About nostalgia

I suppose it had to happen.

Radio 2 has long had the 60s and 70s sewn up, providing a nice pension for Tony Blackburn and the like. More recent acquisitions to their stable, like "Ooh" Gary Davies, have tied down the 80s, whilst the addition of Fearne Cotton and Dermot O'Leary allow for 90s-themed programming, for listeners who are getting on a bit but don't want to admit it. "I can still mosh down the front of my provincial festival, as long as I'm in bed by 11.30 because I've got to get the kids up in the morning." You know the sort. Maybe you are the sort. Maybe I am too, a bit, though I was never really one for the moshpit.

But a new low has been reached. Listening to 6 Music this morning, I discovered they are currently running a whole slew of 00s-themed features and shows. Noughties forever! Like it is some colossal rose-tinted nostalgia-fest and not just yesterday, surely?

I live in hope that they might play something like this, at least: Lights Out For Darker Skies by Sea Power, or British Sea Power as they still were then, from Do You Like Rock Music?, one of my favourite albums of that ancient decade.

What's most depressing, I guess, is that I tend to think of the Noughties as the decade Pop Idol, X-Factor and the like took over, and the death of bands happened, with every chart act suddenly being "A featuring B" or "C vs D" rather than a group. Or maybe I'm just a curmudgeonly old git. Or maybe those statements are not mutually exclusive.

Blah, blah, blah... something about getting old... blah, blah... something about wishing it was the 80s again... blah, blah... some non-specific misery... You can fill in the blanks yourself, can't you? I've only been back three weeks and I'm already tired of blogging. And as Samuel Johnson might have said, had he been online 20 years ago, "When a man is tired of blogging, he is tired of life." Probably.

Where the sheets are stained with gold

Well, if you had "New material from Rialto" on your bingo card for 2025, you might be on a winner. Yes, that Rialto, that had a minor post-Britpop hit with Untouchable (you know the one about soaking your skin in alcohol) all the way back in 1998. They're back! Back, back, back!

This is a direct quote from the promo blurb that dropped into my inbox yesterday:

Theirs is a reunion spurred on not so much by a longing for the past as an urgency to grab the best of life while they can. Six years ago, while holidaying in Spain, singer and song-writer Louis Eliot was rushed to hospital for extreme emergency surgery, mere hours from death. His full recovery was an epiphany. “What you might think is if you have a very close to death experience you want to start looking after yourself,” he says. “I just went chasing full speed after my youth. I was just like, fuck it, I might not be here next week, I'm just going to dive in.”

Part of Eliot’s rebirth involved leaving behind a long-term relationship to immerse himself once more in London’s late-night party scene. Part of it was the romance and anguish he found there. And part of it was realising that the songs that were emerging from this period – songs of love and loss, hedonism and regret, set in wistful witching hours – were a call from the past.

Well, we can only speculate what that "extreme emergency surgery" might have been, but whatever the impetus for the resumption of active service, we can truthfully say that this is Rialto's best new song for 27 years.

I still can't decide exactly what No One Leaves This Discotheque Alive reminds me of. It's a bit PSB, I think, though I know that's a lazy comparison. I also think I might like the video more than the song, but maybe that will change with repeat listens/views.

Anyway, what this has done is remind me that my absolute favourite Rialto moment remains earlier, lesser hit (number 37 in 1997's hit parade!) Monday Morning 5.19, all Pulp-lite kitchen-sink drama, pre-Millennial angst and orchestration. Enjoy!

New to NA: Greentea Peng

I heard this on 6 Music the other morning. The opening guitar motif caught my ear because it was vaguely reminiscent of The Changing Man by Paul Weller (itself more than vaguely reminiscent of 10538 Overture by ELO). But, after that guitar intro, the rest of the song is very different, all lo-fi shuffle and heard-through-a-club-wall sonics, married with a vocal that calls someone else to mind that I can't quite put my finger, for the moment. Imagine Erykah Badu, maybe, if she'd spent her formative years in post-Millennium Dalston rather than 80s Dallas.

