New to NA: KONGOS

"Is it possible that we two, you and I, have grown so old and so inflexible that we have outlived our usefulness?"

So says Spock to Kirk, at the tail-end of Star Trek VI. I would say the same thing, were it not to imply a degree of flexibility and usefulness in the first place. Because I am basically a parochial musical dinosaur who likes what he likes and dismisses anything else, often contemptuously.

But I try, sometimes. Really, I do.

Take today's track - it's hardly new, since it was released in 2012, but it's new to me, courtesy of Amusements Minor's Spotify playlist. KONGOS (their capitalisation) are four brothers from South Africa, relocated to Texas. Come With Me Now remains their biggest hit, and at various times has been picked up for commercial use by WWE, Strongbow, The Grand Tour, The Expendables 3 and, bizarrely, as the theme music for the Australian version of I'm A Celebrity ... but don't hold that against it. It's been everywhere, basically, for a decade, but is still somehow new to me.

Speaking of me... I think the song as a whole is alright. But the middle eight, when it slows down and turns from a bluegrass stomper to something altogether more refined, well I really rather like that. It reminds me of A-ha, that middle eight (and in a good way, before you start).

Anyway, here it is.

It's a big Internet but still a small world

I had a message from my brother a couple of days ago. Nothing unusual there, you might think, except that we are seldom in touch, not for any personal reasons but geographical. He's lived just about as far away as you can get for the last sixteen years, during which time I've only seen him two or three times. Add in the complication of the diametrically opposed time zones and regular communication, over time, just fell into the too-hard pile. So it was a nice surprise to get a message, even if it was just one line: "This wasn't you was it?" A hyperlink was attached.

Turns out my brother had, for reasons only known to himself, been Googling a slightly obscure and largely forgotten short film from the 1970s. Incredibly, the thumbnail for one of the search results showed a grainy black and white photograph of a now-defunct cinema he remembered from his youth, literally half a world away. What a coincidence, eh? So that was, inevitably, the link he clicked on to read about the film.

The more he read, the more uncannily echoic of his own cinema-going experience the article became, to the point that he happened to say (presumably to his missus) "This could have been written by my brother." Lo and behold, when he got to bottom of the article, there was my forename. Too much of a coincidence, he figured ... and hence the message.

You've already guessed from the fact that I've bothered to string out this tiny tale into another blog post that, of course, it was me. This was the article he read, something I wrote seven and a half years ago about The Waterloo Bridge Handicap and long-forgotten cinemas (... and a girl called Denise). That post later got republished by none other than Andrew Collins on his short-lived but much-liked blog Digging your Screen. Now, all these years later, it and a series of small coincidences were enough to prove that, although the Internet is a vast and sometimes horrible place, underneath it all there is still a small world.

Better finish with a song, I suppose. My brother was a big fan of Adam Ant in his younger day, so here's a very early track from him, Deutscher Girls, set to footage from Derek Jarman's 1978 film Jubilee (which included both Adam and this song). Adam is accompanied here by a pre-fame iteration of the Ants, many of whom went on to back Annabella Lwin in Bow Wow Wow when Adam put a white stripe on his nose and recruited a new guitarist, two drummers and a much more tribal sound for the Antmusic that was to sweep the nation's playgrounds.

And yes, I did choose the Jubilee clip for the embed to link all this nonsense back to the ideas of film and cinema-going - these posts don't (always) just throw themselves together, you know?

It's hard to stay positive

I'm with Greta. The COP summit really is all "blah, blah, blah". Here are two consecutive BBC news headlines, as presented to me this morning in my RSS feed reader of choice, with annotations by me:

I've said it before but, sadly, I still think the only way we are going to avoid a global climate crisis is if people who are already rich and powerful can somehow make themselves richer and more powerful by doing it. I take a cold crumb of comfort from the fact that their money will be worthless when there's no food, drinking water or habitable land left. Sorry (not sorry), dysthymia has hoved into view once more. Happy Christmas!

I'm not the biggest Ash fan in the world but since we should all prepare to get very hot indeed, this seemed appropriate.

Monday long song: You Took

We're into December, it's cold and the nights are drawing in. I really should start work on my That Was The Year That Was review of 2023, but I'm not sure I have enough to make it worthwhile. So instead here's a long song for your Monday, from Aussie outfit The Church's second album, The Blurred Crusade, all the way back from 1982. According to Wikipedia, this was about the time the band left their New Wave roots behind and expanded into "neo-psychedelia". Yes, really.

Whatever the genre description, Crusade remains a decent album, even if it has dated slightly. The first 90 seconds of this could be knocked up in Garageband in about, ooh, 90 seconds these days, I reckon. But that's not the point, is it?

Anyway, the song.

