Category Archives: Music

Beatherder

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I went to a festival recently for the first time in a few years. Clearly it’s taken that length of time for me to forget a very important point- I would happily kill 95% of people at any given festival. I’m sure they’re all nice and lovely the rest of the time when their enagaged with normal grinding reality like the rest of us- but stick them in a field with a soundsystem, 48 cans of Stella and access to some industral strength ketamine and everything goes horribly, horribly wrong. They begin communicating at the sort of volume usually associated with a jumbo jet crashing on take-off and decide that 5am is the appropriate time to begin an interpetation of Massive Attack tunes on the bongos to impress a posh girl called something like Iffy.

And these are people I just paid £70 to spend a weekend camping with.

Incredibly, I still had a brilliant time. This is mainly due to the company of friends I don’t see often enough who through a combination of humour, love and understanding managed to smooth the edges off the seething rage that festival people pump into the dense black gloop that’s where my soul should be. Thanks for that guys. Appreciate it.

I was also helped by the fact that festival was everything that Glastonbury always promised to be. Impressive, really, considering that it was a festival called Beatherder I was at and not Glastonbury.

I’ve been down to the big one at Pilton a couple of times and it was great- although as an event it’s so smug and in love with itself that, for one weekend per year, it briefly overtakes Manchester as the cockiest, most-likely-to-harp-on-about-it’s-inherent-greatness place in the UK. If it could fellate itself, it would snap it’s wonderful, oh-so-cool neck doing it.

Glastonbury is brilliant, no doubt, but it likes to present this image as an insane bacchanale of decadence and music where anything can happen. Rumours always ping around the festival like Twitter after it’s received a blow to the head: “Paul McCartney and Neil Young are in the acoustic tent at 4pm!”, “I’ve just seen Kurt Cobain eat a falafel during The White Lies set”, “Glenn Miller’s plane just crashed through a timehole- he’s playing on the Pyramid Stage with Slash”- that sort of thing. The chinese whispers about what’s going on in the awful, rubbish, not-at-Glastonbury outside world are even more insane. Apparently, when news spread about Michael Jackson’s death last year it took about 30 minutes flat for the rumour to mutate into news of every single celebrity called Michael having passed away in the night; Barrymore, Buerk, Jordan, McIntyre, Portillo in a freak yachting tragedy etc, etc. And what really happens that’s a surprise? Bugger all.

Oh, and those festival twats I mentioned earlier? There’s 175,000 of the fuckers.

The truth about Glastonbury, and what actually makes it great, is that it’s lots of bands you’ve heard of playing tightly scheduled sets to ensure they get some coverage on the BBC. That and the fact that Lauren Laverne’s there.

Beatherder, this past weekend, meanwhile turned out to herald all the unexpected insanity that Glasto had to stop having when they let the BBC film it and had to put up a massive fence to stop every baghead in Europe from getting in and ransacking tents. Here’s just three things I saw there this year:

- A stall honest enough to advertise that it sells ‘Shit Cameras’
- A talent competition won by a human-beatboxer and judged by, among others, a drag queen and the woman who plays Janice Battersby on Coronation Street.
- A main stage guest appearance from GMTV’s leotard-toting Mr Motivator which featured backing dancing by a friend of mine dressed as Bertie Bassett

This is what festivals are meant to do; remove us from everyday and let us experience a different reality for the weekend. One where there’s lots of drinking, loads of live music and remarkably few consequences. Unfortunately, this also means experiencing the reality of life in a refugee camp for a few days, albeit a refugee camp where half the residents have gorged themselves on cheap speed and spend their time tripping over guy ropes and walking past tents fruitlessly yelling “DAZ!” at the top of their lungs in the hope of finding their friend who went off to have sex with that posh girl called Iffy because, disgracefully, in this alternate festival reality playing Massive Attack on the bongos in a drug induced stupor at 5am actually does get you laid.

And then instead of bongos you’re listening to sweaty tent-rutting for 3 hours as Daz bangs away at Iffy with admirable tenacity yet few results as his substance-addled brain has forgotten to tell his testicles what to do and Iffy passed out in the early stages anyway. The fucking degenerate scum. Maybe one day he’ll rut right through her pelvis and I’ll be woken by the glorious sound of Daz charging round the campsite as his mind finally caves in with all the horror while Iffy flails around in muted agony looking for her severed legs. The shits. The absolute rotting shits.

Er… Anyway, I had a point, can’t remember what it was now.

Um… yeah… I went to a festival this weekend. It was great. I’m just not sure why.

That Was The Year That Will Be

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It’s that time of the year again where every newspaper, website, magazine, pamphlet, TV show and idiot-with-a-keyboard in whatever field produce their end of year awards or lists.  You know the sort of thing- ’50 Best Albums of the Year’, ’25 Best Movie Scenes of 2009′, ‘The Top 10 Shows Which Are A Bit Like Flash-Forward, But Aren’t Flash-Forward’ and, being a decent sort, I’ll sum them all up for you right now and save you the time of actually reading them.
The Resistance by Muse, Jade Goody R.I.P., Roger Federer’s French Open Final, That Scene From ‘Bruno’ On The Talk Show, Roy Cropper in a Canal, Michael Jackson, Thierry Henry’s hand, Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, The 4th Series of 30 Rock, House is in a Mental Asylum!, A Creeping Sense of Existentialist Dread, Michael McIntyre, Jedward, Jedward, Does Anyone Else Feeling This Gnawing Emptiness?, Fucking Bono.
There you go.  Done.  That was 2009 which, if it had a unifying theme, was essentially 2008 with more resonant celebrity deaths.  And now that it’s out of the way and I’ve summed it all up for you we can get on to job of dishing out next year’s awards- a process rendered infinitely more fun that for 2009 as it’s based on a combination of idle speculation, crackpot brainstorming and desperately chased hunches.  And so, ladies and gentleman, 13 months early, I present The ItSaysHere 2010 Awards…
Album of the Year- ‘Susan Boyle’s Second Album By Susan Boyle’- Susan Boyle:  Boyle won 14 Grammys, 8 Brit Awards and sold 47 million copies of this, her 2nd album, on which she presents a stirring collection of touching but powerful cover versions of her favourite touching but powerful Leona Lewis cover versions.  Bonus Track:  Leona Lewis and Susan Boyle cover Will Young and Gareth Gates’ cover of ‘The Long And Winding Road’.
Film of the Year- ‘Paedophil’- Sascha Baron Cohen trawls across America’s deep south in the guise of a convicted child sex offender called Philip.  Spends all his time making incredibly insensitive comments about any children in his vicinity and offering to buy an hour of delirious sexual pleasure with any passing kids by negotiating with thier parents in a thick Belgian accent and outrageous hat thereby making a point about the reactionary nature of many Americans but actually just proving that Baron Cohen can do funny voices and is happy to risk getting his head kicked in.
TV Show of the Year- ‘The X Factor Election Special 2010′- Hosted by Dermot O’Leary and David Dimbleby, the nation goes to the polls to decide who will occupy 10 Downing Street next year with a mandate to ease Britain through difficult economic times and increasing European intergration as well as a 1 year record deal with Simon Cowell.  The public vote and Peter Snow’s ‘Swing-o-meter’ will decide the final two before they go before the judges panel (Cowell, Louis Walsh, Cheryl Cole, Diane Abbott MP, Ian Hislop) for a vote-off.  They both get to make one final impassioned speech to the nation, highlight 3 manifesto policies of their choice and perform their favourite Rod Stewart song before the winner is announced and the Queen joins them onstage to plug her latest single and ask them to form a government.
Sportsman of the Year-  Thierry Henry- Redeems himself for his handball against the Irish by not only guiding the French to World Cup glody but also winning Strictly Come Dancing- beating Greg Wallace from Masterchef in the final foxtrot round- and also starring in the greatest Gillette advert ever with Tiger Woods who everyone’s been looking at a bit funny since that car crash.  Not that anything happened in that car crash, you understand.  I’m just saying.  I mean, they don’t crash themselves do they?  And what was he doing out at that time of the night anyway?  Two words- Geroge Michael.  That’s all I’m saying.  Just that.
Fiction Book of the Year- ‘Flags and Giraffes’ by Eileen O’Murray- Utterly pretentious load of shit which features no discernable plot whatsoever, has hardly any interesting or likeable characters, is sprinkled with swear words and descriptions of drug taking to try to seem edgy, and is mostly told from the perspective of a narrator who is needlessly cryptic and moany.  Is easily battered in terms of originality, ideas, interest and sheer story-telling ability by every single comic produced this year but everyone on Newsnight Review is terrified that they’ll be struck of the list of pretentious clever-clogs for even admitting they’ve heard of Superman.  Throughout 2010 comics will remain so hopelessly uncool that not even Will Self will pretend to like them ironically to annoy The Guardian.
Non-Fiction Book of the Year- ‘Battered in the Pants’ by Jim Hell- A publishing milestone as, after years of misery memoirs clogging up the nations’ bookshelves and being bought by an apparently multi-million strong population of unsettling voyeurs, this represents the first book to be written by someone who actively set out to get abused as a child knowing the lucrative career that would follow as a writer in later years.  This particularly harrowing tale of constantly going to the vicars house in a tight shorts and a vest top to take showers while asking for help in finding the soap will move even the most hardened psychopath to tears.
Celebrity of the Year- Robbie Williams- Scores a major hit in all the celebrity magazines and websites by finally reuniting on stage with Take That.  His decision to patch things up with Gary Barlow was, he says, a really special moment for him and not in any way to do with the fact that they now sell more records than him and is entirely unconnected to the reality that he’ll suddenly get a bit of an attention spike in a career that was rapidly plummeting downhill while his former bandmates about whom he’d not shown the slightest interest in the last near-decade were suddenly the biggest act in Britain again.
News Event of the Year- The End of the World As Gabriel’s Trumpet Sounds, The Rivers Run With Blood and War, Famine, Pestilence and Death Stalk The Land.  All in HD on Sky News!

