I've got a pocket full of Pretty Green

I saw a real live Jam gig last week No, really, I did... sort of. Because whilst The Jam split up when I was still at school, bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler have reformed with a stand-in Weller in the form of Russell Hastings and a supplementary guitarist/keyboard player whose name escapes me. And they're touring as "From The Jam: Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler". Now some would tell you that The Jam without Paul Weller would be like Starsky without Hutch, Laurel without Hardy, Dr Who without the Tardis, or Wimbledon strawberries without cream... and that this partial reformation would be nothing more than a caricature, more akin to a tribute band than the real thing. Maybe, artistically, such people would have a point, and so it was that I went to the gig with more than a little trepidation, half-expecting my twenty-five year old musical memories to be soured by a half-hearted, half-baked rehash...

...except "From The Jam..." were bloody brilliant! Maybe the fact that the audience - mainly men in their late-30s and early-40s - had been waiting so long to hear these songs live, and knew every word, contributed to the amazing atmosphere. Maybe the small venue - capacity under a 1000, I'd estimate - played a part too. But most of all, I think, the fact that the songs have stood the test of time so well, and still sound fresh and vital was the key to the success of the night. And they didn't just trot out a "greatest hits" style set, there were old album tracks a-plenty (never thought I'd get to hear "Pretty Green" played live) and even a cover of The Who's "So Sad About Us" which The Jam had only ever done as a B-side back in the day (and which went down a storm with all the old Mods in the crowd). Russell is a skilled guitarist who recreated the crackling Weller riffs with ease and accuracy. Crucially, he didn't try to sound like Paul singing though, he just sang them as himself, but with all the intensity and passion the original recordings deserve. I think Bruce and Rick made a smart choice in recruiting someone who is clearly a fan, rather than a sound-alike, because when Russell was singing, he looked like he meant it. And speaking of Bruce and Rick, it was amazing to see them play live. Bruce is as dexterous a bassist as I have seen at such close quarters, and still has a lot of energy on stage (though his mid-riff leaps into the air were a little lower than in his heyday), whilst Rick's drumming was mind-boggling at times - quite how he could drum so quickly and powerfully with apparently so little effort (seeming to barely touch each drum-skin and cymbal) was beyond me.

I see that The Police have also reformed for a summer of gigs - I'll be going to see them if I can get tickets. Of course, Sting is on board for this, so they will only be playing enormo-domes, not the sort of intimate venue I saw The Jam in. Should still be a good night though. What worries me ever so slightly is that both reformed acts are talking about new material! Maybe The Police will be able to pull this off, with Sting on-board and if they can refrain from arguing long enough, but new Jam material without Weller to pen the bulk of the songs? I have more than a little trepidation about this... but at the same time, this old closet Mod hopes he is wrong.

"From The Jam..." are coming back here in December, and I'll be going again. I would recommend you do the same if you get the chance. For details of how and where that chance awaits you, including autumn/winter tour dates, take a sneaky peek here.

Sit down Mourinho!

Chelsea FC manager Jose Mourinho is clearly a talented guy, and good at what he does. Okay, many will say that Chelsea have bought success through their (dodgy) Russian billionaire owner, Roman Abramovich. But it takes skill and shrewd management to mould any group of players, let alone precocious world-class players, into a team, and Jose has done that. Certainly it was more than his predecessor, Claudio Ranieri, another talented football manager, could achieve. Success has followed: Premiership titles, the League Cup, and more, probably.

All of which makes it even more disappointing that when things don't go right for the self-proclaimed "chosen one" of European football, rather than be gracious about it and accept the slings and arrows with the same good grace that he accepts the plaudits, Jose starts carping about anything and everything. Witness last night's "we were the better team" rant after Chelsea's exit to a visibly superior Liverpool team in the second leg of their Champions' League semi-final. Clearly not, because if they were better Jose, you blinkered fool, it would be Chelsea that were in the final, not The Reds of Anfield.

So sit down, Mourinho, and pipe down... it's time the chosen one learnt to be a good loser.

The carbon debate - irrelevant?