Winter

According to the Met Office and their meteorological calendar, today is the first day of winter. You might have other definitions and fair enough, but I need no other excuse for this, a live performance from the fourth best band in Hull, exactly 37 years and one week ago. I Smell Winter was the B-side to Think For A Minute, if memory serves.

Racking up the years

"I'm old, not obsolete," opined Arnold, in the barrel-scraping retread that was 2015's Terminator Genisys. Much like CDs, these days. Remember when they were the future, all over Tomorrow's World, with their irridescent digital promise to tempt us all into rebuying our record collections? Long time ago, isn't it?

When I was at university as an undergraduate, an impossible number of years ago, I was a frequent visitor to the Record Library. It was a little room on the ground floor level of the main campus library, and was home to rack upon rack of vinyl and a small, but growing, number of new-fangled and impossibly exciting CDs. I didn't have a record player in my student hovel, but I borrowed CDs from the library most weeks and taped them onto whatever spare TDKs I had at the time. It didn't matter that the cassette recorder I was doing the copying on was, frankly, pretty rubbish - taping a CD was still better than taping the alternative.

Nearly 25 years after I left, I returned to that same university to work. Since staff have full access to the campus library, I also returned to the Record Library, which had grown somewhat, but also changed - most of the vinyl was gone, and the number of CDs had multiplied 50-fold, perhaps even 100-fold. And although everything is online these days, streamable or downloadable or Spotifyable or YouTubable, I would occasionally borrow a handful of CDs for old times' sake. I took great delight in finding and reborrowing some CDs I had first borrowed in the early 90s - there was a circularity to that that I greatly enjoyed.

Covid and lockdown meant working from home, of course. I'm still only in the office two or sometimes three days a week now - a change has been wrought that will be hard to go back from. But let's not digress. A month or two ago I went back to the library to get a CD, now more than 30 years after my first visit there. And the Record Library was ... gone.

Not gone gone, as I had first thought. But moved, to the lowest basement level, and from regular shelving to these space-efficient rolling racks...

There was no-one around, no-one near the racks. They felt decidedly untouched. CDs are the past, and that makes me very sad. Still, they had a longer useful life than DVDs - you can't seem to give those away these days. Damn you Netflix, Disney+ and all the rest. But I loved CDs. Still love them. And have got thousands of the damn things. And no, Mrs Amusements, I will not part with them - they are a collection, after all.

Of course the other feeling these rolling racks triggered was a Proustian rush of recalling the department store I worked in as a teenager. As I may have mentioned before, I had a Saturday job in the lighting department of a well-known but now defunct high street store that was big enough to have an enormous, windowless stock room on its top floor. Most of the stock was housed in giant rolling racks that made the ones in the photograph above look puny. They were easily big enough to hide in, let's put it that way, and so were a great place to while away the time on a slow Saturday afternoon. Of course most stores these days don't have stock rooms in the same way - just-in-time ordering and better point-of-sale racking mean the shop floor is essentially the stock room now. "Just going to look for it upstairs" has, like CDs, become a thing of the past. That makes me sad too, but then of course I'm an old white guy and, as Mabel says in the wonderful Only Murders In The Building, "Old white guys are only afraid of colon cancer and societal change."

At this point, I was going to embed Yesterday's Men by Madness, but I've unsurprisingly featured that before, so here's something different, in the shape of When You're Old And Lonely by The Magnetic Fields, which gets away with its simplicity and lack of musical progression by being both short and (bitter)sweet.

When you're old and lonely you will wish you'd married me
I could build a fire for you and bring you cakes and tea
When you're cold and hungry I'll be waiting by the phone
You can call me up and tell me how you're all alone, all alone
When you're old and lonely and the rush of life is past
Days go by too slowly and the years go by too fast
When your golden loneliness is heavier than stone
You can call me up and say "My God, I'm all alone, all alone."

To me...

I'll save you squinting to read the horizontal axis - this is a graph of the number of blog posts I've written every month for the last two years, prior to this one. The dotted red line makes the implicit trend explicit. I know it's just a count, it's got nothing to do with quality or page views (though both of those trend lines would follow a similar trajectory). Maybe I've just run out of words.

Take the rest of this post, for example. It starts with seeing this on Instagram the other day...

View this post on Instagram

Which is one of those jokes that, if you have to explain it, stops being funny.

And then I thought, this could lead into a post about how U2 aren't all bad, actually (come back, Rol). Prone to pomposity, yes, effects-pedal-dependent, maybe, and so far over the shark even Quint couldn't get them, certainly. But there were some good songs there too, back in the day. Except ... I don't have the words, effort or energy required to write that post any more, it seems.

Bollocks to it. Here's a song.

See, that was alright, wasn't it? And if it was by anyone else, we'd all be enthusing. Although seeing Bonio in his big glasses inevitably brings this little snippet to mind:

"Are those your mother's cataract glasses?" Brilliant. And that's the post. More, by which I probably mean less, some other time.