It’s that time of the year again where every newspaper, website, magazine, pamphlet, TV show and idiot-with-a-keyboard in whatever field produce their end of year awards and lists.  You know the sort of thing- ’50 Best Albums of the Year’, ’25 Best Movie Scenes of 2009′, ‘The Top 10 Shows Which Are A Bit Like Flash-Forward, But Aren’t Flash-Forward’ and, being a decent sort, I’ll sum them all up for you right now and save you the time of actually reading any of them.

The Resistance by Muse, Jade Goody R.I.P., Roger Federer’s French Open Final, That Scene From ‘Bruno’ On The Talk Show, Roy Cropper in a Canal, Michael Jackson, Thierry Henry’s Hand, Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, The 4th Series of 30 Rock, House is in a Mental Asylum!, A Creeping Sense of Existentialist Dread, Michael McIntyre, Jedward, Jedward, Does Anyone Else Feeling This Gnawing Emptiness?, Fucking Bono.

There you go.  Done.  That was 2009 which, if it had a unifying theme, was essentially 2008 with more resonant celebrity deaths.  And now that it’s out of the way and I’ve summed it all up for you we can get on to job of dishing out next year’s awards.  Yes, just for you, I’m going to get the jump on absoultely everybody else on the planet and give you the highlights of 2010 before they even have a chance to happen.  Doing this is a process rendered infinitely more fun than doing it for 2009 as it’s based on a combination of idle speculation, crackpot brainstorming and desperately chased hunches.  And so, ladies and gentleman, 13 months early, I present The ItSaysHere 2010 Awards…

Album of the Year- ‘Susan Boyle’s Second Album By Susan Boyle’- Susan Boyle:  Boyle won 14 Grammys, 8 Brit Awards and sold 47 million copies of this, her 2nd album, on which she presents a stirring collection of touching but powerful cover versions of her favourite touching but powerful Leona Lewis cover versions.  Bonus Track:  Leona Lewis and Susan Boyle cover Will Young and Gareth Gates’ cover of ‘The Long And Winding Road’.

Film of the Year- ‘Paedophil’- Sascha Baron Cohen trawls across America’s deep south in the guise of a convicted child sex offender called Philip.  Spends all his time making incredibly insensitive comments about any children in his vicinity and offering to buy an hour of delirious sexual pleasure with any passing kids by negotiating with their parents in a thick Belgian accent and outrageous hat, thereby making a point about the reactionary nature of many Americans but actually just proving that Baron Cohen can do funny voices and is happy to risk getting his head kicked in.

TV Show of the Year- ‘The X Factor Election Special 2010‘- Hosted by Dermot O’Leary and David Dimbleby, the nation goes to the polls to decide who will occupy 10 Downing Street next year with a mandate to ease Britain through difficult economic times and increasing European intergration as well as a 1 year record deal with Simon Cowell.  The public vote and Peter Snow’s ‘Swing-o-meter’ will decide the final two before they go before the judges panel (Cowell, Louis Walsh, Cheryl Cole, Diane Abbott MP, Ian Hislop) for a vote-off.  They both get to make one final impassioned speech to the nation, highlight 3 manifesto policies of their choice and perform their favourite Rod Stewart song before the winner is announced and the Queen joins them onstage to plug her latest single and ask them to form a government.

Sportsman of the Year-  Thierry Henry- Redeems himself for his handball against the Irish by not only guiding the French to World Cup glory but also winning Strictly Come Dancing- beating Greg Wallace from Masterchef in the final foxtrot round- and also starring in the greatest Gillette advert ever with Tiger Woods who everyone’s been looking at a bit funny since that car crash.  Not that anything happened in that car crash, you understand.  I’m just saying;  I mean, they don’t crash themselves do they?  And what was he doing out at that time of the night anyway?  Two words- Geroge Michael.  That’s all I’m saying.  Just that.

Fiction Book of the Year- ‘Flags and Giraffes’ by Eileen O’Murray- Utterly pretentious load of shit which features no discernable plot whatsoever, has hardly any interesting or likeable characters, is sprinkled with swear words and descriptions of drug taking to try to seem edgy, and is mostly told from the perspective of a narrator who is needlessly cryptic and moany and who you wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire.  Is easily battered in terms of originality, ideas, interest and sheer story-telling ability by every single comic produced this year but everyone on Newsnight Review is terrified that they’ll be struck of the list of pretentious clever-clogs for even admitting they’ve heard of Superman.  Throughout 2010 comics will remain so hopelessly uncool that not even Will Self will pretend to like them ironically to annoy The Guardian.

Non-Fiction Book of the Year- ‘Battered in the Pants’ by Jim Hell- A publishing milestone as, after years of misery memoirs clogging up the nations’ bookshelves and being bought by an apparently multi-million strong population of unsettling voyeurs, this represents the first book to be written by someone who actively set out to get abused as a child knowing the lucrative career that would follow as a writer in later years.  This particularly harrowing tale of constantly going to the vicar’s house in tight shorts and a vest top to take showers while asking for help in finding the soap will move even the most hardened page-twitching psychopath to tears.

Celebrity of the Year- Robbie Williams- Scores a major hit in all the celebrity magazines and websites by finally reuniting on stage with Take That.  His decision to patch things up with Gary Barlow was, he says, a really special moment and not in any way to do with the fact that they now sell more records than him and is entirely unconnected to the reality that he’ll suddenly get a bit of an attention spike in a career that was rapidly plummeting downhill while his former bandmates about whom he’d not shown the slightest interest in the last near-decade were suddenly the biggest act in Britain again.

News Event of the Year- The End of the World As Gabriel’s Trumpet Sounds, The Rivers Run With Blood and War, Famine, Pestilence and Death Stalk The Land. All in HD on Sky News!

Ker-Plow! Thump! Bash! Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!

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If you were to catalogue my obsessions in to some sort of, well, catalogue and then flip to the ‘B’ section you’d find ‘Beatles, The’ and ‘Batman’ snuggled in comfortably together (seperated by ‘Bears’ and ‘Bay, Car Chases in the Films of Michael;’)  How thrilled I was then to hear that, back in the mists of time, these two iconic forces had collided in the pages of a comic book.  Sort of.  The Beatles, in this particular story, are re-interpreted as ‘The Oliver Twists’ but it’s pretty obvious what the writers are getting at.  It’s also clear that the writers were, for want of a more succinct phrase, mad as a flannel of badgers.  Tonight (or whatever time of day you’re reading this), I present this, possibly the most extraordinary comic, nay piece of literature, ever written, to you.

Now before we get cracking on the issue itself, I think I’d better put this piece of work into some sort of context.  In 1970, a rumour circulated that not only was Paul ‘Thumbs Up’ McCartney dead, but that he’d popped his clogs in 1966 when he’d been decapitated in a car crash and been replaced in The Beatles by a lookalike in order to keep the lucrative business of the band going.  However, those myschievious Scouse band-mates of his had subsequently managed to place a number of clues in their music and artwork to let dedicated fans know the truth about their deceased songwriter and the conspiracy to replace him.  This is what lunacy looks like when it’s Olympic standard.

Some people have, however, spent the last few decades mercilessly trawling through the Beatles work to find these hidden messages.  The full list of ‘clues’ they’ve come up with is far too lengthy and, frankly, bizarre to go into here but- as a taster, let’s have a look at the cover of ‘Abbey Road’.

At first glance, it’s the Beatles wandering over a zebra crossing but, for believers in this sort of thing, it’s actually a dazzling cavalcade of signs and signifiers that makes Dan Brown’s ‘interprative’ ‘work’ in ‘The Da Vinci Code’ seem like he simply wasn’t looking hard enough.  You’ll notice that Macca himself has no shoes on despite wearing a suit- a situation that can be easily explained when one considers his twin ports of wacky old hippy and rampaging commercialist.  But the death theorists claim that he’s barefoot because, in Italy, dead people are buried without shoes.  And, just to prove the point, the rest of the Beatles are lined up in the order of a funeral procession- Lennon all in white representing God/The Chruch, Starr in black as the mourner, the dead body of McCartney and Harrison in denim as the grave digger.  And the numberplate on the Volkswagen Beetle reads ’28IF’ because McCartney would have been 28 if he’d lived.

Quite impressive bit of deduction, isn’t it?  Well it is till you realise that pretty much every Beatles photo of the era has Harrison dressed like a Russian farm-hand and Starr in the suit of a working-class man who was never entirely comfortable in the group that had become the leading lights of psychedelia.  Lennon’s Daz-white garb, meanwhile, is explained by the fact that his LSD intake at this point was so prodigious he had become genuinely convinced that he was Jesus.  And McCartney was 27 at the time, not 28.

Every other ‘clue’ to this mystery can be easily explained away with basic rationality or the slenderest grip on reality but if you want to head over to http://homepages.tesco.net/harbfamily/opd/index.html and check out such phenomena as the backwards message before ‘Blackbird’ on The White Album or what happens when you put a mirror horizontally through the text ‘Lonely Hearts’ on the front cover of Sgt. Pepper then be my guest  (also, take a trip to the site’s forum for some genuine weapons-grade insanity).  However, to get back to the story, the rumour of McCartney’s demise soon spread around the world until Paul himself had to give an interview to Time Magazine under the headline “I’m Not Dead”.  Evidently the rumour also eventually found it’s way round to DC Comics and issue #222 of Batman was born.

