Blue Friday: It's Christmas and I'm Crying

I don't do the Christmas indie advent calendars any more, because they're a lot of effort for very little reward (though the old ones are still all here if you need alt.festive music). But if I had done a calendar for this year, It's Christmas and I'm Crying by Du Blonde would have been on it. It's terrific, even if it does leave you scratching your head thinking, hmm, those melodies are familiar, what does that sound like? Well, I'll save you the head-scratch - the verse evokes a bit of All The Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople, and the pre-chorus brings Basket Case by Green Day to mind. My mind, at least. There's even a tiny bit of Dear Prudence by The Beatles in the middle eight. It's the chord changes, you see. But everyone's a product of their influences, and there's nothing new under the sun, so let's not hold any of those references against Newcastle's Beth Jeans Houghton, aka Du Blonde, for this is rather good, I reckon. Besides, there are only so many ways of arranging a finite number of chords. And notwithstanding the melodic appropriation, this has some great lyrics. Listen carefully.

And in case you think I made a typo, yes, it is Beth Jeans, not Beth Jean. I know, I know...

That Was The Year That Was: 2023

This is the thirteenth time I've recapped a year like this (for completists, here are the others); I nearly didn't bother, on the grounds that I consume so little new material, and no-one cares about my opinion. So I was going to give it a swerve...

...but then had an attackers of blogger's guilt. So here we are ... if "here" is realising that what I "consume" these days is, more than ever, driven by my notional roles of father and partner than by my own individual, personal taste. Especially what I watch, as will become apparent.

Aside from updating twelfth to thirteenth, those opening paragraphs are an exact copy'n'paste of last year's post. Which probably tells you all you need to know about my enthusiasm for this end of year recap. Basically, I have had very few highlights in my cultural life this year, so what to write? But enough prevarication; let's crack on with this load of old balls and see how little new stuff I've tried this year (and that line is also lifted from last year).

Best album

Turns out I've bought very few original albums this year. Lots of compilations, best ofs and retrospectives, but not many of all new material. Consequently Ballad of Darren by Blur wins almost by default, whereas it perhaps wouldn't have won in other years. Don't get me wrong, it is good, borderline great. But it probably isn't essential. If I was Q magazine (remember that?) it would garner a four star review, not five. That said, it does reward repeated listens, and is definitely worth your time, as long as you're not still expecting Popscene.

Best song

I've got a bit more to say here, at least. The Last Rotation of Earth by BC Camplight has been living rent-free in my head since I heard it, and I absolutely love the brilliance of Expert in a Dying Field by The Beths. In other years The Beths would have prevailed, but this year saw Dublin's Fontaines DC cover Nick Drake's Cello Song, and I'm not sure a new song has hit me more so far this decade. I called it as early as March, and this remains my song of a year. A worthy winner - play it loud!

Best gig

It's been another quiet year, gig-wise. There have been the usual suspects, of course: The Wedding Present (for the last time with Mel on bass), From The Jam (with excellent company from my oldest friends), The Smyths (as close as you're going to get without a time machine) - all reliably excellent, of course. Sleeper nearly stole in and took the crown this year, for their wonderful intimate acoustic gig at the Arts Centre, though I accept my judgement may be coloured by still being smitten with Louise (obligatory sigh) after all these years. But it's a tie between Pulp, who were simply brilliant at Latitude (and, crucially, shared with the rest of the Amusements clan) and Suede, who were far better than anyone has any right to expect after thirty years. So yes, another bunch of old people from my youth, basically.

Best book

I've read a few books this year, but not many of them are new for 2023. In fact, I think crime procedural Holly by Stephen King is the only book published this year that I've read so far. So that ought to win but it won't, good though it was. I also got a surprising amount out of Before & Laughter by Jimmy Carr; I'm not his biggest fan but there are genuine nuggets of life advice to he had here, delivered in an accessible and funny manner. However, the nod this year must go to The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, even though the subject matter - climate catastrophe - meant that I had to read it in small doses, over the course of a year, for my own mental health. The first chapter in particular hits as hard as any opening I think I've ever read.

Best film

I am once more somewhat embarrassed by the paucity of new films I've been to see this year, partly because Amusements Minor is now at an age when he wants to go to the cinema with his mates instead of me. That said, I very much enjoyed Spielberg autobiog The Fabelmans at the start of the year. However, the best film I've sat amongst spilled popcorn for this year, by a short nose from Señor Spielbergo, is Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall. I don't know if it's that foreign language films make you work harder, and therefore appreciate what you get out of them more, or whether this really is a great film but, whatever, it kept me very focused for all of its two and a half hours, plus stimluated plenty of discussion with Mrs Amusements afterwards.

