You must've thought I didn't exist

The National frontman Matt Berninger is soon to release a solo album, Get Sunk. Now I have nothing against The National (who are still going, by the way, it's not like Matt's solo album is post-breakup), but nor am I a fan particularly. I certainly don't own any records by them and, truth be told, I am unlikely to race out and buy Berninger's new effort. Having said all that, I did hear lead-out single Bonnet of Pins on the radio at the weekend, and rather liked it. And now, having sought out the video, find that it has some interesting lyrics.

All in all, it might be a grower or it might be one of those songs that sneakily grabs your attention with a turn of phrase before it gradually becomes apparent that it's actually a bit ordinary musically and the attraction wears off. We shall see.

What do you think?

Sunday shorts: The Thing

Pixies first thing on a Sunday, you say? No problem. Here's The Thing, originally a B-side to Velouria.

Naturally

Coincidentally, both Rol and Swiss Adam have posted songs today about being alone. Reading those excellent posts back to back put me in mind of Alone Again, Naturally by Gilbert O'Sullivan. And from there it was only a short mental hop to a song that is almost exactly the same age as me, Nothing Rhymed.

Personally, I could live without the strings on this, but notwithstanding that it's hard to hear these lyrics and not think how well suited they are to our black-mirror-obsessed, social-media-saturated, polarised, desensitised times:

And if while in the course of my duty
I perform an unfortunate take
Would you punish me so
Unbelievably so
Never again will I make that mistake

This feeling inside me could never deny me
The right to be wrong if I choose
And this pleasure I get
From say winning a bet
Is to lose

When I'm drinking my Bonaparte shandy1
Eating more than enough apple pies
Will I glance at my screen
And see real human beings
Starve to death right in front of my eyes

And to think, I might never have heard this song if not for acquiring SPM's cover on a bootleg.

1. Bonaparte shandy = brandy.

Gone but not forgotten

I had cause to reach out to a former colleague and old friend this afternoon. I hadn't seen him in the flesh for more than twenty years, but we'd stayed in touch on and off, not least because of our shared interest in creative writing. We proof-read and critiqued each other's work, sometimes. Anyway, I hadn't heard from him since the summer of 2022 when, in reply to an email I'd sent him about blog radio silence, he mentioned that he wasn't writing and wasn't having the greatest year either. To my shame and regret, I didn't follow up on that.

When I struggled to get in touch with him today, I headed over to his Flickr stream - photography was always his most prolific outlet - and found that whilst his account is still there, it's now labelled "In Memoriam".

Now he was a doggedly private person, whose online presence was kept to the minimum necessary to pursue his interests, so it was no surprise that Googling turned up no details of his demise. Only by searching probate records was I able to discover that he'd died in December 2022, just six months after our last email conversation. So I don't know the circumstances of his death, although I have ideas that I won't go into here.

What I will say is that there was a time, a quarter of a century ago, when I considered him a good friend, an outsider-ally in the corporate circus we briefly inhabited. Since we both left that place, he grew into a better writer of fiction than I will ever be, and an accomplished wildlife and astronomy photographer. He also had an excellent, dark sense of humour, though he had his share of demons too. Most of all, he was always a thoroughly decent bloke.

There was a fair degree of overlap in our musical Venn diagram - something else to bond over - but a key difference is that he considered The Rolling Stones to be the greatest band ever to have walked the planet. Now I don't mind them at all, but he knew their work inside out and revered them, in the same way that I laud The Jam or Gene. So it seems only appropriate to belatedly mark my friend's sad passing with something by Mick and the lads. From Let It Bleed, this is Monkey Man.

Rest in peace, Mark.

Songs for tomorrow: This Time Tomorrow

You know I've run out of blogging ideas when I start trying to resuscitate old series.

Completely unrelated to that, here's a new post for the Songs For Tomorrow theme.

From 1970's The Kinks versus Powerman and The Moneyground, Part One, this finds Mr Davies in familiar territory, mourning the loss of Albion, railing against apparent progress and feeling separated from normality. We've all been there, Ray.

This time tomorrow
What will we see
Fields full of houses
Endless rows of crowded streets
I don't know where I'm going
I don't want to see
I feel the world below me
Looking up at me

There's a nice bit of what I thought was rough and ready banjo in there too, though Wikipedia tells me it was, in fact, a National Steel resonator guitar. So what do I know?