Anyway, I know nothing else about Greentea Peng that can't be gleaned from her Wikipedia entry, whence comes the knowledge that Greentea is a "neo soul" artiste, and that "peng" is slang for attractive. I have seldom felt older or more parochial but never mind that, because what I do know is this: whilst One Foot is distinctly outside the Venn diagram of my normal musical tastes, I quite like it. It's borderline hypnotic in places, I think. What do you reckon?

I like the video too, it feels like it was shot on someone's iPhone without permission, guerilla-style. Or at least has been deliberately made to look that way. Next time you see someone with headphones on, singing aloud on the tube, look around, you could be in a music video...

Getting back

Or TIWHBALYIIHBOS (Things I Would Have Blogged About Last Year If I Hadn't Been On Sabbatical) #3

Back in 2022, in my end of year round-up, I made Paul McCartney my person of the year, on the basis of his headlining Glastonbury at 80 years of age and doing an excellent job of it. At the time, I wrote, "He's basically a very few years younger than my old man who, on occasion, struggles a bit to headline the armchair. So well done Paul - I hope you tour at least once more, so I can finally see you live."

Well, he did tour again; his "Got Back" tour trundled around the globe through the latter half of 2024, culminating in two nights at the O2 Arena. Which is how I found myself, six days before Christmas, sitting way up in the stand stage left, finally getting to see the man himself. Now 82, for very nearly 3 hours Paul and his band were everything you would expect and hope for, and then some. At times it was almost too much to take in, there seemed to be so much going on, even if a lot of it was largely expected: staggering pyrotechnics during Live and Let Die, for example, or mass singalong na-na's for Hey Jude. We've all seen these things so often, haven't we, not least at the aforementioned and brilliantly televised Glastonbury set. But there were surprises: I watched it snow inside the cavernous dome of the O2, for a seasonal rendition of Wonderful Christmastime (made less cheesy by the joyous accompaniment of the Capital Children's Choir). I saw a skeletal Ronnie Wood, wizened almost to the point of self-parody, join Paul on-stage for Get Back. But the biggest surprise of all came during the encore.

Immediately after Paul's duet with a virtual John Lennon on I've Got A Feeling (again, no surprise, he did that at Glasto too), I saw a second drum kit appear at the side of the stage. "No way," I muttered, to no-one in particular. Because an extra drum kit could surely only mean one special guest?

Anyway, I was sat a long way up, and my camera is quite old, but with those apologies out of the way, this is what happened next...

There's a lot I like about this, not least that Paul's regular drummer, the amazing Abraham Laboriel Jr, watches Ringo intently throughout, the way that middle-aged children watch their parents at family gatherings, to make sure they get through it all okay.

I'll be honest, I'd booked the last night of the tour for the slightly morbid reason that, at 82, I figured it might conceivably be Paul's last live performance. "I was at McCartney's last ever gig," I could later claim. Me and 20,000 others, right? But after the (again expected) finale of Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight and The End, Paul said his goodbyes to the crowd, ending with a cheery "See you all next time." So what do I know?

Well, what I do know is that the gig, a Christmas present to myself if ever there was one, was amazing. It hasn't shot to the very top of my notional "Top Ten Gigs" list, though it is certainly a new entry to that particular chart. And it felt like more than a gig - a spectacle. At times it was almost too much to process, a feeling compounded by going alone: I had no-one to talk to about what I was seeing and hearing, and no-one to bounce reactions off. But the bottom line? Whether it was his last gig or not, I'm glad I went - the experience, the music, the sensory overload, two Beatles for the price of one, and everything else. Whatever your view of the man, he puts on one hell of a show. So, with another apology for poor quality (especially when I had to try to film around heads, towards the end), here's a video of that closing medley.

Take AIm

Or TIWHBALYIIHBOS (Things I Would Have Blogged About Last Year If I Hadn't Been On Sabbatical) #2

With all apologies in advance (especially to C, who I know gets understandably hot under her exquisite collar about this), one more AI experiment. As ever, I'm doing this crap so you folks don't have to, okay?

