Three Things

Reading Helen Zaltzman's blog (if you don't listen to her Answer Me This podcast you really really should, I was reminded of Isy Suttie's great Edinburgh show this year, in which her mum tells her she should write down three things that made her happy that day.
It's a lovely idea, and one I'm going to start doing. But as I haven't done it before, today's Three Things will be about the last week. I'm also going to set myself the rule that the Things can't already be blog posts.

1. Winning the pub quiz - the first time at our local pub quiz, and we romped to victory by half a point. This was in no way because the music round was about musicals. which brings me on to

2. Hungover Sunday - having had enough red wine the night before that I felt justified in lying around in my pyjamas, but not enough that I was lying with my head in the toilet. Watched West Side Story and Strictly ballroom. West Side Story is a little schmaltzy even for me, but perfect hangover cheese.


3. Fireworks in Blackheath. Not as impressive as usual, but I get ridiculously excited with fireworks. Especially when you're so close up it feels like they're aimed right at you. Less fun was standing next to two men, who were both recording on two devices each. Pah, these young 'uns. I did take my phone out for two minutes however, just to snap the below.

I really enjoy live comedy. For various reasons I hadn’t seen any for over a month, so going to see some last night, especially when it is that good, was a pleasant surprise. But it also reminded me of the problems I face when I do venture forth. The main one being, I’m easily offended.

I don’t quite know how. Certainly, as a nice white middle-class girl at an inner-London comprehensive, I had to make sure I didn’t offend anyone, and it’s easy to offend when you’re a slightly pretentious, well-spoken geek. But The Real Daniel O’Donnell Show at The Albany last night wasn’t full of race-orientated comedy last night. This would be pointless, as with all live comedy, the audience was basically white. Maybe Jewish, but not black. Nope, the jokes were about The A-Team raping in Vietnam (in a song performed by Phil Whelans), and a sketch about paedophiles, based on Loose Women, that most scintillating of programmes. The first was actually very funny, perhaps because if you put anything to a jaunty melody it somehow seems more friendly. The paedophile sketch I found less funny. I hope this is because it wasn’t actually very funny, but I suspect it’s because I was quite offended by it. I’ve laughed at Madeline McCann jokes (and then felt a bit guilty), and I find Frankie Boyle hilarious, despite his entire act being about pushing the audience as far as he can. But on some level, I’m offended by them, and if I caught someone looking at me while I laughed I think I’d feel very ashamed. So I’m hoping that it was just that the sketch was unfunny. The whole show is put together very quickly before each monthly club night, which leads to some fairly hit and miss pieces, but creates a great energy and sense of excitement.
There was then a great band on. Subtle link, there, sorry.
Anyway, The Brute Chorus were fantastic. The singer looked like some sort of 40s swashbuckling Errol Flynn type. It’s essentially music of the intelligent art pop persuasion, but bloody brilliant for all that. A bit of a Kinks style riff here, a Cure bassline there (There’s a definite LoveCats vibe to one song), and you’ve got a whole room loving the energetic pop. I though that heights had been reached with ‘Nebuchadnezzer’ and ‘Chateau’, but then for an encore (after singing Happy Birthday to Nick, the keyboardist/guitarist, they brought on Tigs, so sing the flipping amazing The Cuckoo & The Stolen Heart. A fantastic bluesy sea-shanty type thing (yup, ok, I admit defeat, it’s undefinable), they have immediately captured my heart, and I’ll be looking out for more. Look, I got to the end without mentioning they’re releasing their music on the Hawley Arms (the boozer of choice for Wino and Borrell) label Bumpman Records. Oh. Dammit.

2007 The year in review - Pt I

On a personal note, it’s the year I moved back to London, and stopped acting like a student. However, as this is uninteresting to no one but myself, and even then I find it fairly boring, I am going to try and get the last year in some semblance of order in my head, by going through the major pop culture happenings. I have a feeling it’s going to descend into stream of consciousness fairly quickly as well, so apologies for any structural weaknesses.