As I’m not as avid a comic reader as some, I’m going to assume that the images of Batman and Robin appearing behind Bruce and Dick when they think about what they could do to solve the mystery as their respective alter-egos are to be taken figuratively and not as actual occurances, otherwise they’d be something of a giveaway.

Well it would appear that Frank Robbins has decided that, so we don’t swerve too close to real life, the Paul character should be re-named Saul and, if his facial hair and dress-sense are anything to go by, changed from a cheery mop-top to an evil magician.  There definitely appears to be an obvious George Harrison clone, and a Lennon lookalike who also looks like he’s a good three decades older than anyone else in the band whilst the artist seems to have forgotten all of Ringo’s distinguishing features like his massive nose and sad eyes and instead decided to base his character on 1972 Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz.  (Also, the car Wayne sends to pick them up appears to be chauffered by M. Bison from Streetfighter II.  Or Cheryl Cole.)

Do Superheroes regularly go pinching stuff from celebrities bedrooms as they sleep just on a hunch?  Don’t they have to get warrants?  It must be hard enough being famous and coping with all the attention without Wonder Woman flying through your window at all hours trying to swipe your toiletry bag in case it’s got blueprints in it or something.  Frankly Robin deserves to be clattered in the back of the head for snooping around like Raffles in latex. And he’s not much cop as a crime fighter if he get’s taken out by someone as fey as a pop star.  The only musicians who it’s acceptable to take a leathering from are the notoriously ‘handy’ Roger Daltrey, Ted Nugent or all 35 members of Earth, Wind and Fire at once.

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Now they’re bugging the Twists’ calls!  Even ignoring the fact that they’ve apparently got dressed up as Batman and Robin just to sit around in private listening to other people on the phone this is some seriously unethical behaviour.  No wonder America comes up with Camp X-Ray and friendly fire if they all grow up reading their heroes pissing all over the UN Human Rights Charter with gay abandon.

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“They call this a mike- BOOM!”, “Lets make this in STEREO!  I’ve balanced the LEFT channel… now for the RIGHT!”, I can’t help reading lines like that and picturing Robin sat alone at night trying to think of every possible arena for him to have a scrap and then trying to think of things he’d find there to attack people with and then an appropriate one-liner to accompany it- something akin to a cross between Jackie Chan and Emo Phillips.  I like to think that similar lines to these spoken by Robin were uttered by Phil Spector when he attacked the various musicians who’ve had the opportunity to work with him through the years.  But not when he shot that woman as that would be in extraordinarily bad taste.

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That tape recorder must be made of kevlar or something!  That’s the second person it’s been used to batter and there’s not a scratch on it.  Try that with an I-pod and you’ll be picking bits of white plastic out of the carpet for months.

Let me get this straight- Saul has perpetrated fraud on a massive scale and get’s adulation-a-plenty on the final page whilst Glennan/Chumley, who’s only apparent crime was smacking Robin over the head whilst the Boy Wonder was in the middle of robbing a sleeping house guest is last seen being man-handled out of the door- no doubt en-route to a life in solitary!  Can’t help but think the writer of this particular comic was more a McCartney fan than a Lennon one.  In fact it wouldn’t surprise me if Mark Chapman had a copy of this issue stuck in his bag between the gun and Catcher in the Rye…

NEXT WEEK:  Iron Man meets The Bee Gees

Children In Need 2009

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3 years ago I wrote a blow-by-low account of a night watching Children in Need but, since none of you read it, I’m doing it again this evening because I’m light on ideas at the best of times and it’s an effort to bring some much needed verisimilitude (look it up) to this site.  I also failed to make it all the way to 2am last time out and on this occasion- I promise you- that will not happen again.  I’m going to stare 7 solid hours of light entertainment in the face and it will blink before I do.  Here goes…
7.05-  Five minutes gone and Terry Wogan’s already been introduced twice either side of a performance from ‘thinking-man’s Cheryl Cole’ Alesha Dixon- whose head appears to be far too small for her body.  It turns out she’ll also be co-hosting the show tonight with Wogan and Tess Daly.  It all seems a long way from the days when the lady hosting duties were undertaken by stern crimestopper Sue Cook accepting massive cheques for a few thousand pounds from the staff at Littlewoods.  In other news the crowd is strangely subdued, though that might only be an illusion due to my exposure to the X-Factor which seemingly gives it’s audience an order to impersonate a holocaust in a screaming factory at every opportunity.  We also get our first trip to see members of the Eastenders cast taking telephone donations at the top of BT Tower while being interviewed by Peter Andre.  In turn we get our first thigh-slapping moment of the evening when Andre attempts to hijack a call from a generous donor who promptly hangs up the moment he speaks.  Even if the former Mr Jordan is hosting for free he’s actually lost the charity money just by being there which must be about as low as a career gets in British television- and lest we forget this is a man who married a woman he met while on a gameshow based around eating kangaroo arses in some shrubbery.
7.30-  We’ve had our first ‘Why we’re here’ clip which was hosted by the three principal actors from Harry Potter who are about as far from the idea of being Children in Need as it’s possible to get.  This is followed by Peter Kay’s contribution- a video of literally hundreds of classic animated characters singing a medley that builds to a combination of ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘One Day Like This’.  Already seems destined to be the highlight which, with 6 and a half hours to go, is a little depressing.  This is thrown into sharp relief with the subsequent ‘special’ episode of Merlin- merely the first of what I don’t doubt will be countless TV shows sullying themselves in the name of charity by shoe-horning Pudsey Bear into a five minute scene that was written by whoever lost a bet.  There’s also been a band on called JLS who achieve the impossible by being Boyz II Men with less charisma.
7.50-  First regional bit- in the North West it’s being beamed, inexplicably, from an aquarium which seems slightly tasteless with half of Cumbria currently submerged by a ‘once-in-a-thousand-year’ flood.  Back in London, John Barrowman turns up and recreates Tom Cruise’s famous dance number in Risky Business wearing a pair of boxers which he subsequently promises to autograph and auction without offering to wash them first.  Doesn’t he know there’s a flu pandemic on?
8.10-  Four members of the Hollyoaks cast do a Queen medley, notable only for the microphone of one of them malfunctioning which creates more tension, drama and emotional resonance than any episode of their show ever.  This could be a way forward for Hollyoaks where, let’s be honest, the actors are picked more on looks and willingness to do everything in their underwear than acting ability.  If they populate the studio with malfunctioning equipment such as lights which intermittently explode it’d at least add a nervy, jumpy, Giovanni Ribisi (look him up) quality to their performances.
8.30-  Now it’s Casualty’s turn for a C.I.N. special- featuring Pudsey being treated on a secret teddy-bear ward in Holby General which is easily the most disturbing sight of the evening so far.  I reckon that these downright bizarre charity versions shouldn’t be shown on the nightof Children In Need itself but should just be slotted into the show’s normal run elsewhere in the year without telling anyone.  It’d get everyone talking.  Plus I reckon it’d have more impact if the Pudsey storyline in Casualty had to intertwine with that of a man who drove a lorry full of fireworks into a warehouse storing matches and tar.
9.30-  In the last hour we’ve had the people from The One Show recreating ‘Fame’ in the BBC Television Centre car park, Dragons Den doing an episode of Challenge Anneka, Westlife (who I thought had just, sort of, vanished), and four blokes from The Bill singing ‘Mack the Knife’.  Read that sentence back and consider the production meeting that led to each of those ideas getting the green-light.  I can only think it took place at gunpoint and involved a tombola and several industrial strength hallucinogens
9.55-  Eastenders’ annual karaoke car crash this year took the music of Motown and stamped on its neck with terrifying efficiency while the latest trip to the North West’s broadcast featured a bunch of kids dressed as zombies shuffling through a tunnel at the aquarium FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.  3 hours in and this is all starting to feel like an experiment in how far the goodwill of the British people can be pushed.  I know it’s all for a good cause but just how in need are these children?  I’ll be honest, it’s going to take some pretty spectacular hardship to justify me having to watch Minty and Daniella Westbrook bum-raping some of the finest pop music ever made.  Never mind- here come the newsreaders…
10.00-  The newsreaders’ performance is one of the highlights of ever year and they don’t disappoint on this outing.  First the ladies give it some Beyonce, which opens up the tantilising possibility of George Aligaiyah turning up to perfrom Jay-Z’s rap from ‘Crazy in Love’.  In the end, he doesn’t and we have to make do with Bill Turnbull and Nick Owen breakdancing to Run DMC’s ‘It’s Like That’.  It really is like the office Christmas party at the end of the world.  A special mention must go to Sophie Raworth whose exploits in this number lead to a highly-charged text exchange between me and a friend about newsreader fantasies that finishes with a description of Raworth, Emily Mathis and Natasha Kaplinsky getting flooded out of a neglige testing factory and taking shelter in a paddling pool warehouse until thousands of packets of jelly burst all over them due to high humidity.  Still, it’s all for charity…
10.30-  The traditional switch over to BBC2 during the news features a comedians’ version of Mastermind and the frankly bizarre spectacle of John Humphrys discussing Five Star with Steven K. Amos and quoting ‘My Humps’ by the Black Eyed Peas while asking a question.  This is staring to feel less like a telethon and more like a psychotic episode by the minute.
12.00-  Since we’ve returned to BBC1 there’s been a ‘special’ episode of Poirot which marks an even deeper career nadir for David Suchet than ‘Executive Decision’, a performance from Harry Connick Jr who hasn’t been seen since he got killed to death by an alien in ‘Independence Day’ and songs by Spandau Ballet and Madness when the whole show suddenly seems to arrive in 1983 without any warning.  In fact, there’s been more and more stuff repeated from earlier in the show which gives a worrying sense of deja vu and of time slipping it’s moorings and floating off into the distance leaving us trapped in a loop of the last 5 hours.  I’ve just found out that CERN is back online as of 3 hours ago.  This can’t be a coincidence.
12.30-  The latest ‘special’ is billed as ‘Rebus meets Taggart’ even though 50% of those people are dead.  Still, it’s probably the funniest thing on all night so far though whether this is due to quality on the show’s behalf or creeping insanity on mine is, at this late hour, hard to judge.  It does portray Pudsey as a potential murderer for the second time tonight after Poirot did it earlier.  This is a bizarre trend which does at least open the way for a ‘The Wire’ Children in Need special next year.
12.45-  The Nolans are on.  In terms of tests of stamina, this is now the telly-watching equivalent of doing a triathlon while suffering from M.E.  75 minutes to go.  Fading fast.  No-one’s even trying anymore.  Least of all me.
2.00-  Made it.  Barely.  The last hour was a punishing mixture of musical performances (Ronan Keating, Stereophonics, The New Original Sugababe Experience) and more ‘Why We’re Here’ films for which the only personal highlight came during Paloma Faith’s song and was basically centred around remembering that I know someone who knows her drummer.  That’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to me since I was hypnotised by Fiona Bruce’s jiggling bottom over 4 hours ago.
This is how I spent my Friday night.
And I didn’t even think of a punchline.