Much has been written about the carbon debate, specifically the way that man's carbon dioxide emissions are either contributing, or not contributing to, global warming, depending on which group of experts you choose to listen too. Famously in recent years, Al Gore's excellent documentary An Inconvenient Truth has left viewers in little doubt as to the inexorable effect our modern industrial lifestyle is having on CO₂ levels, and how that is throwing the planet's delicate environmental balance out of sync, with devastating physical and social implications. Equally, Channel 4's recent Great Global Warming Swindle paints a very different picture, suggesting (with evidence every bit as compelling as Mr Gore's) that rising CO₂ levels are a consequence of global warming, rather than the cause, illustrating this with a Goresque graph showing an 80 year lag from temperature rise to carbon dioxide increase.

I'm not an environmental scientist. I haven't studied meteorology since S-level Geography at school. I don't know whose graphs to believe, Al Gore's or Channel 4's. Whatever the cause though, there's no denying that global warming is happening and redefining the landscape at an alarming rate - just recently I read how maps of Greenland need to be redrawn. Of course on the same day, and in the same paper, there was an article on how corporations are hijacking global warming for commercial gain which, in its own way, is almost as alarming.

What I do know is this: whether carbon dioxide is a cause or side-effect of global warming is, in a way, irrelevant. Because even if it doesn't cause the problem, why would anyone want to pollute any more than they could help? Surely it is common sense, both ethically and economically, to cut down on consumption, re-use materials and recycle whenever possible anyway, regardless of any carbon debate motives for doing so? One undisputed fact from Gore's documentary is that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are going off the chart, higher than any level discernible from any ice core samples for hundreds of thousands of years. So why should anyone in their right mind want to make it even worse, regardless of their view on the relationship between carbon emissions and global warming? Other than to justify, to themselves at least, that it's okay to jump in their gas-guzzling 4x4 (which, incidentally, only ever goes off-road if they park on the pavement, but don't get me started on that) and drive past the bus-stop on their way to the airport for their fourth overseas holiday of the year...

And just think of the air quality! Burning less fossil fuels through greener practices, and switching to cleaner renewable sources of energy, surely means less pollution... hence cleaner air for us all to enjoy. Makes sense, doesn't it?

So... the carbon debate. I leave that decision to your own conscience. But living a greener, more environmentally friendly life is surely a must, whichever side of the fence you come down on. I've mentioned them before, and I'll mention them again no doubt, but for advice and guidance on ways that you can do your bit, take a peek at CRed.

Do more with less

In the week that it was revealed an employee of Barclays earned £22m last year, I offer this simply told tale, forwarded on to me by a quite extraordinary friend.

The industrialist was horrified to find the fisherman lying beside his boat, smoking a pipe.

"Why aren't you fishing?" said the industrialist.

"Because I have caught enough fish for the day," the fisherman replied.

"Why don't you catch some more?"

"What would I do with them?"

"Earn more money. Then you could have a motor fixed to your boat and go into deeper waters and catch more fish. That would bring you money to buy nylon nets, so more fish, more money. Soon you would have enough to buy two boats, even a fleet of boats. Then you could be rich like me."

"What would I do then?"

"Then you could sit back and enjoy life."

"What do you think I'm doing now?"

By Gorge!

This morning, a local radio station announced that George Michael will be playing a gig at a local sports ground in the summer. And that station - let's call it Radio Bland - then offered listeners the chance to win tickets: all they had to do to be in with a chance was text the word "George" to the station. So far, so simple... except that two songs later, the inane breakfast DJ had to spell out that George is spelt G-E-O-R-G-E as they had been swamped by listeners texting in "Gorge"... Oh how I wish I was making this up.

Top, top gear...

I hope you saw Top Gear tonight - Billie Piper was the "star in a reasonably priced car". Now I haven't seen her interviewed before, so I was more than pleasantly surprised. Not only did she come across beautifully (so well spoken, and so far removed from the vowel-mangling character she portrayed in Doctor Who), she seemed intelligent, funny and engaging. Top gear? Top girl!