Music

It’s been a fairly unexciting year in music, for me at least. Of course there are some fantastic artists, but there have been no momentous albums…just take a look at the Q albums of the year:

1. Neon Bible - Arcade Fire
2. Icky Thump - White Stripes
3. Favourite Worst Nightmare - Arctic Monkeys
4. The Good, The Bad & The Queen
5. Magic - Bruce Springsteen

I found Neon Bible disappointing, and certainly not as heart-stopping as their debut. The White Stripes seem to have descended even further into caricature, The Good, The Bad & The Queen was an album of ideas, but too disparate to be really good, and I’ll be honest and say I haven’t listened to the Springsteen. Of the five, the only one I really like is Favourite Worst Nightmare. There are some really fabulous songs on it, and there’s a sense of a band of potential working up to a really great album, I can’t wait for the next one.
Other honourable mentions have to go The LCD Soundsystem album Sound of Silver, The Klaxons, and Radiohead (that fact that the album is really good seems to have got lost in the hype surrounding the delivery method), as well as Asobi Seksu, although the new album Citrus is nowhere near as good as their self-titled debut, which only got a UK release this year.

There have of course been a few fantastic singles, Umbrella by Rihanna is still not losing its appeal, and if you can enjoy the hopefully ironic pronunciation, Foundations by Kate Nash is lovely, as long as you avoid the rest of the album. It’s been great to see The Manic Street Preachers remember how to write good singles again, Send Away The Tigers and Your Love Alone stood up really well in comparison to older material when I saw them live in December.

I can’t really comment on the live scene at the moment, as I’ve been rather old-fogey like this year, I didn’t go to any festivals, and haven’t managed to see many gigs, of which I’m particularly gutted about missing Joanna Newsom. However, it does seem like two increasingly separate entities exist, the album/single selling bands, and then those that are successful live (of course, some bands cross the divide). A band can have a very comfortable success playing live to large audiences, but this doesn’t seem to translate into album sales anymore.

But really, 2007 has been the year of melt downs. Of course, this is a topic every pop culture commentator is covering, but then it has been the most entertaining thing to watch this year, as long as you’re comfortable with a bucketload of schadenfreude. We started the year with blanket coverage of Pete Doherty & Kate Moss’ relationship, and end it in a tabloid obsession with Amy Winehouse. It’s difficult to see Amy as anything more than a tragic figure at the moment, and hard to remember the period between her first (very good) and second (brilliant) albums, where she was just a mouthy, feisty and endearing London girl. The comparisons with jazz legends of old (cheers Lord Lloyd Webber), go further than the music, she’s become the stereotype of the strong woman weak when it comes to love, standing by her man however grubby he may get.

And then we get to Morrissey. Oh, what to say. Those who know me will attest to the fact that I have spent some years pretending that songs such as National Front Disco don’t exist. I love Morrissey and The Smiths, and I really can’t bear to think that the man who expresses with such perfect wit and subtlety my emotions, is a hypocritical xenophobe. Of course accounts of the interview he gave to the NME differ, but it seems pretty certain that he made some remarks, not of themselves offensive, but the thoughts of a middle-aged Dail Mail-educated grumpy white man, wrapped in some fairly unpleasant rhetoric. He then blogged on the Guardian Music website. At last! I hoped. Morrissey is going to honestly give us his thoughts on immigration, racism etc. What we got instead was an petulant rant about journalistic standards, and some weak posturing along the lines of ‘I can’t be racist, because I let an anti-racist organisation put their logo on the back of my album’. The latest news that Morrissey has donated some money to Salford Boys’ Club, while a nice thing to do in itself, just confirms it. Morrissey is a old, grumpy man. I’m going to get back to listening to the old stuff, and pretend the last six months have been Morrissey free. Delusion can be a great thing.