3 years ago I wrote a blow-by-low account of a night watching Children in Need but, since none of you read it, I’m doing it again this evening because I’m light on ideas at the best of times and it’s an effort to bring some much needed verisimilitude (look it up) to this site.  I also failed to make it all the way to 2am last time out and on this occasion- I promise you- that will not happen again.  I’m going to stare 7 solid hours of light entertainment in the face and it will blink before I do.  Here goes…

7.05-  Five minutes gone and Terry Wogan’s already been introduced twice either side of a performance from ‘thinking-man’s Cheryl Cole’ Alesha Dixon- whose head appears to be far too small for her body.  It turns out she’ll also be co-hosting the show tonight with Wogan and Tess Daly.  It all seems a long way from the days when the lady hosting duties were undertaken by stern crimestopper Sue Cook accepting massive cheques for a few thousand pounds from the staff at Littlewoods.  In other news the crowd is strangely subdued, though that might only be an illusion due to my exposure to the X-Factor which seemingly gives it’s audience an order to impersonate a holocaust in a screaming factory at every opportunity.  We also get our first trip to see members of the Eastenders cast taking telephone donations at the top of BT Tower while being interviewed by Peter Andre.  In turn we get our first thigh-slapping moment of the evening when Andre attempts to hijack a call from a generous donor who promptly hangs up the moment he speaks.  Even if the former Mr Jordan is hosting for free he’s actually lost the charity money just by being there which must be about as low as a career gets in British television- and lest we forget this is a man who married a woman he met while on a gameshow based around eating kangaroo arses in some shrubbery.

7.30-  We’ve had our first ‘Why we’re here’ clip which was hosted by the three principal actors from Harry Potter who are about as far from the idea of being Children in Need as it’s possible to get.  This is followed by Peter Kay’s contribution- a video of literally hundreds of classic animated characters singing a medley that builds to a combination of ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘One Day Like This’.  Already seems destined to be the highlight of the night which, with 6 and a half hours to go, is a little depressing.  This is thrown into sharp relief with the subsequent ‘special’ episode of Merlin- merely the first of what I don’t doubt will be countless TV shows sullying themselves in the name of charity by shoe-horning Pudsey Bear into a five minute scene that was written by whoever lost a bet.  There’s also been a band on called JLS who achieve the impossible by being Boyz II Men with less charisma.

7.50-  First regional bit- in the North West it’s being beamed, inexplicably, from an aquarium which seems slightly tasteless with half of Cumbria currently submerged by a ‘once-in-a-thousand-year’ flood.  Back in London, John Barrowman turns up and recreates Tom Cruise’s famous dance number in Risky Business wearing a pair of boxers which he subsequently promises to autograph and auction without offering to wash them first.  Doesn’t he know there’s a flu pandemic on?

8.10-  Four members of the Hollyoaks cast do a Queen medley, notable only for the microphone of one of them malfunctioning which creates more tension, drama and emotional resonance than any episode of their show ever.  This could be a way forward for Hollyoaks where, let’s be honest, the actors are picked more on looks and willingness to do everything in their underwear than acting ability.  If they populate the studio with malfunctioning equipment such as lights which intermittently explode it’d at least add a nervy, jumpy, Giovanni Ribisi (look him up) quality to their performances.

8.30-  Now it’s Casualty’s turn for a C.I.N. special- featuring Pudsey being treated on a secret teddy-bear ward in Holby General which is easily the most disturbing sight of the evening so far.  I reckon that these downright bizarre charity versions shouldn’t be shown on the night of Children In Need itself but should just be slotted into the show’s normal run elsewhere in the year without telling anyone.  It’d get everyone talking.  Plus I reckon it’d have more impact if the Pudsey storyline in Casualty had to intertwine with that of a man who drove a lorry full of fireworks into a warehouse storing matches and tar.

9.30-  In the last hour we’ve had the people from The One Show recreating ‘Fame’ in the BBC Television Centre car park, Dragons Den doing an episode of Challenge Anneka, Westlife (who I thought had just, sort of, vanished), and four blokes from The Bill singing ‘Mack the Knife’.  Read that sentence back and consider the production meeting that led to each of those ideas getting the green-light.  I can only think it took place at gunpoint and involved a tombola and several industrial strength hallucinogens

9.55-  Eastenders’ annual karaoke car crash this year took the music of Motown and stamped on its neck with terrifying efficiency while the latest trip to the North West’s broadcast featured a bunch of kids dressed as zombies shuffling through a tunnel at the aquarium FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.  3 hours in and this is all starting to feel like an experiment in how far the goodwill of the British people can be pushed.  I know it’s all for a good cause but just how in need are these children?  I’ll be honest, it’s going to take some pretty spectacular hardship to justify me having to watch Minty and Daniella Westbrook bum-raping some of the finest pop music ever made.  Never mind- here come the newsreaders…

10.00-  The newsreaders’ performance is one of the highlights of ever year and they don’t disappoint on this outing.  First the ladies give it some Beyonce, which opens up the tantilising possibility of George Aligaiyah turning up to perfrom Jay-Z’s rap from ‘Crazy in Love’.  In the end, he doesn’t and we have to make do with Bill Turnbull and Nick Owen breakdancing to Run DMC’s ‘It’s Like That’.  The bit with the ladies looks like this:

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And, more importantly, like this…

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It really is like the office Christmas party at the end of the world.  A special mention must go to Sophie Raworth whose exploits in this number lead to a highly-charged text exchange between me and a friend about newsreader fantasies that finishes with a description of Raworth, Emily Mathis and Natasha Kaplinsky getting flooded out of a neglige testing factory and taking shelter in a paddling pool warehouse until thousands of packets of jelly burst all over them due to high humidity.  Still, it’s all for charity…

10.30-  The traditional switch over to BBC2 during the news features a comedians’ version of Mastermind and the frankly bizarre spectacle of John Humphrys discussing Five Star with Steven K. Amos and quoting ‘My Humps’ by the Black Eyed Peas while asking a question.  This is staring to feel less like a telethon and more like a psychotic episode by the minute.

12.00-  Since we’ve returned to BBC1 there’s been a ‘special’ episode of Poirot which marks an even deeper career nadir for David Suchet than ‘Executive Decision’, a performance from Harry Connick Jr who hasn’t been seen since he got killed to death by an alien in ‘Independence Day’ and songs by Spandau Ballet and Madness when the whole show suddenly seems to arrive in 1983 without any warning.  In fact, there’s been more and more stuff repeated from earlier in the show which gives a worrying sense of deja vu and of time slipping it’s moorings and floating off into the distance leaving us trapped in a loop of the last 5 hours.  I’ve just found out that CERN is back online as of 3 hours ago.  This can’t be a coincidence.

12.30-  The latest ‘special’ is billed as ‘Rebus meets Taggart’ even though 50% of those people are dead.  Still, it’s probably the funniest thing on all night so far though whether this is due to quality on the show’s behalf or creeping insanity on mine is, at this late hour, hard to judge.  It does portray Pudsey as a potential murderer for the second time tonight after Poirot did it earlier.  This is a bizarre trend which does at least open the way for a ‘The Wire’ Children in Need special next year.

12.45-  The Nolans are on.  In terms of tests of stamina, this is now the telly-watching equivalent of doing a triathlon while suffering from M.E.  75 minutes to go.  Fading fast.  No-one’s even trying anymore.  Least of all me.

2.00-  Made it.  Barely.  The last hour was a punishing mixture of musical performances (Ronan Keating, Stereophonics, The New Original Sugababe Experience) and more ‘Why We’re Here’ films.  The only personal highlight came during Paloma Faith’s song and was basically centred around remembering that I know someone who knows her drummer.  That’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to me since I was hypnotised by Fiona Bruce’s jiggling bottom over 4 hours ago.

This is how I spent my Friday night.

And I didn’t even think of a punchline.