Best television

Even if not up to the dazzling standards of earlier series, Ghosts has continued to be a joy - there's a Christmas Day finale coming too, so get your Button House fix whilst you still can, would be my advice. In terms of documentaries, Louis Theroux's recent BBC1 interview with Pete Doherty was a captivating watch, for fans of both, and the Ronnie O'Sullivan behind-the-scenes film The Edge of Everything on Amazon Prime was a real eye-opener - I defy anyone not to be moved at the end at Ronnie's emotion. Definitely worth a watch. However, my TV choice this year is Only Murders In The Building on Disney+; no other show has given me as much satisfaction and all manner of laughs, from knowing "that's clever" chuckles to tea-spurting laugh out loud roars. Steve Martin is as good as he has ever been, his chemistry with Martin Short elevates their every shared scene, and Selena Gomez is a revelation. Very highly recommended indeed.

Best sport

In a year that has been pretty mundane in terms of sport, it is hard to look beyond the superbly victorious European Ryder Cup team, but I'm going to because once more the Lionesses gave us all something to get excited about; yes, they fell at the final hurdle against Spain, but that was still as close as England have come to winning a World Cup in my lifetime. And sure, they've just missed out on Nations League qualification by the most heartbreaking of slender margins, but let's not forget they did beat Brazil to win the Finalissima at the start of the year too. Aside from that, I must also mention Katie Boulter, who was next level at the recent Billie Jean Cup qualifier against Sweden and continues to look our best hope on court, at least until Emma Raducanu can get herself back on track.

Person of the year

Well, it's Chris Packham, obviously. Quite apart from his televisual impact on the natural world, through Springwatch, Autumnwatch and this year's outstanding five-parter Earth, he also gave us the illuminating documentary Inside Our Autistic Minds, asked difficult questions in Is It Time To Break The Law? and even found time to pop up on Celebrity Gogglebox for Stand Up To Cancer, alongside his step-daughter Megan McCubbin. And all the while, he was fighting an exhaustive and intrusive legal battle against Country Squire Magazine for defamation - he stood up to be counted on this, and won, at some personal if not financial cost. That he continues to be a publicly active activist, despite arson attacks on his property and having dead badgers nailed to his front gate, tells you all you need to know about the man. The natural heir to Attenborough, and there's no higher praise than that in my book.

Tool of the year

I need a bigger toolbox ... although most of last year's candidates are still here. Johnson, Sunak, Patel, Braverman ("As thick as pig-shit, basically" - Mark Watson), Rees-Mogg, Shapps, Hancock, Dorries, Cleverly (a new entry, and proof of all the flaws in nominative determinism). We need shot of them all from public life, from public service, because they do us all a dis-service, to say the least. Further afield? Man-child Putin, throwing missiles and young Russians onto the bonfire of his own vanity, the seemingly inevitable comeback from Trump, the dollar-enabled kid-in-a-candy-store that is Elon Musk, the batrachoidal puddle of bigotry that is Farage and all those who conspire to keep him in the news, the perma-tanned barrel-scraping and down-dumbed miasma of reality television, those who are famous for being famous, anyone who applauds themselves on television, oh Jesus, I could go on. I'm not going to pick one person... I'm just begging, hoping beyond hope that 2024 is better. 2023 hasn't been, to the extent that, aside from a few tweaks and updates, I have basically just copied and pasted this paragraph from last year.

Well, blogger's guilt, I hope that was worth it. But reader ... how was it for you?

Great moments in music video history #10: Wild Boys

Duran Duran were just about the biggest band around when Wild Boys came out, a scarcely believable 39 years ago, and they had a video budget to match. They perhaps hit the peak of video excess with this four minutes of ... well, everything, frankly.

At the time, the red-tops were full of "Le Bon almosts drowns on video set" stories, as I recall. Simon has sought to distance himself from the story in recent years, calling it an urban myth. But the video's choreographer, Arlene Philips of Strictly fame no less, remembers it slightly differently. As you may recall, Le Bon was strapped to the sail of a windmill which rotated and dunked his head underwater whilst he was singing. What can I say, it was the Eighties. Urban myth the near-drowning may be, but Arlene is quoted as saying, "The windmill stopped when he was under the water and he couldn't breathe. He was stuck there and they had to send divers in to rescue him. It was awful, waiting to see if he was OK. I'll never forget it. It was an amazing video, though. Wild Boys was just the most fabulous, mad video ever."

Of course he didn't nearly drown, and I'm sure he wouldn't have downplayed it if he had. But it does give me all the excuse I need to play this gloriously OTT slice of nostalgia, and dedicate it to The Man Of Cheese, a big Duran fan back in the day - happy birthday, mate.

And P.S. - if you don't sing the intro to this but with a lyric change any time anybody ever mentions the phrase "wild boar" then I'm afraid we need to have words...

New to NA: KONGOS

"Is it possible that we two, you and I, have grown so old and so inflexible that we have outlived our usefulness?"