So I've previously played with text-based AI, and image generation. Now onto video, courtesy of Minimax. For consistency, I've stuck with the same idea of trying to generate something you would never see for real. Specifically, my prompt to the AI was "Singer Morrissey eating a hamburger in an empty McDonald's restaurant, at night". This is what it came up with.

All very impressive, I'm sure. He looks nothing like Morrissey, and doesn't actually eat the burger, just holds it whilst his jaw is moving. Plus, it's very short and has no sound but other than that ... well, it looks like real, carbon-based creatives can rest easy ... for now, at least.

Anyway, with apologies (again) to all those who don't any more, here's the real McCoy with his northern outsider pals, when they were still pals, most decidedly not eating a burger.

Forty years ago though. Stone me.

Remember when "compact" mattered?

Or TIWHBALYIIHBOS (Things I Would Have Blogged About Last Year If I Hadn't Been On Sabbatical) #1

I had to get a new phone last year, unfortunately. And it seems that if you want a decent spec, compact phones are no longer an option. My new phone is a full 20mm longer than the one it replaced - so much for progress. Add on the new protective case I also had to buy and it all adds up to a ridiculous slab. I may or may not be pleased to see you, but it really is a phone in my pocket.

Anyway, it's time to belatedly update the mobile timeline:

Because these photographs are inexplicably popular (in web searches, at least) they have their own label so, for completists (!), here are the previous posts in the series.

Simplification (or, time for it all to go)

It's time to accept the Internet is never going to make me rich.

Likewise, I'm never going to win the world snooker championships, lead the Tour de France, or write an international bestselling novel. But back to the Internet and, more specifically, this blog.

For the past two years of so, I've ended every post with this, a kind of Patreon-esque way of letting readers tip me any amount, big or small, for something I've written.

In all that time, no-one has ever tipped me anything, which is fair enough. Patreon and the like are clearly best left for high-volume, mass-market, original content creators. None of those adjectives apply to me, or my "content". Besides, if you wanted to pay to read something, newspapers are available (for now).

Never mind, eh? For the past eighteen months I've also had this in my sidebar, allowing readers to buy me a cuppa.

In all that time, no-one has ever bought me a coffee, much less a notional cup of tea that I would actually enjoy. And that's fair enough too - I'm probably over-caffeinated anyway.

So it's all going, from today. New Amusements is eschewing third-party advertising wherever possible, and becoming a public service broadcaster. With apologies to the actual BBC, whose sign I've photoshopped...

All of which is my tenuous double-link to a song, Go by Public Service Broadcasting.

I especially love the very enthusisastic "Go!" from Steve Bales on Guidance. He was only 26 at the time, can you believe?

Anyway, in the unlikely event that you do want to somehow make me pence richer, you can always buy my book. Or a t-shirt! What a time to be alive.

I can't help myself...

...so I'm back, for one more lap of the sun at least. Sabbatical over, and mostly adhered to (except when RIPs and elections prompted a few posts), I regret to say that I haven't achieved much of anything in the way of new creative writing in the last year, as I'd hoped. I'm not sure that I missed blogging that much either - make of that what you will. Maybe I'm only in it for the comments, but there's the catch-22.

Regardless, here we go again because, as we have established, I can't help myself. Will you share every sorrow?

And happy new year.

Where my thoughts escape me

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

Well, that's it: this is the last post that was written and scheduled in December 2023, and my year-long sabbatical is over. Some may be happy about that, not least because I might post a bit more often; others may feel sad, because it will also mean carefully planned and edited posts are a thing of the past, and I'll be back to impulsive, scattergun posts that inevitably I won't have time to write properly or carefully. But hey ho ... what is this blog, if not where my thoughts escape me?

Either way, you can probably (but who knows?) expect a post in January reflecting on the sabbatical, and whether I missed posting regularly. Also about how I managed to use the me-time I hoped to free up ... God, I hope I didn't waste it (but I bet I did).

For now though, this feels like I am homeward bound ... so what better than this, Paul Simon and George Harrison duetting for Saturday Night Live in 1976. A spectacular curio.

Bon année, tout le monde ...

Cancelling

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

For anyone who is, for whatever reason, not with the person or people they want to be with this Christmas.