Tales of the Unexpected

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The Grand Tier of Manchester’s Palace Theatre is apparently named, if the seating room is anything to go by, due to the fact that Grand people in Victorian times didn’t have legs. I was settling down there for the Saturday matinee performance of Chicago this past weekend, trying to find a place for my lower limbs to squeeze into which wasn’t the back of an unfortunate Japanese woman’s head when it occurred to me that I didn’t have a single bloody clue what I was about to watch unfold on stage. Now I’m well aware that the film version won loads of Oscars a few years ago and I know that the story is held as tightly to the souls of many women as the first two Alien films are for men but I’ve managed to go my entire life without ever learning the slightest thing about the plot, characters or setting and this suddenly hit me a moment before curtain up.

As an example of how strange this sensation was let’s compare it with when I sat in the cinema to watch Die Hard 4.0. Before the trailers even started rolling for that one I knew that John McLane fought against cyber-terrorists, had a nerdy sidekick, was involved in a long running dispute with his daughter, ran into Kevin Smith, fought an F-39 jet and, or course, killed a helicopter with a car (actually, I was sure I’d seen Kevin Smith in the trailer but was utterly convinced I’d imagined the whole thing. I mean, come on- Kevin Smith in a Die Hard film? Playing a bloke called ‘Warlock’? Was Harry Knowles busy?). All I was really waiting for was to see how these things were all strung together before he said ‘yippee kay-aye motherfucker’ and the credits rolled.

Flash forward to last Saturday and to be aware that I had no idea what I was about to see was an oddly terrifying moment. I was suddenly flying without the safety net of an explosive trailer, a carefully read synopsis, a familiar cast-list (apart from Gary Wilmot from the 1980′s) and a review in Empire to guide me to my chair. All I had to cling to was the assumption that the action took place in Chicago which would rule out a spectacular morris dancing number but not much else.

As it turns out what transpired in the following couple of hours was centred around a woman desperate for stardom, a jealous affair, acts of violence and a downtrodden husband. Coupled with all the singing it had the feel of a special episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show filmed for Children in Need. And thoroughly enjoyable it was too but I can’t help thinking that it was helped by catching me completely unwares.

If you think about it (or rather, if I think about it for you), this hints at why reality television has been so popular over the last decade or so. With every TV show and film trailed and previewed to death these days reality shows, in particular those where a bunch of people who want to perform a specific task for a living (singing, cooking, being shouted at by Alan Sugar) get whittled down over a series of weeks, offer the genuine hope of some surprises and shocks and the chance to have a good old shout at the goggle box over the judges’/public’s decision making and the screaming injustice of it all. It’s sport, for people who don’t like sport (a bit like golf).

In shows like The Apprentice, The Restaurant or Masterchef the job of firing is handled by either experts in their field or someone who is in some way invested in the outcome of the show. These protagonists come in all shapes and sizes from cockney bellowers (Masterchef) to successful entrepeneurs (The Restaurant) to a successful bellowing cockney entrepeneur (The Apprentice) and by having the ejection process exclusively presided over by respected figures these shows present the acceptable end of reality television. They are thus eulogised in The Guardian and are even, to stretch the sport metaphor to breaking point, given, in the shape of The Apprentice You’re Fired! a Match of the Day-style analysis show hosted by Adrian ‘Absolutely Fucking Everywhere on the Telly, Honestly He’s Like John Barrowman About 7 Months Ago’ Chiles.

At the other end of the scale is the gaudy, public-voted stuff like Tv-phenomenon-de-jour The X Factor and, on the other side, Strictly Come Dancing- the BBC’s laudable attempt at bolting some culture onto a standard phone vote money-trawling exercise. These are the shows that seem to genuinely grab hold of the public’s attention in a manic sense and can easily dominate the front pages for days on end with the casual flick of a judges barb or a backstage racist comment. Since these shows revolve around decisions made by the viewing millions the sort of indignation witnessed when Sir Alan fires a nice bloke and leaves a pack of sniggering conniving bastards in the running is magnified a trillion-fold when the voting masses feel they’re opinion has been staunchly ignored and a perceived injustice has just flashed all over their screens.

This has been seen most obviously this week when a curious, avant-garde bi-entity by the name of Jedward was kept in The X-Factor by Simon Cowell at the expense of a pretty girl with a nice voice and all the personality of half a hoover bag’s contents.

Quickly- an aside. This is not about to turn into some massive anti X-Factor rant. The show seems to divide the nation in a way that Marmite or peak-season Big Brother could only dream of; half the country talks about and watches nothing else for 3 months while the other half try to out-do each other in demonstrating their utter indignation towards everything the programme does, everyone who appears on it and everyone it employs (apart from recently Teflon-coated Geordie national treasure Cheryl Cole). I end up feeling rather out on a limb as I don’t really watch the show to any great extent beyond Youtubing whatever everyones talking about that week and I’ve got no problem with it either. Anyone who thinks it’s destroying music is wildly over-reacting; all Cowell’s doing is what Larry Parnes and other impresarios did in the 50′s and 60′s and British music came out of that period rather well. Mind you, those that follow the show slavishly are the ones I worry about most- especially in the light of the ongoing Jedward scandal.

For years now Simon Cowell has been expertly manipulating the stories, scandals and gossip on his shows to keep them on the front pages, keep the viewing figures on the ceiling and keep the phone vote money rolling in. An expertly placed ‘feud’ with a fellow judge here, a voting scandal there, a convenient throat infection threatening a performance to spice things up when necessary- all designed and perfectly placed to hook in the public and fill column inches. He is, and this is a massive complement, the natural heir to P.T. Barnum. However, keeping Jedward in is either Cowell’s first massive cock-up or proof that he’s drunk on power and convinced he can manipulate the British public into doing whatever the hell he damn well pleases.

The decision to keep them in goes against every scree of his supposed position of ‘judge’ and his carefully managed opinion of recent weeks in which he basically equated the twins to the ebola virus with shitter hair. Letting them remain in the competition was so utterly, utterly obviously the wrong thing to do as a judge but blatantly the wisest move for a man with an interest in the show’s viewing figures and attention that any last vestiges of the idea that The X-Factor is a talent contest were washed away in a stroke. I honestly thought that the show’s public would wake from their frenzy and stride blinking into a future in which Emperor Cowell is finally revealed naked and clueless before them and they all have to watch Strictly Come Dancing instead. But no- somehow, and this must take balls of steel, Cowell got away with it. No-one spotted the ruse and the show’s all over the papers again. It’ll get a 4000% share of the viewing public next Saturday and he’ll have another Xmas number one on his hands. Well done, sir- you’re clearly a genius. And I mean that.

Plus, of course, when people tune into the X-Factor they’ll know they genuinely have no idea what’s going to happen. Not with Colonel Cowell’s finger on the button. This is a man who presides over a circus of such lunacy he can even warp seasoned showbiz pros into demented performances- witness Robbie Williams mad-eyed charging about and Cheryl Cole’s terrifyingly erotic impersonation of M. Bison in StreetFighter II from earlier in the series- and things have only got madder and more unpredictable from there. Now everyone’s been complicit in letting him keep Jedward in things are only going to escalate further- it’ll be Finnish Death Metal Week soon, or he’ll have one of the blokes performing “I’m A Pink Toothbrush, You’re A Blue Toothbrush” while dressed as Clement Atlee. And then keep them in till next week. When they’ll do exactly the same performance again but replacing every 7th word with ‘coelocanth’. And that’ll be the Xmas no. 1.

There’s no stopping him now. But at least it’ll be unexpected which is a rare thing these days. There’s only Cowell and me left to provide it. What can I do that’s unexpected you ask?

Finish this blathering by telling you I’m a Belgian rhinocerous.

OK, it’s bollocks but you didn’t see it coming did you?

This Is It

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Let me tell you about the man who boiled himself to death in a pair of waders. Essentially, he was a chap who got his rocks off by filling a massive pair of waders with water and then standing in them with his nipples wired up to the mains. This in turn, and don’t ask me how he figured all this out, allowed him to use a dimmer switch to electorcute himself in a way he found arousing. Or at least it did until the day he suffered a minor seizure during one shock and was unable to move his arm and flick the switch off which in turn lead to him slowly simmering his way to oblivion over the next hour or so. A bit like a broth. But with a hard-on.

Pretty humiliating eh? And that’s still nowhere near how undignified the death of Michael Jackson’s been; with still no sign of the poor dead man’s torment abating. As if it wasn’t bad enough having helicopters hovering over his final ambulance ride, as if it wasn’t bad enough having reports of his death inter-sperced with clips from the Thriller video where he dances around as a corpse, as if it wasn’t bad enough having details of his mammoth prescription drugs shopping list plastered all over the papers, as if it wasn’t bad enough having that jaw-dropping memorial service beamed around the world- especially when Usher looked like he was going to hysterically rip the coffin lid open, desperately grab Jackson’s body by the lapels and try to sing him back to life- as if all that wasn’t bad enough we reach the coup de grace this week with the release of a video documenting his final weeks called ‘This Is It’.

This seems to have been lost on everyone- after all ‘This Is It’ was the title of the comeback show he was rehearsing for- but what sort of name is that for a film of a man’s final acts upon this Earth? A film which everyone will be watching in the hope of seeing the Grim Reaper hiding behind the drum riser ready to pounce. ‘This Is It’. ‘This Is It’. Honestly. ‘This Is It’. For a sense of perspective, here’s a few titles for a film of Michael Jackson hurtling towards his end which would have been in no way in worse taste than ‘This Is It’:

‘Dead Man Dancing’. ‘Prescription For Death’. ‘Doomwalker’. ‘Blame It On The Druggie’. ‘Lets All Watch A Man Uniwttingly Rehearsing Himself Into The Grave’. ‘Beat It’.