And oh, what a storm

Bradford were a late-80s indie five-piece from, ironically, Blackburn. Annointed by SPM, they opened for the quiffed one at his first post-Smiths live performance (the Wolverhampton Civic Hall gig) and were rapidly signed to Stephen Street's nascent Foundation label. Their first single predated that though, with Skin Storm being released in 1988 on the Village Records label; Wikipedia tells me that it was first independently financed recording to be released on CD, and who am I to argue? Anyway, for all singer Ian Hodgson's obvious vocal Moz tendencies, here it's really guitarist Ewan Butler's even more obvious Marr-isms that stand out, especially in the chorus. Or maybe they're Street-isms? Anyway, see what you think:

Bradford are on Bandcamp, where you can listen to the expanded, remastered version of album Thirty Years Of Shouting Quietly. It's alright, but Skin Storm remains the best track on it, still.

Of course, SPM loved them so much he had a crack at covering Skin Storm, and put his version on the B-side of Pregnant For The Last Time. Or maybe he'd just run out of new song ideas, in the relative doldrum of his Nevin years. Stop reading here if you've had enough of him.

See, for me that has a better vocal but an inferior band performance. Your mileage may vary. Anyway, there'll be some more old nonsense from me some other time, no doubt. Until then...

I'm on fire

Had forgotten how much I like this and the album from whence it comes, Silent Alarm. I can thank Jo Whiley for playing it on t'radio t'other night, and reminding me just how good Bloc Party and Banquet are. Feels like a good tune for Bonfire Night too, and not just for the closing lyrics... well, it was either this or something by Catherine Wheel, a-ha ha ha... *

* Makes mental note to post Catherine Wheel track next year. Or maybe that Kasabian track about being on fire.

Turning Japanese

Duolingo is a mighty popular app. On the Google Play Store it has been downloaded over 100 million times. In the Apple realm, it is the #2 app in their Education category. Everyone wants to learn a new language, it seems, (and / or please a green owl) and I am no exception.

Background: I studied French at school. Although I stopped that 37 years ago, I got a AA at O-level, was pretty good at it, and have retained enough to make trips to France comfortable. I also studied Russian at school, which was harder, and I haven't retained much of that - I can ask "Where is Red Square?" but I probably wouldn't understand the answer. Anyway, the bottom line is that I haven't tried to learn a language since the mid Eighties.

So to Duolingo, where I am trying to learn Japanese. God, it's hard. Partly it's because there seem to be three character sets - Hiragana (over 100 characters or character combinations), Katakana (another 100+) and Kanji (45 characters so far and apparently more to come in later lessons). It all makes Russian's 33-letter alphabet seem a bit feeble.

Then there's getting your head around word order. To say I'm going to have coffee with my brother next week you essentially say Next week my brother with coffee going to have I am... which takes some getting used to. At least this ordering seems pretty consistent, so far at least.

Then there's the accent. Learning languages as a kid, I adopted an appropriate accent very easily. As a middle-aged fossil in the making, who hasn't used this part of his brain for a long time, any time I try to say anything in any language other than French or Russian, I end up sounding like I am deliberately trying to do a comedy foreign stereotype. And I'm not, I promise.

Age is a factor in other ways too. When you're sixteen, your brain is a lightning rod, ready to take input and turn it into neural connections as easy as pie. The teen brain is a sponge, basically, and it can absorb a hell of a lot of water. When you're fossilising, things are a bit different. The brain can still absorb but it's more like a damp tea towel than a sponge. Those neural connections have to be hammered into place. Learning just isn't as easy as it used to be.

I'm trying though, I really am. I'm 21 weeks into a daily Duolingo streak, and I can now say more in Japanese than I can remember in Russian. Whether anybody would understand me in downtown Tokyo remains to be seen, and whether I'll ever get to go back to Japan to try a few phrases is equally unknown. Let's hope so though, that I get to go back at least - Tokyo remains the most other-wordly place I've ever been.

So, here's some Japanese music. Homecomings are an indie-ish four-piece that met and formed at university in Kyoto. This song's title translates as Hurts. I've no idea what it's about (I haven't got to the Duolingo unit on deciphering indie lyrics yet) but the video has helpful subtitles that might ... oh, they're in Japanese...

And as the title of this post suggests, I did consider writing about The Vapors for the 800th time. But instead, here's Kirsten Dunst's cover of their most famous song. Yes, really.

What did you make of that? To be fair, Akihabara Majokko Princess was more of a video art installation from director McG than a serious foray into 80s power-pop from Kirsten. Whatever, the video was included in the 2009 "Pop Life" exhibition at the Tate Modern. Akihabara, by the way, is a frankly dizzying shopping district in Tokyo, particularly heavy on electronics and tech... although when I was there I bought a tiny paper diary. Make of that what you will.