EARLIER this year, for reasons too complicated to go into here, I had reason to be looking for kids from an estate in Preston who made their own music.
It turned out that the supposedly uncommunicative and hard-to-reach youth on this particular estate were absolutely into communicating with the outside world, but you’d only know about it if you looked on MySpace.
Although broadly ‘urban’ in origin, the music they’re coming up with ranges from grime and dubstep to 4×4 bassline and straightforward hip hop. In the comments for each profile, it’s all about barz, beefs, merking and endz and a lot of the time I don’t have a fucking clue what they’re on about, to be honest – though I have a pretty good idea – but one name seems to crop up time and again.
WHERE are the old punks on Twitter? There are more 30-something DJs tweeting their brains out than you could shake a shitty stick at, but the generation of stay-up-forever party animals before them don’t seem to have caught the bug in quite the same way.
They’re all over Facebook, MySpace and most other online social media platforms you’d care to mention, from the well-meaning and informative but occasionally holier-than-thou Southern Records forum to the irreverent and endlessly diverting website born out of the legendary Kill Your Pet Puppy fanzine. But very few have made it onto Twitter.
Of course, Boy George tweets. He was, and remains, as punk as fuck. Ditto Alternative Tentacles, clearly, and the Gang of Four too. Okay, and Justin Broadrick. And ACR. I also have my suspicions about the not-so-secret pasts of people like Graeme Park and Luke Solomon. But where is Viv Albertine? The Shend from the Cravats? Jimmy Pursey? Pauline Murray? Cal from Discharge? Mensi? Are you out there?
Apparently not. They’ve probably got better stuff to do. Which is a shame, because I think Cal from Discharge would be able to do wonderful things with 140 characters – although they’d probably all be capitals, exclamation marks and downward smiley-faces :(
@Cal_from_Discharge AIN’T NO FEEBLE BASTARD, AIN’T NO FUCKING SCAPEGOAT!!! Also, thinking about what to have for tea 1 day ago
IT TAKES me a couple of seconds to realise that the Third Davyhulme Scout & Guide Marching Band are playing Hit The North as they turn onto Deansgate in front of us. Somehow their spirited instrumental rendition of Mark E Smith’s tale of useless MPs and big wide streets manages to be utterly ludicrous and totally brilliant at exactly the same time, perfectly setting the tone for the rest of the Procession put together by Jeremy Deller in collaboration with the people (and football club mascots) of Greater Manchester.
Criticised, a little unfairly I think, for not attracting more Manchester residents to Manchester International Festival in 2007, MIF director Alex Poots wanted to find a big, high-profile, mass-participation, free event for the festival’s opening weekend and with thousands of people lining the parade route, Procession seems to have done the trick.
While Deller has a history of tackling big ideas, people are always at the very heart of his work and it is the people of Manchester who make the parade – and the city – what it is. Poignant, daft, inspiring, hilarious and baffling in equal measure, it perhaps sums up the complexities and contradictions of Manchester as well as any official census or commercial survey.
“I love parades, so I’d like to do my own parade about a town that I have a lot of love for,” Deller told me at the festival launch. “Even though I don’t live here, it means a lot to me as a part of Britain. It’s a town I’ve been interested in for years. You come up here and the buildings are really telling you about the past. You feel it, you feel the history. I find that very exciting, walking around.”
EAGLE-EYED readers will have noticed that Expletive Undeleted now has its own ‘Twittery-Twattery’ feed (down there on the right) where I talk about all the things I can’t be arsed blogging about, in 140 characters or less. Come join the party. You will get spammed by PR twats! Yay!
There are also a few new additions to the blogroll – Manchester arts and culture supremo Mancubist, superlative resource for all things clubby / DJing / house music-related, Resident Advisor, and the fairly self-expanatory Easy Listening World.
And while we’re at it, visit History Is Made At Night for more of Transpontine’s fascinating and informative words on the politics of dancing, all around the world, right through the ages. Marvellous and inspiring stuff.
And while we have our dancing shoes on, the ever-generous Freaks are giving away mp3s of two versions of a new song, the groovy and very beautiful Black Shoes, White Socks. All your need to get your ears on these bits of top notch bendy house music is go to the Music For Freaks website and sign your life away. You probably won’t regret it.
Kev H from the recently re-defunct Flux got in touch to let me know that Hard Night Out, the Professor Green track which samples Tube Disaster by Flux, finally looks like getting a formal release. Head over here to see the vid. I think they might be getting a percentage so let’s make it a hit, eh chaps?
PROVIDING a much needed unicorn chaser to the dark excesses of 1974, 1980 and 1983 – and giving you, dear reader, the opportunity to test the snazzy play/download option on zShare – the entirely appropriate Sergio Mendes & Brasil 77 bring us Love Music.
