Ha! Great David Crosby reference in yesterday's Achewood
posted by duke harringay at 11:43 AM

Goodness, don't the Young People sound like Mecca Normal? And isn't that a fine, fine thing?
posted by duke harringay at 11:17 AM

Sethe thinks I should add a comments feature to my blog so that people can comment on the things I have to say. I admit that sometimes it’s a tempting idea, but on the whole I tend to think not… I remember all too well the last time I had a feedback area on my website. It got inundated by nasty comments made by fans of the former singer with that pop group called The Smiths, all of them taking umbrage to the fact that I had dared to criticise their idol. It was a depressing episode and I really don’t want to risk going through it all again. I have a very thin skin. And I mean very… Besides which, everyone who reads this knows me anyway and emails me when they think I’m talking shite, or when they don’t know who Graeme O’Bree is (Rupert…), so, uh, yeah.

Every time I write Sethe in Word it changes it to seethe. Just thought I’d mention that. Glad you are in love again, incidentally. And that you think Truman Capote was a genius. I know lots of people who would disagree, but Andy thought he was God, and that’s good enough for me.

The James Kirk album is god-like. If you don’t own it yet you are an idiot. On the subject of which, we watched ‘Magic Town’ last night, with Jimmy Stewart and that woman who married Ronald Reagan, I cant remember her name off-hand. Hang on… Jane Wyman. No relation to Bill. Anyway, there’s a great line in there; two radio comedians doing a skit, one goes ‘gee, you must have studied really hard to become such a moron’ to which the other one goes ‘no, I come from Grandview’. Uh, you have to watch the movie. I just thought it would be really apt for Tiverton, which is where I teach, in case you didn’t already know. Except underneath it all Tiverton is nowhere near as ‘magic’ as Grandview.

Tonight we may watch ‘Darling’, as recommended by Robin, and starring of course the very wonderful Julie Christie. And every time I think of Julie Christie I get that Stephen Duffy line in my head about being reminded of her in ‘Billy Liar’.

I need to go and review some CDs.

posted by duke harringay at 9:28 AM

I should point out of course that I only listen to that hour or so of Radio 2 in any one day. Half an hour of Wogan and half an hour of Wright. And I’ve almost never heard Wright play anything remotely interesting, except occasionally when a listener sends in their ‘oldies’ selection. I understand that at other times Radio 2 may well be a source of wonderful stuff, and that’s fair enough, but, you know, I’m only going on what evidence I have to hand. And on that evidence I want to boak.

(‘boak’ incidentally is a Scottish term for puking, or throwing up. It’s a great word. C likes it a great deal, and Graeme O’Bree uses it in his autobiography when talking about the time he overdosed on asprin and alcohol in Geneva before trying to hang himself with a stolen car seat belt. The last few pages of the book are pretty grim reading. Two suicide attempts, both written about with a very desolate air of calm. Not exactly cheery stuff…)

posted by duke harringay at 7:51 AM

I’ve just been subjected to Simply Red murdering Dylan’s ‘Positively 4th Street’. Hucknall and his gang of fools turning what is surely one of the most vitriolic songs of all time into a painfully polite romp, with jaunty horns and backing vocals trilling like nightingales, when if anything they ought surely to be screaming like skuas. It’s the kind of horror that shows how awful ‘mainstream’ radio really is; something I had forgotten all about for perhaps the best part of twenty years but which I now experience for a half hour or so twice a day, courtesy of my lift to school and back (can’t ride my bike at the moment because my bike store room is filled with boxes of cameras, printers, scanners and the like).

John Carney has been writing recently about how the likes of Vic Godard talked about their ambition to be heard on Radio 2. This was in the early ‘80s when the cultural landscape was very different to how it is now, but still, experiencing Radio 2 these days actually reminds me of how much I hated it twenty years ago too. It’s all Terry Wogan’s fault of course. My mother used to listen to Wogan on Radio 2 every morning before we went off to school, and I always detested his chirpy, smug attitude as well as the appalling music he played. I don’t remember what any of that music was, but I’m sure it was dreary nonsense. He certainly plays dreary nonsense now that he’s still there (or is back again), once again in the mornings, on Radio 2 (witness the Simply Red as already mentioned). He’s also still horribly smug. Not only that, but nasty and offensive to boot. The other week he was taking the piss out of Dizzy Rascal in a way that was really only thinly cloaked racism, and this morning he did the same whilst playing a Texas song that had some rapping alongside whassername who does that impression of singing. It was truly horrible, especially as immediately afterwards someone in the studio started doing some shitty piss-take about David Blaine in a German accent. Not that I care for Blaine, but you know, the whole German thing was like something out of the seventies or something. It wasn’t nice.

Radio 2 in the afternoon ride home is only marginally better. Steve Wright is less objectionable that Wogan, but his taste in music is only marginally less offensive. I honestly thought that artists like Chris Rea, Sting, Dire Straits etc were pretty much forgotten about, but that’s clearly just a case of me being ostrich like in my obscurity, because no, they’re all alive and well and being aired on Radio 2. Sometimes, I swear, I feel like puking.

If only it were all Bobbie Gentry and the Swingle Singers...

posted by duke harringay at 4:54 PM