From around mid-November my radio-dial on my car/home stereo/non fruit-based hand-held internet device of choice remains firmly switched to anything but commercial radio.
As anyone will know Christmas advertising is pretty much fair-game from September onwards when the kids go back to school (though I heard my first Christmas 2018 advert back in January - a saving scheme for Christmas), but it's from mid-November that the war of attrition really starts.
You see, it used to be A Thing, for UK music acts of a certain era to release a Christmas song to try and reach that all-important Festive No 1 slot. It still happens from time to time, but here are a few of the more well known ones:
Merry Christmas Everyone - Shakin' Stevens (how someone doing a fifties rockabilly act at the height of the Punk movement had any hits is a mystery)
Merry Xmas Everyone - Slade. The ultimate in Glam Rock and bad spelling. This one would be quite good if it wasn't on in Every Single Place You Go
Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time - Paul McCartney. Some of you may be aware that in
James Joyce's book Ulysses he describes the seven levels of hell. Well listening to this piece of bubblegum pap is worse than any of them.
Merry Christmas (War Is Over) - John Lennon. Not content with Macca trying to burn in effergy any last vestige of credit The Beatles had by releasing his above mentioned Christmas missive Lennon brought out this with the annoying children's chorus at the end
Stay - East 17. A song about a friend dying. Doesn't mention Christmas once, but has some Christmassy bells
A Spaceman Came Travelling (At Christmas) - Chris DeBurgh - look, Chris, we all knew what the song was about - there was no need to add "at Christmas time at the end" other than to buy that Lady in red a new dress
Can You Stop The Cavalry - Jona Lewie. In Lewie's defence this was never intended as a Christmas single and is about a bloke fighting in a war and wishing he was home. The monotonous, repetitive tone makes me want to stick explosives in my ears and light the fuse
And then there is Fairytale Of New York
Fairytale stands alone as a piece of brilliance shining in a dark December night. A song written by Irish wildboys and rockers The Pogues and featuring the vocal talents of the late, great Kirsty MacColl it's a song about two people living in the worst of conditions, coming to New York and getting lost - it's first line "It was Christmas eve babe/in the drunk-tank" tells you exactly where it's going. It should be miserable, but it isn't. Somehow the music and the lyrics transports you....
...but it's a song that's under threat.
In the middle of the song, written in the 1980s, the couple resort to name-calling singing:
You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last
cheerful stuff, isn't it? And yet it's gone to the collective hearts of the nation and across the country you will hear people singing along
But in recent years that line about the cheap-lousy tinned sausage has caused controversy and there have been calls to ban the song because of the offence it could cause to the LGBTQ community. As far as we know no actual offence has been caused. Shane MacGowan, speaking from behind dark sunglasses and broken teeth, has declared that the line is Irish slang for something else and besides the characters in the story are clearly not nice people and the views and language of the song should reflect that.
But is it ok?
I've always argued that it is - because really if you ban this line of the song then you'd also have to ban most blues songs, any songs that objectify women. Fairytale is not the only song under threat this year as some stations have refused to play Baby It's Cold Outside in the aftermath of the #metoo movement...
Very few people seem horrified by the line "you're an old slut on junk" (although both were bleeped out a few years ago) - but part of me does wonder if I would feel the same if a) I wasn't such a big Kirsty MacColl fan and b) if it was the "n" word or another minority insult
Sometimes I think there's too much political correctness, too many people worrying that group a, b or c might possibly be offended or even actively looking to be offended...
Anyway, here's the song - happy Christmas y'all
Monday 10 December 2018
Tuesday 26 June 2018
Three Coins In The Fountain
There are only so many days of the week that you can stand in the local book/stationary shop looking at the motorbike magazines before they start to think you're casing the joint and ask you to either buy something or leave.
This, though, is the problem of lunchtime whilst at work: particularly if you want to save a fortune by bringing your own food: because you can't go and eat it anywhere that sells their own food and the benches in the shopping centres are designed to be just the right side of uncomfortable so as to stop people sitting on them for long and force them back into the shops.
