, my husband does, me and my blazing hate. He says it can't be kept up for ever, you've got to forgive and forget. I'll never forget, that's one thing that's sure: and I'll never forgive neither, at least I can't see myself doing. The Coal Board's turned my husband, who all his life's been an honest upright working man, into a criminal. They've made him someone with a conviction, and a criminal record for it. And as well as that they've made him into someone who because of it'll never again in his whole life get a decent job. He did nothing wrong in the first place: but they won't relent and give him his job back. So neither will I relent either. Those people, the Coal Board, Ian MacGregor, Maggie Thatcher, the Tories - I hate every one of them and I'll hate them till my dying day for what they've done to my husband. He can forgive them if he likes, and if he does he's a better person and a better Christian than I am. To me they're the biggest bastards who ever walked the face of the earth, and every morning when I get up I curse them and I curse them every night when I go to bed.
(from 'Me and my blazing hate')
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Saturday, April 02, 2011
30 Day Song Challenge - day 02
day 02 - your least favorite song
I'm not the angry young man I once was so picking a least favourite song was more difficult than I imagined.
My decades long hatred of Bon Jovi's 'Living On A Prayer' melted away once I moved to the States and realised that Jon Bon Jovi didn't stand a chance. The poor swine's from New Jersey. He couldn't help myself. My loathing of the BritPop also rans such as the likes of Cast and The Seahorses is so all encompassing that I couldn't pick out the one song to hate above all others. Their combined back catalogues merge into one mass of mediocrity; and it's a cop out to hate a novelty hit or a charity comedy record. They're there to be shot at.
Ten seconds before penning this post, this tuneless pious crock of happy clappy liberalism shite was stepping up for the gold medal - dishonorable mentions also go out to here and there - but I suddenly remembered that one particular song that I always hated above all others from the first moment I heard it. Twenty years on and it still raise the hackles.
Step forward James, Ian, Derry, Mark and Zac:
Number 1 in the US Charts back in '91, and still number one for me - but in a very different sense - all these years later.
Friday, January 01, 2010
The chosen feud
No apologies or shame for the cliche of posting this classic from U2 on the blog on today of all days.
When they were still good. They should never have swopped Sälen for the Californian desert.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Lemons
And you thought Bono would always be the biggest wanker in U2. Looks like Larry Mullen Junior is giving him a run for his money.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Old Waves
Morphing Into A Music Blog (5)
Accidents Will Happen I hope it amounts to more than Elvis Costello doing a 'Phil Caine'* ('Don't like paying the taxes . . . . they've got no ambition in Britain'.) Just don't tell me that he lives in Chelsea, Manhattan. Time's Up I listen to the first couple of U2 albums and always want to cut Bono some slack, but when I read him spouting shite like this in the Rolling Stone: "Just being in D.C., and meeting all the people I've met - I've now been going there for nearly ten years. They let me in their rooms and they listen to my rhetoric or invective or whatever it turns out to be. And I come away from that city not with nausea but with admiration. These people work like dogs. These lawmakers, they're trying to move between their families back home and Washington. All of them could make much more money in the private sector. Not all, but most of them are there for the right reasons. There's very little glamour. And they're listening to me, who's completely over-rewarded for what I do.". . . I just want to take an axe to his Joshua Tree. I don't think I've ever witnessed a smarmier politician than that *@#%. I don't care if he thinks he's doing it for the right reasons. Spot the reference to the Buzzcocks' 'Spiral Scratch' EP in the interview, and wonder if Bono thinks it's 1993, he's Damon Albarn and he's talking about his new album, Modern Life is Rubbish.**Step Back in Time That's enough ranting about the posters on your wall falling to the floor, back to when old waves was post-punk, and the best track from Scritti Politti's 1979 EP, '4 A-Sides' For extra credit, flick through Robert Lumley's 'States of Emergency', whilst wondering out loud 'Whatever happened to Big Flame?'***Scritti Politti - P.A.s mp3
*The alternative name was Michael Collins. You figure it out.
**Yep, first found out about Bono in the Rolling Stone via The Blogging Equivalent of U2 (Had a soft spot for the early stuff. Turned into bloated insufferable wankers ever since.)
***Yep, I know Green Gartside was a YCLer and had a bad case of the Gramscian MT's to prove it but, in an alternative universe, back in 77/78 he should have been the activities officer of the St Pancras branch of the Lotta Continua