There, that was alright, wasn't it?

In other news, I might have an original idea for a post sometime soon (but don't hold your breath). Until then, I'll just keep treading water with more of the same pointless ballsackery.

Flirt a little, maybe

A couple of weeks ago Rol posted Ash's excellent cover of Jump In The Line. At the time, it reminded me that Ash had previously covered Abba, of all people, and that the result was half worth a listen. I must blog about that some day soon, I thought. Well, today is that day (mainly because I have naff-all else to post).

Tim Wheeler and co's fairly straight playing of Does Your Mother Know? saw the light of day on the 2008 collector's edition of their remastered debut album 1977. Here it is.

And for comparison, the original, with a rare lead vocal for Bjorn.

Far from their best work but somehow this has still clocked nearly 52 million views on YouTube. Imagine.

It's like the Nineties never ended

First, Gene announce a 30th anniversary show (and, subsequently, a low-key warm-up show that seems to have sold out its pre-sale allocation in just two minutes*), then Pulp announce a new album. Called More, it will be released on the 6th of June, as far as I can tell. There's also a single, Spike Island, which sounds like this:

Apparently Jarvis used AI to create that video, specifically to animate and insert the "cardboard cut-out" figures that appear on the cover of Different Class into modern footage. As one of the captions points out, Jarv needs to get better with his AI prompts - I particularly "enjoyed" the four-armed bride in the closing scene.

Anyway, no AI was involved in making the track, at least. It is immediately recognisably Pulp, right down to a short spoken middle eight, and I think it might be a grower, if not a track to trouble the Champions League places of the Pulp Premier League.

Honestly, it's like the Nineties never ... etc.

* Please contact me in the unlikely event that you have a Gene warm-up gig ticket going spare... thanks.

What you like, not what you are like

It's an unbelievable 25 years since the cinema release of High Fidelity.

Directed by Stephen Frears and starring John Cusack as Rob, it remains an object lesson in how to adapt and change a successful book into an equally successful film. Nick Hornby didn't have a problem with the story relocating to Chicago, after all, so why should we? And it has a brilliant soundtrack (as a film set around a record shop should) and quotable dialogue (example left) by the mile.

Most of all, the film endures so well because of how it speaks to Generation X men. No, not Billy Idol. Blokes like you and me, born between 1965 and 1980 (Wikipedia confidently asserts), blokes now properly into their fifties, getting on a bit yet still waiting for that moment when they figure it out... it being life. Life is complicated. In the film, Rob excruciatingly re-examines his romantic history, trying to understand what went right and (mostly) wrong. No spoilers (not that you haven't seen it already) but he mostly works it all out, with a little help. Of course it is a fiction - if only real life were that simple.

Maybe it's because of that complexity that the quote on the left resonates - people are complicated but you can tell a lot from a person's likes and dislikes - the books, records and films that float their boat. That is why these things matter, at least to our generation. I wonder if the same will be true for Generation Z and later, now that books are electronic, records are all played through a phone's tinny, tiny speakers one track at a time ("What's an album?") and your choice of films is dictated by which streaming service you sign up to. But for us - for me - these things still matter.

You'll note, of course, that I haven't included Rob's next line of dialogue in the screenshot, in which he admits this assertion is "fucking shallow".

Anyway, we never get to find out, in the film, what Rob's Top 5 records are, though there is a clue: in his apartment, he has these records on the wall, hung in frames:

• Maggot Brain by Funkadelic
• Tonight's the Night by Neil Young
• Wild Honey by The Beach Boys
• Goo by Sonic Youth
• Double Nickels on the Dime by Minutemen

I don't know whose choices these were - Frears', Cusack's, Hornby's... some set designer's. Who knows? But it's an excuse for some songs, and hence a blog post - see what you think. High Fidelity is having a limited cinematic re-release to celebrate its birthday; why not go along? I think I might.

And the impossible question: what's your Top 5?

Public service book announcement

No, this is not an April Fool.

Slade House by David Mitchell (not that one, the other one) is currently only 99p if you have a Kindle or the Kindle app, but only for a limited time. It's bloody brilliant, you should definitely read it. It was my book of the year in 2016, when I lauded its "seductive prose and remorseless sense of the uncanny". So there.

And no, it's nothing to do with Noddy and Dave (or Cup-a-Soups).