It’ll probably make a fortune for everyone involved (apart from the star, obviously) including the director Kenny Ortega, a man who is also responsible for High School Musical and therefore already on course for being one of the most sinister men on the planet even without his part in ‘Wacko Jacko’s Terminal Journal’ (another potential title). Obviously, what ‘This Is It’ serves to do is allow Jackson’s fans to see a little more of him, especially as there’ll be no more new performances to savour in the future. After all, we can’t turn back time.

Except, of course, we can. In fact, we did it just this last Sunday when we all turned the clocks back an hour and gave ourselves a luxurious extra hour in bed. Or at least, that was the plan. What actually happens when the clocks go back is:

1. Everyone tries to decide whether to turn the clocks back before bed- which’ll mean waking up at about 7am which is an ungodly hour for anyone to be conscious on a Sunday; or turn them back in the morning which’ll mean forgetting to turn them back in the morning and being an hour behind everything till at least mid-afternoon, like a time-traveller who’s fallen 60 minutes out of sync with the rest of existence and is therefore excluded from everything as he or she slowly loses their grip on sanity and finally flips out when they realise they’ve missed the first hour of the ‘Come Dine With Me’ omnibus in which the hilariously stuck-up estate agent has burnt her souffles and spilled a bloody mary on Ryan the overly critical baggage handler from Dewsbury.

2. People who use their phones as their alarm clocks all forget whether their phones automatically adjust when the clocks go back and can’t decide if they should go ahead and alter it or not. They all decide not to then wake up in the morning, check to see what time their phone is showing, realise that they don’t know if the time it is showing has actually been corrected or not, struggle with unending futility to find another clock in the house but realise they now use their new 3000 gigabyte, 27 terra-pixel handset/MP3 player/whisk to do ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING IN THEIR LIVES. They then switch on the Andrew Marr show to find out what the time is, are faced with the creeping dread of discovering they don’t actually know what time the Andrew Marr Show starts and finishes and therefore give up and go back to bed, their planned luxurious lie-in now lying tattered, sweaty and ruined beneath the duvet.

3. No-one really benefits at all on Sunday, then they go to their jobs on Monday and suddenly realise they won’t be leaving work during daylight for the next 6 months and seriously consider flinging themselves under the nearest TransPennine Express.

4. Something important happens with farmers but no-one is sure what it is.

Bearing all this in mind, it’s little surprise that there’s been a rumbling in recent days of discontent with the whole idea of pushing and pulling the hour hand backwards and forwards twice a year. After all, Daylight Saving Time was originally brought in to help agriculture during the First World War and since farmers these days are restricted to simply growing cows with which to trample hikers to death there isn’t much point to it anymore. People who think this are missing the point by a mile.

If we can all decide twice a year to bend time to our will so that it’s suddenly an hour earlier or later than the clocks say it is then why can’t we expand this to suit our every whim? After all, the wonders of Sky+ now mean that TV schedules are basically meaningless beside the striding magnificence of our personal timelines so let’s just extend that to life itself.

Don’t want to get up for work in the morning? Fair enough- it’s now 3 hours earlier. Don’t want to turn 30 next year? Not a problem, lets just say you’re 18 again. Don’t Like Mondays? No problem, it’s Tuesday already. You’re favourite musician’s dead? No sweat, just go to the pictures and we can all pretend he’s still alive.

Actually, we’ve already sorted that last one.

Prince Among Men

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Here’s a conversation from the late eighties that probably never happened but I like to imagine it did:

Executive 1: You know that Batman film we’re doing?
Executive 2: Yeah
Executive 1: I reckon we need a big, famous artist to do the soundtrack.
Executive 2: Good idea. Who?
Executive 1: Well, I’ve been thinking- it’s an adpatation of a comic that’s quite gothic.
Executive 2: Yeah
Executive 1: And Tim Burton’s directing, and he’s got quite a gothic style.
Executive 2: True
Executive 1: And it’s set in Gotham City.
Executive 2: Right
Executive 1: So we’ve got a gothic comic, gothic director, Gotham City- you know who I’m thinking for the soundtrack?
Executive 2: Who?
Executive 1: Prince
Executive 2: Er, that little black fella who did ‘Raspberry Beret’?
Executive 1: Yes!
Executive 2: Oh. I thought you were going to say, maybe, Trent Reznor or Bauhaus or someone like that.
Executive 1: No way, have you heard ‘Little Red Corvette’?

Of course, whoever picked Prince to do the Batman soundtrack is a canny operator indeed- it gave His Royal Purpleness the perfect opportunity to add another string to his small but perfectly formed bow. A while ago, I wrote on here about the spectacular body-swerve that saw Paul Weller leave behind the Jam’s taut, punky attack for the euro-cafe Jazz leanings of The Style Council. Well that’s the sort of change in tack that Prince seems to have spent much of his career going through about three times on an average afternoon.

This isn’t to say that most Prince albums don’t have unifying themes. They do, and they’re wide in scope from ‘Dirty Mind’ (sex), to ‘Around The World In A Day’ (psychedelic whimsy, sex) to ‘The Gold Experience’ (religion, sex) to ‘Sign O’ The Times’ (state of the world, sex). In fact, in the 4 minutes of the latter’s title track he covers more lyrical ground than Bob Dylan, the man who is meant to be pop music’s maestro of reinvention.

That title bestowed on Dylan is, of course, utter bobbins. Dylan has spent 43 albums (at the last count) moving from “Here’s some wry observations about the world” to “I’ve had a bike crash” to “I’m getting divorced” to “I’ve found God” to “No I haven’t” to “Bugger, I might die soon” and Prince pretty much covers all of that in the first 4 minutes of Purple Rain. He doesn’t have a bike crash during that song but the film had a nifty motorcycle in it which is close enough. The reason for Dylan’s canonization is pretty obvious, he’s a pretentious wordsmith and staggeringly sluggish musician and therefore the perfect hero for every rock journalist who thinks they could be the next James Joyce but could never master the riff to ‘Waterfall’. If they make the lyrics more important than the music, they’ll feel a bit better about themselves.

Prince meanwhile can play more instruments than Roy Castle, as well as dancing much better, and he pushed lyrical boundaries to such a level that he single handedly caused Tipper Gore in 1985 to create the ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker in outrage at ‘Darling Nikki’ “masturbating with a magazine”. We can only assume she wasn’t paying attention 3 years earlier when, on ‘Sister’, Prince sang about incest being “not all it seems” as an 16 year old boy got jiggy with his elder sibling. You never got that with ‘Blonde on Blonde’.

Dylan, on the other hand, makes me think of old cars. It seems that Dylan afficionados think that the relationship between musician and fans, whereby the artist puts all the effort into making music and therefore get paid handsomely from the pockets of the audience, should be turned on it’s head and it is, in fact, the duty of the listener to put all the work into consuming Bob’s tunes as they figure out what the hell he’s banging on about as they sit through, for example, eight long minutes of Visions of Johanna. The only other type of person in society who puts such effort into an otherwise easy task is the classic car enthusiast- who considers that getting from A to B in a comfortable hatchback is a waste of time when one can arrive there two hours late, covered in oil and ready to regale all present with tales of broken gaskets.

I have a friend afflicted by this particular condition and he once arrived somewhat tardily to a party and explained, quite cooly, that he had been held up when his car developed “a small fire”. For me, a man used to such modern motoring comforts as electric windscreen wipers and a CD player that’s audible over the engine, I believe size is no issue when it comes to a fire accompanying you in what is essentially a metal box powered by highly flammable liquid. The only scale it can be measured on begins at ‘no fire’ and only goes up one notch to ‘Oh fucking shit!’. For every classic car enthusiast up to his elbows in engine parts on the side of the A40, there’s a Dylan fan listening to something from his infamous eighties output.

The crossover between classic car enthusiasts and Bob Dylan’s fans continues when nationality is brought into play. The motorists are forever in thrall to Triumph Dolomites and Lotus Europas because British cars never sold abroad very much whilst foreign makers continued to make inroads into our markets year after year and this gets them very upset and defensive. Similarly, Americans have always been rather upset that the Beatles (and The Stones and Led Zep) were British and therefore they went looking for an American to place firmly at the centre of popular music whilst Elvis was busy making dreadful movies. This happened in the mid-60s, right around the time John Lennon started saying Dylan was influencing him strongly and bingo! the Yanks had their man. It’s worth pointing out that in the same period as eulogising His Bobness, Lennon was also so mashed on LSD he convened a meeting to let the rest of The Beatles know he was Jesus, so it’s fair to say his judgement at this time can’t be entirely trusted but that didn’t stop Americans deciding that Bob was lord of all he surveyed and from them on everything he did was a monument to his towering genius.

Well, lets have a close look at a few of Bob’s career landmarks. Modern rock was truly invented, so Rollign Stone magazine would have you believe, when Dylan decided to go electric in 1965, dumping his acoustic guitar for a Fender Stratocaster and angering the entire folk movement. This, apparently, was a very brave thing to do. However, it is worth reconsidering this supposed bravery when you remember that the people he upset spent much of the 1960s ripping up their Vietnam draft papers and being pacifists. It’s highly likely they wouldn’t be much cop if it came down to a fight- especially one over an instrument that had already been toted by such noted hard-nuts as Hank Marvin and Buddy Holly.