So inevitably you end up eating your sandwiches (or whatever you brought in your Tupperware container today) and mooching between shops, looking at things you have no interest in (motorbike magazines being a prime example) and perusing the shelves of CDs in the hope of finding that rare imprint of Blind Wombat Jones's rare imported second album and coming out having somehow bought the thing that was playing on the tannoy when you went in.
My favourite record store posed exactly this problem: it was on the one hand a veritable Aladdin's cave of treasures and on the other a very dangerous cash black hole where money intended for replacing the fridge would somehow disappear.
I actually no longer work near to this particular shop (where I tell Herself that I am regularly marched into the shop by the assistant and forcibly made to buy something) but always enjoy going back. I've made several wonderful discoveries there over the years...but then a few years ago the chain of shops ran into financial difficulties (because no one was buying music anymore in physical form) and was threatened with closure. Somehow, with a change of name and corporate identity, it was able to continue and with the resurgence of interest in vinyl was actually looking very good for the future...
...until around Christmas time it closed again, with practically no warning, and seemed to be gone for good.
This was sad in many ways: largely, of course, for the assistants who would now need new jobs. For me also it was the end of an era and I found myself looking at my last two purchases there (U2: Songs Of Experience and Bjork: Loopy Bonkers (her album is actually called Utopia - but I think my title is more fitting)) and wondering if I could have done better.
So I'm sure you can imagine that it was with a certain bounce in my step that I dashed out of the house and towards my car when I heard that it had reopened again. I say dashed, but at my age and state of mind it was more a leisurely stroll; but you get the idea.
I don't know how car parks work in the rest of the world but in England they can be anything from an abandoned patch of land that is rented out to permit holders with security being that if you hide your belonging well enough the local kids might not break your windows to multi-storey concrete edifices that were designed so that the ramps were just tight enough to scrape the paint off the sides of anything bigger than a mini metro.
There are also, generally speaking, two ways of paying when on site: firstly there is the barrier car-park where, as you go in, you get a ticket time-stamped with your arrival that you pay for when you return, thus charging you only for the time you actually stay. This is my favourite type and is generally speaking a multi-storey park.
Secondly there is the "pay-on-arrival" type where you have to find a space, go to the little ticket machine and then take a guess at how long you think you are going to be so that you don't end up paying too much. It was to this type of car-park that I was going on this day.
I arrived, parked up and went to the ticket machine: trying to figure out the tariffs. 50p for 1/2 hour - well that was clearly not going to be good enough to walk-past that compilation album three times saying "you don't need it" quietly before finally caving in. £1 for an hour: well, I would probably be back within an hour: I don't like hanging around too long, but just in case I decided to pay £1.50 for 90 minutes. Hardly going to break the bank.
And so I dutifully put 50p into the slot.
Nothing happened. No light flashing, no bleep of acknowledgement. Not even a clunk of the mechanism as my hard earned cash was swallowed. And so I pressed the coin-return button
And out popped a £1 coin.
Blimey Charlie, I thought, not quite comprehending. I stood there and thought for a second and eventually decided that maybe this was the reason my initial coin hadn't succeeded: because of a blockage somewhere. And so I scrambled around in my wallet for another 50p coin
And this time I got a £2 coin back.
And at this point a person with less scruples with me would have continued to see how ahead of the game they could get. I, however, meekly went and found another machine.
And so I sashayed forward (I didn't sashay, obviously; only people in Fred Astaire films actually sashay) and duly spent far more money than I should have in the newly-opened shop (an action which I defended as showing Support To A Struggling Venture)
Coming back to the car later I still felt bad about the money I'd somehow made at the car park. There had, after all, been a parking attendant checking for tickets in windows at another part of the area and I could have offered it to him.
And so I did the only decent thing I could think of: I gave the £2 coin to a homeless person and wished him a good day.