So says Spock to Kirk, at the tail-end of Star Trek VI. I would say the same thing, were it not to imply a degree of flexibility and usefulness in the first place. Because I am basically a parochial musical dinosaur who likes what he likes and dismisses anything else, often contemptuously.

But I try, sometimes. Really, I do.

Take today's track - it's hardly new, since it was released in 2012, but it's new to me, courtesy of Amusements Minor's Spotify playlist. KONGOS (their capitalisation) are four brothers from South Africa, relocated to Texas. Come With Me Now remains their biggest hit, and at various times has been picked up for commercial use by WWE, Strongbow, The Grand Tour, The Expendables 3 and, bizarrely, as the theme music for the Australian version of I'm A Celebrity ... but don't hold that against it. It's been everywhere, basically, for a decade, but is still somehow new to me.

Speaking of me... I think the song as a whole is alright. But the middle eight, when it slows down and turns from a bluegrass stomper to something altogether more refined, well I really rather like that. It reminds me of A-ha, that middle eight (and in a good way, before you start).

Anyway, here it is.

It's a big Internet but still a small world

I had a message from my brother a couple of days ago. Nothing unusual there, you might think, except that we are seldom in touch, not for any personal reasons but geographical. He's lived just about as far away as you can get for the last sixteen years, during which time I've only seen him two or three times. Add in the complication of the diametrically opposed time zones and regular communication, over time, just fell into the too-hard pile. So it was a nice surprise to get a message, even if it was just one line: "This wasn't you was it?" A hyperlink was attached.

Turns out my brother had, for reasons only known to himself, been Googling a slightly obscure and largely forgotten short film from the 1970s. Incredibly, the thumbnail for one of the search results showed a grainy black and white photograph of a now-defunct cinema he remembered from his youth, literally half a world away. What a coincidence, eh? So that was, inevitably, the link he clicked on to read about the film.

The more he read, the more uncannily echoic of his own cinema-going experience the article became, to the point that he happened to say (presumably to his missus) "This could have been written by my brother." Lo and behold, when he got to bottom of the article, there was my forename. Too much of a coincidence, he figured ... and hence the message.

You've already guessed from the fact that I've bothered to string out this tiny tale into another blog post that, of course, it was me. This was the article he read, something I wrote seven and a half years ago about The Waterloo Bridge Handicap and long-forgotten cinemas (... and a girl called Denise). That post later got republished by none other than Andrew Collins on his short-lived but much-liked blog Digging your Screen. Now, all these years later, it and a series of small coincidences were enough to prove that, although the Internet is a vast and sometimes horrible place, underneath it all there is still a small world.

Better finish with a song, I suppose. My brother was a big fan of Adam Ant in his younger day, so here's a very early track from him, Deutscher Girls, set to footage from Derek Jarman's 1978 film Jubilee (which included both Adam and this song). Adam is accompanied here by a pre-fame iteration of the Ants, many of whom went on to back Annabella Lwin in Bow Wow Wow when Adam put a white stripe on his nose and recruited a new guitarist, two drummers and a much more tribal sound for the Antmusic that was to sweep the nation's playgrounds.

And yes, I did choose the Jubilee clip for the embed to link all this nonsense back to the ideas of film and cinema-going - these posts don't (always) just throw themselves together, you know?

It's hard to stay positive

I'm with Greta. The COP summit really is all "blah, blah, blah". Here are two consecutive BBC news headlines, as presented to me this morning in my RSS feed reader of choice, with annotations by me:

I've said it before but, sadly, I still think the only way we are going to avoid a global climate crisis is if people who are already rich and powerful can somehow make themselves richer and more powerful by doing it. I take a cold crumb of comfort from the fact that their money will be worthless when there's no food, drinking water or habitable land left. Sorry (not sorry), dysthymia has hoved into view once more. Happy Christmas!

I'm not the biggest Ash fan in the world but since we should all prepare to get very hot indeed, this seemed appropriate.

Monday long song: You Took

We're into December, it's cold and the nights are drawing in. I really should start work on my That Was The Year That Was review of 2023, but I'm not sure I have enough to make it worthwhile. So instead here's a long song for your Monday, from Aussie outfit The Church's second album, The Blurred Crusade, all the way back from 1982. According to Wikipedia, this was about the time the band left their New Wave roots behind and expanded into "neo-psychedelia". Yes, really.

Whatever the genre description, Crusade remains a decent album, even if it has dated slightly. The first 90 seconds of this could be knocked up in Garageband in about, ooh, 90 seconds these days, I reckon. But that's not the point, is it?

Anyway, the song.

Winter

According to the Met Office and their meteorological calendar, today is the first day of winter. You might have other definitions and fair enough, but I need no other excuse for this, a live performance from the fourth best band in Hull, exactly 37 years and one week ago. I Smell Winter was the B-side to Think For A Minute, if memory serves.