Later that year, DA Pennebaker followed Dylan around the UK for the documentary ‘Don’t Look Back’. In this, Bob is said to set the archetype for the modern rock star by being surly with journalists and looking blankly at everyone and everything. Far from pioneering the artists of the future as he blazes a trail through these isles, what the documentary actually turns out to be is an hour and a half in the company of a man so stoned he probably only swtiched to an electric guitar cause he liked the colours. Much is made of how much Bob looks bored and desperate in this film whilst travelling through such places as Nottingham and Devon, but this is much more to do with Nottingham and Devon than it is Bob.

In 1969, as I’ve alluded to, Bob Dylan, artist, musician, genius, fell off his motorbike and nearly died. He followed this by a prolonged period of isolation in which he stitched himself together again and created the real mystique of Dylan that has continued to this day by becoming a recluse and being a bit odd on the rare times he gave interviews. To be frank, his behaviour since the accident appears to be less a sign of a maverick at work and more a sign of moderate brain damage. And what kind of rock star falls off a motorbike anyway? At least Simon Le Bon made a twat out of himself by pranging a big, expensive yacht.

Fast forward to 1975 and Dylan unleashes his true ‘masterpiece’, ‘Blood on the Tracks’ as he splits from his wife Sara. Three points need to be made clear about this album:

1. I defy anyone who doesn’t actually know the story behind it to figure out it’s actually all about the end of a marriage on the first listening
2. Once you penetrate the lyrics, it turns out Bob’s a bit of a bastard
3. Dolly Parton did much better work on the subject with ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’

If you’re reading all this and thinking I hate all Bob Dylan’s music, you’d be wrong. He’s done some good stuff- Like A Rolling Stone, Subterranean Homesick Blues, Rainy Day Women #19 & #35- but his hit rate’s appaling and he sings like he’s had a cold for 40 years. And, there is never, EVER, any need for that much harmonica. But, to crank up the automotive theme again, there’s one reason alone why I’ll always worship at the purple altar of Prince while Mr Zimmerman leaves me cold. They’re both massively influential artists, they’ve both shown great longevity and they’re both genuine auteurs in the world of popular music.

But only one of them has ever sung about the Batmobile.

Pop-a-Doodle-Do

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We human beings are constantly crowing about what seperates us from the animals which, to be fair, really seems like we’re rubbing it in to the rest of the Earth’s creatures. I mean, we say all this and they can’t answer back can they? Because they can’t speak and we can- it’s what seperates us from the animals.

And there’s plenty more where that came from. Powers of reasoning, senses of humour, wheelbarrows- all things that we have and animals don’t and it would be very simple for us to become divided- to create a bit of a ‘them and us’ attitude between humans and animals which would be a crying shame as there is something far greater, far more important and far, far more special that unites us with a good portion of the Mother Nature’s other living, breathing creations. It’s something that we humans may feel, as we rightfully should, to be one of our greatest innovations of the 20th century but it is in fact something that we pinched from the animal kingdom without even realising it.

Pop music.

Now obviously a sparrow didn’t write ‘Are Friends Electric?’ and it wasn’t a sperm whale playing the organ on ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ but animals have been making great pop since time began. That’s “since time began” if you’re a Creationist. If you believe in Darwinism rather than Creationism (known colloquially as ‘not being a Grade-A fuckclump’) then you believe animals reached a certain stage in their evolution and then realised what they could do when they opened their mouths and made sound come out. And that, my friends, was a good day.

Anyway, a load of the Earth’s creatures use song for a variety of reasons. To mark their territory, to warn of danger, to identify themselves within a peer group and, most importantly, to attract a mate. And that’s exactly what great pop music should do as well. For each of those criteria I’ve listed just think of ‘Anarchy in the UK’, ‘What’s Goin’ On?’, ‘My Generation’ and, for the last one, absolutely every good song ever written by anyone ever.

All good pop music, when boiled down to the bones, is about getting laid or at least created with that intention in mind. Think about it- being a musician instantly makes someone about a billion times more attractive than they otherwise would be. I’ve been staggered for years now by the number of girls I’ve met who fancy Noel Gallagher despite the fact he looks like Parker from Thunderbirds. Although when I think about it he did write ‘Acquiesce’ so I’d probably bang him silly myself. Then there’s Morrissey whose very notion of sexuality has been the focus of intense scrutiny for years, especially since he’s been extremely coy about it throughout. His lyrics, however, constantly address the subject to the point that his last album had more sex all over it than the average bongo flick and- despite his occasional clalims of celebacy- his cross gender appeal, not to mention his extraordinary popularity within California’s latin community, means he’s probably the person on the planet that most people want to sleep with. And yet, if he wasn’t a pop star, he’d be the wierd bloke that lived on your street when you were growing up- you know, the one who lived in a bungalow behind permanently-closed brown curtains and had a limp. He’d be him. And then he really would be celebate.

I ought to point out at this juncture exactly what I mean by ‘pop music’. I mean it in it’s original sense- where the ‘pop’ means ‘popular’ and that means practically anything which, until downloads made things go a bit funny, could be aimed at the charts- either single or album. Basically, anything that fits into a lineage that began when Robert Johnson went to the crossroads and the Bobbysoxers started screaming at Sinatra- which is intriguingly also the time that sex and music really got to know each other. So- The Beatles? Pop. ABBA? Pop. Metallica? Pop. N.W.A.? Pop. Fairport Convention? Pop. Black Lace? Pop. Paranoid Android? Pop. Ernie, The Fastest Milkman In The West? Pop.

In recent years the word ‘pop’ has come to be associated primarily with the likes of Britney, Westlife and everything churned out by Simon Cowell’s TV marionette parades and while they’re all part of the picture they’re only a small part. Pop has always been tribal and this manufactured stuff has always been one of the tribes- in fact it’s pretty much the oldest one of them all. Remember that the next time you think the high-waisted one is single-handedly ruining music with a succession of talent shows that essentially make him a one man play-dough bastard factory.

I do wonder though how far the comparison between human pop and animal music can be taken. For instance, does birdsong have the variety in quality that pop has? Does a thrush let fly with it’s call on a morning only to be greeted by the shuffling indifference of blue tits saying “Nah, that’s rubbish”. Is there a blue whale in the southern oceans churning out a succession of Burt Bacharach-esque whale-song gems while a bunch of bitter whale hacks can produce nothing more than bland, derivative nonsense? I ask this because what actually makes great pop, and how anyone goes about the simple act of writing a classic song, remains one of life’s great intangibles. Paul Morley has a theory on what makes great pop music, though it is slighted by the fact that he’s a deluded muppet. He is one of those music writers who believes he’s part of the story rather than a mere observer. We could call this ‘Paolo Hewitt Syndrome’ and Morley is a terminal case. Just read his stuff on Joy Division- he think’s he’s part of the band. Seriously. The man’s insane. Hunter S. Thompson has a lot to answer for. Or at least he would if he wasn’t dead- though if there’s an afterworld he’s probably writing a book at the moment about death as if he’s the first person to ever have it happen to him. Like the drug-addled fool he is/was. Students will probably love it. Students and idiots.

Getting back to the point, Morley reckons that all great pop music could be imagined as being sung by Elvis which is, of course, complete and utter arse-gravy. I’m as big a Presleyterian as you’ll find but even I have to admit that his version of ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’ would be dreadful. Ditto his attempt at ‘Bittersweet Symphony’. Though hearing him have a pop at ‘(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman’ would be worth a giggle. The simple fact is that no-one seems to have actually figured out what great pop music is and how to make it- just think of the hit-rates of even the greatest bands. ‘The Beatles’ were capable of both staggering brilliance and bemusing awfulness, often on the same album, as have been everyone from The Kinks to Oasis to Prince. To my mind there’s only The Smiths and Simon and Garfunkel who came close to hitting the bullseye with practically every song and both of those acts couldn’t keep it up for more than three or four years before it all got too much.

Maybe it’s impossible to come up with a formula because great music, like anything great in life, is all about moments. In pop music, it’s the little things- a hook, a word, a guitar lick, a sample- that make the magic. God really is in the details. Think of the moment the flute comes into ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’. The backing vocal that comes out of nowhere in the second chorus of ‘Careless Whisper’. The pregnant pauses in both ‘Your The First, The Last, My Everything’ and ‘Everybody Hurts’. The heartstopping mini drum solo in ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. The bit with the handclaps in ‘Teenage Kicks’ which really ought to be naff but is actually brilliant. No-one could have just sat down and written these moments- planning them out in meticulous detail. They’re the sort of moments that can make a man believe in divine intervention or at least strange things happening when the planets align. Inspiration, the really good stuff, just comes from nowhere and can be gone before you realise you ever had it there.

And that’s probably why great music will always seem a little bit other-worldly, a little bit uncanny, a little bit intangible. Because, like the inspiration that begets it, it seems to come from someplace else- beyond simple planning and rational thought. You can try and keep plugging away, searching for the moment that lifts everything into the realm of the special but if the inspiration isn’t there you’ll only end up with that most disappointing of phenomena- bland pop music.

Or, even worse, the bollocks you’ve just read. Sorry about that.

Old Age and the Boss

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Did you notice it? Where you aware it had even taken place? What were you doing when the world finally fell completely through the Looking Glass and we all ended up groping around Wonderland as reality melted round our ankles like pyjama trousers?

Because that’s what’s happened. I’m sure you’ve read various writers and commentators over the years peddling their default ‘you couldn’t make it up!’ stance when something odd happens (prime culprit: Richard Littlejohn bemoaning such acts of terrifying modern lunacy as people being gay or black people having the vote) but if the past few weeks the planet officially went, for want of a better word, wonky.