This, though, is the problem of lunchtime whilst at work: particularly if you want to save a fortune by bringing your own food: because you can't go and eat it anywhere that sells their own food and the benches in the shopping centres are designed to be just the right side of uncomfortable so as to stop people sitting on them for long and force them back into the shops.
So inevitably you end up eating your sandwiches (or whatever you brought in your Tupperware container today) and mooching between shops, looking at things you have no interest in (motorbike magazines being a prime example) and perusing the shelves of CDs in the hope of finding that rare imprint of Blind Wombat Jones's rare imported second album and coming out having somehow bought the thing that was playing on the tannoy when you went in.
My favourite record store posed exactly this problem: it was on the one hand a veritable Aladdin's cave of treasures and on the other a very dangerous cash black hole where money intended for replacing the fridge would somehow disappear.
I actually no longer work near to this particular shop (where I tell Herself that I am regularly marched into the shop by the assistant and forcibly made to buy something) but always enjoy going back. I've made several wonderful discoveries there over the years...but then a few years ago the chain of shops ran into financial difficulties (because no one was buying music anymore in physical form) and was threatened with closure. Somehow, with a change of name and corporate identity, it was able to continue and with the resurgence of interest in vinyl was actually looking very good for the future...
...until around Christmas time it closed again, with practically no warning, and seemed to be gone for good.
This was sad in many ways: largely, of course, for the assistants who would now need new jobs. For me also it was the end of an era and I found myself looking at my last two purchases there (U2: Songs Of Experience and Bjork: Loopy Bonkers (her album is actually called Utopia - but I think my title is more fitting)) and wondering if I could have done better.
So I'm sure you can imagine that it was with a certain bounce in my step that I dashed out of the house and towards my car when I heard that it had reopened again. I say dashed, but at my age and state of mind it was more a leisurely stroll; but you get the idea.
I don't know how car parks work in the rest of the world but in England they can be anything from an abandoned patch of land that is rented out to permit holders with security being that if you hide your belonging well enough the local kids might not break your windows to multi-storey concrete edifices that were designed so that the ramps were just tight enough to scrape the paint off the sides of anything bigger than a mini metro.
There are also, generally speaking, two ways of paying when on site: firstly there is the barrier car-park where, as you go in, you get a ticket time-stamped with your arrival that you pay for when you return, thus charging you only for the time you actually stay. This is my favourite type and is generally speaking a multi-storey park.
Secondly there is the "pay-on-arrival" type where you have to find a space, go to the little ticket machine and then take a guess at how long you think you are going to be so that you don't end up paying too much. It was to this type of car-park that I was going on this day.
I arrived, parked up and went to the ticket machine: trying to figure out the tariffs. 50p for 1/2 hour - well that was clearly not going to be good enough to walk-past that compilation album three times saying "you don't need it" quietly before finally caving in. £1 for an hour: well, I would probably be back within an hour: I don't like hanging around too long, but just in case I decided to pay £1.50 for 90 minutes. Hardly going to break the bank.
And so I dutifully put 50p into the slot.
Nothing happened. No light flashing, no bleep of acknowledgement. Not even a clunk of the mechanism as my hard earned cash was swallowed. And so I pressed the coin-return button
And out popped a £1 coin.
Blimey Charlie, I thought, not quite comprehending. I stood there and thought for a second and eventually decided that maybe this was the reason my initial coin hadn't succeeded: because of a blockage somewhere. And so I scrambled around in my wallet for another 50p coin
And this time I got a £2 coin back.
And at this point a person with less scruples with me would have continued to see how ahead of the game they could get. I, however, meekly went and found another machine.
And so I sashayed forward (I didn't sashay, obviously; only people in Fred Astaire films actually sashay) and duly spent far more money than I should have in the newly-opened shop (an action which I defended as showing Support To A Struggling Venture)
Coming back to the car later I still felt bad about the money I'd somehow made at the car park. There had, after all, been a parking attendant checking for tickets in windows at another part of the area and I could have offered it to him.