If this song doesn’t make you feel glad to be alive, that you could just kiss the sun if the fancy should take you, that everything will be alright in the end, probably, then there is something seriously wrong with you, my friend. You have no soul. Seek professional help. Quickly. But let me know what you think to the play/download thing before you do.
Dean Cavanagh definitely has a soul. Dean is one of those people who is always up to something.
I first ran into him in the early Nineties when he was promoting Bradford’s first big rave events and got to know him properly when he started the Herb Garden club culture fanzine with Dave Gill a couple of years later. He went on to promote the innovative Soundclash nights in Leeds before landing a major label deal with his friend Enzo Annecchini under the name Glamorous Hooligan.
Since then, he’s forged a working partnership with Irvine Welsh, with whom he’s written for both stage and screen. The pilot of Dean’s latest TV project Svengali, a razor-sharp comedy about an innocent (Jonathan Lewis Owen) lost in the London music biz, is being released in weekly five-minute chunks on You Tube and I guess the idea is for someone to pick it up and give them the money to do a full production.
It features Sally Phillips, Jodie Whittaker and cameos from the likes of Alan McGee and Paolo Hewitt and while you can tell they’re doing it guerrilla-style, it’s funny and it’s smart and I like it.
And while I remember, new band alert: Shit & Glitter, listen out for them. They are the future of now.
WE’VE already established that a million monkeys randomly tapping away on a million typewriters for a zillion years are unlikely to produce the complete works of Shakespeare or anything like it – but what would these strangely conscientious literary simians actually come up with?
You can get a peak at the first fruits of the initial 20 years of this ongoing, open-ended social experiment courtesy of Alphainventions, a blog aggregator which allows viewers to see a seemingly endless cycle of frontpages from the far reaches of the mechanical webnets.
Like some gargantuan two-dimensional online tower of Babel almost entirely populated by psychotic apes on drugs jabbering at each other without even realising they’re not talking the same language, Alphainventions might seem a little wacked out to the casual observer. And also the not-so-casual observer.
You’ll find any number of tedious religious zealots trying to impose their rather narrow worldview on the rest of the humanity via banal and poorly punctuated prose that nobody ever reads.
You’ll meet gun fetishists, entomologists, someone called Elvis Jedi and a man whose life’s work is to explain that very few things are actually worse than Hitler.
You will also be introduced to the Somali ex-pat community in Switzerland, people with ME, hot babes and Wild Dervishes. You’ll read about one woman’s journey from high-powered computer geek to Buenos Aires tango teacher. You may even meet the odd kindly soul who just likes making really nice soup.
You’ll get clued up on renewable energy on the Mendocino Coast and the views of Imam Bukhari on the kissing of hands and feet, you’ll learn about the Fuel Cell Market Report, how to restore wolves to the Rocky mountains and vegans of color (“because we don’t have the luxury of being single-issue”).
And if you have time after perusing the marvels of the Hijda Eunuch blog and Frank H Jump’s photo blog about fading advertising hoardings, you could try some Three-Minute Bible Study. Or you could fight the good fight with Combat Queer instead. Or maybe just kick back with some sad Urdu poetry.
I don’t know how the site works but I don’t know how Google works. Or cars or planes. Some kind of mechanical ju-ju, no doubt. Either way, Alphainventions is, not to put too fine a point on it, fucking nuts .. and I think I like it.
David Peace’s writing is also fucking nuts and I definitely like it.
I’m getting very, very excited about Red Riding: The Trilogy, which is adapted from his fantastic Red Riding Quartet and stars a virtual who’s who of British acting talent in the shape of Paddy Considine, David Morrissey, Maxine Peake, Warren Clarke, Andrew Garfield, Rebecca Hall, Mark Addy, Sean Harris, Gerard Kearns, Daniel Mays, and a few more people I can’t remember right now.
Make a date with your telly and Channel 4 for 9pm on Thursday 5 March. In the meantime, here’s David Peace writing about the books. And here’s an excellent interview with Peace from the Observer.
“WE’RE supposed to be a republic, that’s what we were founded on, not a democracy, dumbass. Now, thanks to morons like you, we will be neither ..”
I managed to provoke this comment from one of our online colonial cousins the other day (needless to say, I’ve tidied up the punctuation and grammar), when I opined that the democratic process means that sometimes the other guy wins.
Our angry and inarticulate friend was, of course, referring to the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States or, as he viewed it, the coronation of Pope Obama I.
I usually subscribe to the view that no-one with the ability to really effect change would ever be allowed within a mile of the Oval Office but this guy somehow seems to have slipped through the security cordon. Like pretty much everyone else in Europe, I’ve fallen for the Obama hype hook, line and sinker.
He’s got a big job ahead of him, not least convincing the rest of the world that the bad old days of idiocy, corruption and stealth-fascism we endured under George W Bush have finally gone. But simply electing Obama in the first place has given the US more good PR than it’s had in decades.