Let’s review. Television in recent weeks has presented us Heston Blumenthal serving a dessert made of absinthe and dildos to a dinner party featuring former BBC Iraqui correspondent Rageh Omar and this was merely a side dish to the sullying taste of sour scandal eminating from, of all places, ‘University Challenge’. Meanwhile, the most dangerous and therefore rock’n'roll job for anyone to have is now as a Sri Lankan international cricketer; a comic deemed ‘unfilmable’ has been filmed into a film; global warming has lead to the coldest winter in 13 years; this year’s Best Director Oscar has been shown off at a working man’s club in Bury and the new kings of political agit-rock are apparently Oasis who’ve been banned from playing in China because Noel Gallagher once played at a Free Tibet concert and Liam’s new hairstyle is based on ‘Hong-Kong Phooey’.

Mind you, most of you may not have noticed any of this happened as these stories need more than 140 characters to be explained in detail and therefore won’t have made it onto ‘Twitter’- which you probably all know by now is a mind-bending innovation in which, after a couple million years of learning to speak to each other in complex setences embracing a breadth of tones and inflections, mankind has decided that the next logical step is to boil communication down to an un-nuanced string of text which is shorter than the real name for Bangkok (which runs to 155 characters, so at least it could be just about squeezed into the average SMS text message).

In short, the world- as usual- is currently confusing the hell out of me. Normally, I’d put this down to humanity’s unlimited capacity for absurdity (the sort of thing so expertly skewered by Stewart Lee- watch his Comedy Vehicle this week on BBC 2. Seriously. That’s an order) but now it seems I can actually ascribe my bafflement at existence to old age. And this isn’t some late-20s existencialist rage at the slow dying of the light as my glorious late-teen years fade into the distance. This is down to actual, genuine, proper old age.

Because it starts at 27.

An American scientist (isn’t it always) has discovered that mental agility starts to decline noticably from the age of 27- therefore heralding the onset of old age. Brain speed, reasoning, puzzle-solving, memory; all start hitting the skids at this particular age. No wonder Hendrix, Cobain, Morrisson, Joplin et al all kicked the bucket during within 12 months of their twenty-seventh birthday. I’ve written previously of my owrry that I’d never make it to 28 owing to my obssession with this strangest of rock ‘n’ roll phenomena but now it seems my real concern should have been getting through to my next birthday and still remembering how to tie my shoe-laces.

My new job currently sees me dispensing study-skills coaching to a variety of perky, enthusiastic and terrifyingly young University students when what I clearly should be doing is getting them to teach me how to program a VCR while I regale them with stories about when the internet was all fields.

To asuage both my worries about the world going mad and me becoming an elderly gibbering vegetable I’ve decided to listen to music by a man who most certainly didn’t pop his clogs at 27 and never seems to have gone in for the kind of absurd behaviour which is usually perpetrated by massive rock stars before it filters down to the rest of humanity.

Bruce Springsteen, and this is a fact, is as old as America. His recording career started just after he signed the Decleration of Independence and he only failed to become the first President of the United States after missing the election due to selling out 437 consecutive nights at Madison Square Garden. Absolutely every single one of his recorded output of 4 billion songs is about a) girls, b) cars, c) girls and cars or d) Vietnam and there are people who genuinely believe he finishes playing to 80,000 people a night around the world for 10 months and then goes home and back to his job running a hardware store. He is so earnest he sings everything with his eyes shut with a look on his face like he’s defacating gravel and most of his songs have outros that are longer than most people’s careers. And in ‘Ain’t Got You’ he wrote the ultimate ‘being-a-rock-star-is-rubbish-I-don’t-care-what-you-think-cause-I’ve-got-lady-trouble’ song. He’s so utterly plain, in fact, that he’s beaten to the title of New Jersey’s Most Exotic Rock Star by Jon Bon Frigging Jovi.

He is, in short, the Anti-Prince. And I’ve started to absolutely love him.

Told you the world had gone mad.

String Theory

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Geologists have no place in classical music, do they? Rocks, that’s really they’re thing. Rocks and tectonic plates (which are basically really big rocks) and sediment (which is basically really small rocks) and movements which take aeons to happen- such is the life of a geologist. Classical musicians, meanwhile, are concerned with movements which take minutes, timbres, symphonies and black ties. Which geologists, by the nature of their jobs, aren’t. And never the twain shall meet.

Until, that was, a geologist got ideas slightly above his station and figured out the greatest mystery in all of classical music.

Antonio Stradivari is, or more acurately was, the man reponsible for making the finest stringed instruments known to man- they carry the name ‘Stradivarius’ and a violin carrying that moniker is worth millions. 650 of his instruments survive to this day and there’ll never be any more. Ever. That’s not to say people don’t know how he made them- we’ve got scientists and computers and robots (probably) for things like that. It is perfectly simple to get the same type of wood Stradivari used, treat it in the same way, make the exact same strings and place them on a body shaped identically to the master’s work to the tiniest, merest grain. We can do that easily. And it won’t sound like a Stradivarius. And it used to be that no one could figure out why.

Because they’d forgotten to think about Ice Ages.

You see, for the four hundred years from around 1500 to 1900 Europe went through a mini Ice Age which led to some particularly cold winters and had minor, but noticable, effects on various plants and animals. Some grew stronger, some grew weaker. Among the winners were three types of tree- the maple, the spruce and the willow. And Stradivari made his violins from maple, spruce and willow. And when was he at his best? When was his ‘Golden Period’?

1700-1720. Slap bang in the middle of the Mini Ice Age. And that’s why there’ll never be any more instruments that sound like a Stradivarius- it’s too warm.

And that brings me nicely to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (well, as nicely as anyone can by brought to a modern art museum via some violins and an Ice Age). Geology sits about as comfortably in the subject of great classical music instruments as the Guggenheim sits by the river in the middle of Basque country.

It. Is. Stunning.

And Bilbao isn’t. It’s not a horrible town- it’s just rather old and, well, ‘lived-in’. Imagine Hull, for instance. Then imagine Hull with the Parthenon in the middle of it. The Parthenon made out of lasers and mercury. THAT’S the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

It looks like it’s billowing out of the ground- equal parts silver, ribbon and smoke. No, scratch that, it looks like all the oceans of the world; a tempest by the water. Actually, ignore that as well. It looks like nothing else, anywhere. I’m wasting my time here really- words haven’t really caught up with the genius of it’s design. Language just can’t do the job; you’ll just have to go and look at it yourself. Yes, the Guggenheim is, basically, a miracle. A huge, extraordinary, staggering, stunning, mind-bending miracle.

And it’s construction is the 2nd most incredible thing to ever happen in Bilbao.

It comfortably sat at the top of that particular tree until last Friday when I was walking around Bilbao’s old town and figured out how to sort every human being on the planet into one of three simple categories. By the way, I also managed to eat 6 species of animal in a single day on Friday but that’s another story.

Friday in Bilbao saw the city’s 6 day carnival already in full swing. You did read that right, I might add- 6 days. Almost a week of carnivalling; frankly, for a country that spends most of it’s working life in bed, that’s overdoing it on the larking about front. Anyway, back to the story- Saturday night, which tragically was when I had to fly home from Bilbao, saw the carnival’s attention shifting to a ‘Superhero Party’ when the youth of the city get dressed up as… well you can probably guess. And then get drunk. Basically.

Friday night saw them all queueing up outside of Bilbao’s fancy dress shops (there’s quite a few of them, unsurprisingly) to buy their costumes and that’s what caused my latest moment of searing insight to hit me. Well- that and about 4 gallons of cerveza caused it to hit me but that’s probably unrelated.

Anyway- here we go. There’s three types of Superhero and three only:

-Transforming

-With Powers

-Without Powers

‘Transforming’ superheroes transform into something else under specific circumstances, think The Hulk or Blue Beetle. ‘With Powers’ superheroes have your genuine actual superpowers, like Superman, Spiderman or Dr. Manhattan. ‘Without Powers’ superheroes have no superpowers but are usually utterly nails, or tooled up with gadgets, or both- like Batman, Ironman or Silk Spectre.

And (and here comes the science) if you think of anyone, ABSOLUTELY ANYONE, that you know- you will instantly know exactly what type of superhero they would be, if they were a superhero. Go on, try it. Try it on yourself. Try it on the missus. Try it on your Uncle. Try it on the next person to walk past your window. Try it on the next person to come on the telly (this’ll be a more pertinent test if you’re not watching a superhero movie at the time). Try it on everyone you meet.

And you know what, you really will feel like you know people that little bit better. If everyone started thinking about everyone else this way- we’d all get along more I reckon. We’d all be that little bit closer. We’d probably hug more. Take for instance, that special person in your life- if you have one (and you do have one, even if you’re not dating them; even if you only occasionally speak to them, even if you’ve split up with them and never speak, even if you only ever see them on the bus in the morning- you have one). You know everything about them, don’t you? What they like, what they hate, what makes them laugh, smile, cry; what they look like naked (and, again, you don’t have to have seen them naked, but you know); their whats, whys and hows. And now, you’ll know them even better, you’ll be even closer- because now you know two more things about them. You know what kind of superhero they’d be.

And the fact that they’ll never make the greatest violins ever.

Next time: some jokes. Or I just give up trying and do one of those ‘fill in the answers- honestly- only using songs from your i-pod that begin with F, then tag ten people you want to fill it in too!!!!’ quizzes that seem to be creeping onto Facebook and being filled in by pillocks.