Racking up the years

"I'm old, not obsolete," opined Arnold, in the barrel-scraping retread that was 2015's Terminator Genisys. Much like CDs, these days. Remember when they were the future, all over Tomorrow's World, with their irridescent digital promise to tempt us all into rebuying our record collections? Long time ago, isn't it?

When I was at university as an undergraduate, an impossible number of years ago, I was a frequent visitor to the Record Library. It was a little room on the ground floor level of the main campus library, and was home to rack upon rack of vinyl and a small, but growing, number of new-fangled and impossibly exciting CDs. I didn't have a record player in my student hovel, but I borrowed CDs from the library most weeks and taped them onto whatever spare TDKs I had at the time. It didn't matter that the cassette recorder I was doing the copying on was, frankly, pretty rubbish - taping a CD was still better than taping the alternative.

Nearly 25 years after I left, I returned to that same university to work. Since staff have full access to the campus library, I also returned to the Record Library, which had grown somewhat, but also changed - most of the vinyl was gone, and the number of CDs had multiplied 50-fold, perhaps even 100-fold. And although everything is online these days, streamable or downloadable or Spotifyable or YouTubable, I would occasionally borrow a handful of CDs for old times' sake. I took great delight in finding and reborrowing some CDs I had first borrowed in the early 90s - there was a circularity to that that I greatly enjoyed.

Covid and lockdown meant working from home, of course. I'm still only in the office two or sometimes three days a week now - a change has been wrought that will be hard to go back from. But let's not digress. A month or two ago I went back to the library to get a CD, now more than 30 years after my first visit there. And the Record Library was ... gone.

Not gone gone, as I had first thought. But moved, to the lowest basement level, and from regular shelving to these space-efficient rolling racks...

There was no-one around, no-one near the racks. They felt decidedly untouched. CDs are the past, and that makes me very sad. Still, they had a longer useful life than DVDs - you can't seem to give those away these days. Damn you Netflix, Disney+ and all the rest. But I loved CDs. Still love them. And have got thousands of the damn things. And no, Mrs Amusements, I will not part with them - they are a collection, after all.

Of course the other feeling these rolling racks triggered was a Proustian rush of recalling the department store I worked in as a teenager. As I may have mentioned before, I had a Saturday job in the lighting department of a well-known but now defunct high street store that was big enough to have an enormous, windowless stock room on its top floor. Most of the stock was housed in giant rolling racks that made the ones in the photograph above look puny. They were easily big enough to hide in, let's put it that way, and so were a great place to while away the time on a slow Saturday afternoon. Of course most stores these days don't have stock rooms in the same way - just-in-time ordering and better point-of-sale racking mean the shop floor is essentially the stock room now. "Just going to look for it upstairs" has, like CDs, become a thing of the past. That makes me sad too, but then of course I'm an old white guy and, as Mabel says in the wonderful Only Murders In The Building, "Old white guys are only afraid of colon cancer and societal change."

At this point, I was going to embed Yesterday's Men by Madness, but I've unsurprisingly featured that before, so here's something different, in the shape of When You're Old And Lonely by The Magnetic Fields, which gets away with its simplicity and lack of musical progression by being both short and (bitter)sweet.

When you're old and lonely you will wish you'd married me
I could build a fire for you and bring you cakes and tea
When you're cold and hungry I'll be waiting by the phone
You can call me up and tell me how you're all alone, all alone
When you're old and lonely and the rush of life is past
Days go by too slowly and the years go by too fast
When your golden loneliness is heavier than stone
You can call me up and say "My God, I'm all alone, all alone."

To me...

I'll save you squinting to read the horizontal axis - this is a graph of the number of blog posts I've written every month for the last two years, prior to this one. The dotted red line makes the implicit trend explicit. I know it's just a count, it's got nothing to do with quality or page views (though both of those trend lines would follow a similar trajectory). Maybe I've just run out of words.

Take the rest of this post, for example. It starts with seeing this on Instagram the other day...

View this post on Instagram

Which is one of those jokes that, if you have to explain it, stops being funny.

And then I thought, this could lead into a post about how U2 aren't all bad, actually (come back, Rol). Prone to pomposity, yes, effects-pedal-dependent, maybe, and so far over the shark even Quint couldn't get them, certainly. But there were some good songs there too, back in the day. Except ... I don't have the words, effort or energy required to write that post any more, it seems.

Bollocks to it. Here's a song.

See, that was alright, wasn't it? And if it was by anyone else, we'd all be enthusing. Although seeing Bonio in his big glasses inevitably brings this little snippet to mind:

"Are those your mother's cataract glasses?" Brilliant. And that's the post. More, by which I probably mean less, some other time.