So this one is for you guys. Thanks very much for getting rid of that fucking monkey (or at least having a constitution which allows you to get rid of that fucking monkey after two terms). Maybe we can get onto the important stuff now – signed, the rest of the world.
[I wanted to use Dr Nina Simone’s superlative version of this song but, inexplicably, it’s unavailable on YouTube, so here’s a version by another bad gal diva, Rachel Hylton from last year’s X-Factor. I think it gets my point across.]
What else is making the world a better place as we hunker down for what looks like being, despite the joyous events across the Atlantic, a very long and bleak winter?
HOLY verbosity, scream insanity! All you ever gonna be is another great fan of me .. posting twice in the same week. Yes, it’s a veritable shit-storm of uninformed opinion, reckless conjecture and outright lies. What can I say? Buy an umbrella.
Me and the missus bought a couple of tickets for Róisín Murphy’s sold-out gig at the Academy on Friday night from one of Manchester’s army of charming ticket touts (“I’d give you a couple of quid back if I had any change,” he said as we handed over 40 quid for two £19 tickets) and had such a good time that I felt compelled to tell you all about it.
A thousand drunk girls with fascinators, all the gays in the world and us two, straight out of work, scream in unison at the appearance of La Murphy behind a chiffon curtain. She sings the whole of the first song, You Know Me Better, from behind that same curtain, upon which a succession of appropriately trippy, glam and kitsch images are projected.
Why isn’t this woman a popstar? I don’t get it. Am I missing something?
ONE-TIME Playboy bunny Marion Benoist and ex-Motherfucker feedback enthusiast Fred de Fred (aka the Lovers) have been making beautiful music together since they were introduced by a mutual friend in London on September 11, 2001.
Now based in Sheffield – they have no plans to invade Afghanistan, for the moment – the Lovers’ naughty but nice second album continues the saucy crusade they began with their eponymous debut three years ago. Recorded in Texas and South Yorkshire, Pardon My French contains the kind of big production pop nobody is supposed to make anymore. I think it could be my favourite album of the year.
An effortlessly exotic and eclectic sound – whistling, kazoos, ukuleles, a glockenspiel, a sousaphone, even a clarinet are all thrown into the mix – might make Pardon My French seem like it’s from another time and place but closer listening reveals some talented musicianship and a resolutely individual, contemporary and internationalist outlook.
If that wasn’t enough, they’re sexy and funny, they sing in French, English and a strange combination of the two, and they write killer hooks too. What more do you need to know?
Although it’s new to the Expletive Undeleted blogroll Kill Your Pet Puppy has been online for just over a year. It’s a blog by the same people – Tony D, Al, Penguin – who put together the legendary punk rock fanzine in the late Seventies/early Eighties. They’re adding old fanzine reprints, downloads of vintage punk vinyl and obscure demo and live cassette tapes and the like, all the time.
One of my favourite bits of KYPP is Josef Porter’s ongoing serialised autobiography, Genesis to Revolutions, with tales of squats, trains, chillums and his time in bands like Zounds and the Mob. Pathetically, I was hoping for a mention when he gets to Blyth Power – I think I might have done the historic first interview with the band – but I’ve probably scuppered my chances of that now.
Another thing I really like about KYPP is the fact that people really respond to it and, in common with all the best blogs, each entry is accompanied by lively and informed comments from readers – which are often every bit as interesting and illuminating as the original post. We seem to have arrived back in fanzineland without even realising it. Highly recommended.
LP Cover Lover specialises in sharing cover art from the time when albums had two sides and came in flat cardboard packaging 12 inches square.
I’m gagging to hear the music on the records themselves but there are no downloads, which is a pity. Even so, LP Cover Lover is one of my favourite things in the whole wide world of web at the moment.
Insights from the Engine Room is a new blog written by former Manchester radio DJ, record plugger and man about town Tony ‘the Greek’ Michaelides, relocated to sunny Florida. The blog finds Tony musing on his years in the old-school music business most amusingly, although I do wish he would name names in the more scurrilous entries. Dish the dirt Tony, you know you want to.
Ali Catterall has written a fascinating piece for the Channel 4 film website called The Story Of Babylon By The People Who Made It, with quotes and insights from the cast and crew of the seminal British reggae flick (which is just about to be released on DVD). Ali tells me that just three journalists turned up for the recent Babylon interview junket at the NFT recently, so this could be as good as it gets.
And have you seen that TV programme where celebrities force themselves through holes in moving walls? I like that too.
“I love parades, so I’d like to do my own parade about a town that I have a lot of love for,” Deller told me at the festival launch. “Even though I don’t live here, it means a lot to me as a part of Britain. It’s a town I’ve been interested in for years. You come up here and the buildings are really telling you about the past. You feel it, you feel the history. I find that very exciting, walking around.”
LP Cover Lover