Blood moon and enlightenment

Did anyone else see the lunar eclipse last night? Please say it wasn't just me standing outside freezing my proverbials off to watch the Moon turn red. In case you're wondering what causes this phenomenon, the picture to the left kind of explains it - the Moon falls into the Earth's shadow, and is only lit by the frequencies of light that can skip through the edge of the Earth's atmosphere. Those frequencies are at the red end of the spectrum, so the Moon takes on a reddish-orange hue, as can be seen in the photo to the right. Well I think that's right - it sounds plausible anyway. It might not have quite the wow factor of a solar eclipse but it was pretty impressive nonetheless, and certainly worth standing out in the cold for. Some of the people I was stood watching with remarked that you could quite understand why people in days gone by worshipped moons and stars, and how they would view this as a sign of an angry god. How they chuckled at this, and patted themselves on the back for being so enlightened. Sure, worshipping celestial bodies is patently ridiculous... but no-one thought to ask why it is any more ridiculous than worshipping an omnipotent, omnipresent being who apparently created the world and everything in it in six days? Who's enlightened now?

More on Saturn 3...

Just a couple of days ago, I rambled for a bit about the relative merits of Saturn 3, a British science fiction film made in 1980, starring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel. I even went so far as to speculate that if it were remade with modern effects and a more appropriate cast it would be a huge hit, rather than the flop it turned out to be all those years ago.

Imagine my surprise, then, to learn that a remake actually is being discussed, with director James Cameron at the helm. There's even talk of the Governator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, providing the voice of Hector, the robot with more than a few screws loose. This is all quite promising - I enjoyed Cameron's Aliens (though I preferred the Ridley Scott-directed original) and I like all three Terminator films for wildly different reasons (before you write in, I know Cameron only directed the first two). I worry though that the dark themes at the heart of the original Saturn 3 - insecure and unrequited love, getting old, mental illness, loss and isolation - will not be preserved. All the more reason to seek out the original before it gets buried beneath the Hollywood behemoth - you can find it here.

Saturn 3

Saturn 3 was a British science fiction film made in 1980 in a flagrant attempt to jump on the Star Wars/Alien bandwagon. Despite its Britishness (low budget, poor effects) it boasted three bona-fide Hollywood stars in the shape of Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel. Here are some other facts you might not know about Saturn 3:

• At the time it was the only place you could get a glimpse of Farrah Fawcett naked, even if only for a second (this was long before career desperation brought about ill-advised Playboy shoots).
• The film's screenplay was written by a certain Martin Amis, later to find fame as a serious novelist and author of The Rachel Papers, London Fields and more. Whether Steve Gallacher, author of the film tie-in book of Saturn 3, is a nom de plume of Mr Amis, who knows?
• Inexplicably, Harvey Keitel's dialogue is dubbed by someone called Roy Dotrice.

So why am I writing about such an obscure film? Because it belongs to a select band of science fiction films that have been criminally overlooked (see also Logan's Run, Westworld, Capricorn One, Silent Running and, more recently, Event Horizon). Just because a "sci-fi" film has bad special effects (and occasionally laughable dialogue, in the case of Saturn 3) doesn't mean it's a bad film. Imagine "3" being reshot, let's say by a somehow-resurrected Stanley Kubrick, with decent CGI effects instead of wobbly models made out of leftover Airfix. Now let's cast Pierce Brosnan as our ageing hero, Keira Knightley as his much younger love interest and, let's say, Clive Owen as the menacing interloper with a psychotic giant cyborg for a friend. Find some decent dialogue from somewhere instead of the Amis corn, submit to the inevitable tie-in PlayStation game and you've got a blockbuster... but none of that is going to happen, so instead look at the late-night listings of the more obscure satellite and Freeview channels, or in the bargain bins of your friendly neighbourhood DVD store. If you stumble across Saturn 3 in either of those places, watch it, you're in for 88 minutes or so of interesting film.

And even if you don't like it, you get to see a young Farrah Fawcett with her top off...

The danger of whim

There's an old saying: act in haste, repent at leisure. As you might have guessed from the fact that it has become an "old saying" there is a lot of truth in those simple words. Because, my friend, whims can be dangerous, oh yes.

You see, it doesn't matter how good an idea seemed at the time, or how good your intentions were, or how much you saw things going differently in your head. The tragedy is that, more often that not, actions carried out on a whim, particularly when that whim occurs late at night and after way too many beers, by which time the moral compass is utterly demagnetised and the foot has come off your mental brake, it's those actions that you later desperately wish you could undo. Of course you cannot and, like me, you are left with no choice but to face up to the consequences, however unpleasant.

Those of you who have read this blog before might be remembering some posts from this time last year and hypothesising that this "whims are bad" rant is somehow related to Valentine's day. Well you might think that - I couldn't possibly comment.