And so I did the only decent thing I could think of: I gave the £2 coin to a homeless person and wished him a good day.
Monday 12 March 2018
Take Me To Church
I don't sing hymns in church. Haven't done for nearly 20 years.
Not that the requirement to do so comes up very often - I tend to avoid going through the door at all in case the Heathen Alert goes off and I spontaneously combust.
There are, generally speaking only three times I ever go to church:
1) Christening for the child of a friend/relative
2) Marriage of a friend/relative
3) Funeral of a friend/relative
Of course: any of these can happen in any order, but in general, and as you get older, you start to get slightly more of what lies behind door number three
The last time I sang in church was actually at the funeral of my Nan, nearly 18 years ago. Although generally speaking I have concerns around partaking in ceremonies that I don't believe in (I don't, for instance, believe that you should have a child christened just because it is a Nice And Expected Thing To Do, nor should you get married in a church because it's Traditional: only do either of the above if you are actually religious and go regularly) - my actual reason for stopping was more straightforward: I can't sing them properly.
The pitch is just wrong for my voice - I either have to come in very low, or slightly too high: and either way it sounds like I'm making fun of the service, which I'm really not (at my Nan's funeral I stopped because I was unintentionally making my brother laugh)
I say this because last Friday I went to a funeral - a friend of my parents that they had jointly known for 50 years and whose kids we had grown up knowing - and of course I didn't sing. The service itself was pleasant as it goes, but it reaffirmed my own feeling that instead of some stranger standing up and saying "I never got to meet..." I need to write out something to be said when I pop my clogs (hopefully in the very far away and distant future)
I managed to make it through an entire half-an-hour without anyone pointing at me and yelling "unbeliever!" and we moved on to the wake where it soon became clear that neither of her kids actually recognised me - no real surprise as it had been about 30 years since we last saw them
When I did introduce myself to her daughter she apologized for not having recognised me and said, "You've broadened out, haven't you?" - and then, realizing what she'd said, added, "Of course we all have..." she added - looking down at her stick-thin contours
The Son finally came over and it was an odd experience because he was larger and bald and tattooed he was exactly the same and pretty much how I imagined he would turn out. When he finally smiled in recognition it was like the kid I had known peered out from behind older eyes
I don't really have a point to this post. If you are religious and enjoy singing hymns then I'm glad that you have that. If you have recently met with someone who you used to know and find that, underneath all the exterior changes, there is still some of that person in you then think about what you have gained and not what you have lost. As Paul Simon once said - after changes upon changes we are more or less the same
Not that the requirement to do so comes up very often - I tend to avoid going through the door at all in case the Heathen Alert goes off and I spontaneously combust.
There are, generally speaking only three times I ever go to church:
1) Christening for the child of a friend/relative
2) Marriage of a friend/relative
3) Funeral of a friend/relative
Of course: any of these can happen in any order, but in general, and as you get older, you start to get slightly more of what lies behind door number three
The last time I sang in church was actually at the funeral of my Nan, nearly 18 years ago. Although generally speaking I have concerns around partaking in ceremonies that I don't believe in (I don't, for instance, believe that you should have a child christened just because it is a Nice And Expected Thing To Do, nor should you get married in a church because it's Traditional: only do either of the above if you are actually religious and go regularly) - my actual reason for stopping was more straightforward: I can't sing them properly.
The pitch is just wrong for my voice - I either have to come in very low, or slightly too high: and either way it sounds like I'm making fun of the service, which I'm really not (at my Nan's funeral I stopped because I was unintentionally making my brother laugh)
I say this because last Friday I went to a funeral - a friend of my parents that they had jointly known for 50 years and whose kids we had grown up knowing - and of course I didn't sing. The service itself was pleasant as it goes, but it reaffirmed my own feeling that instead of some stranger standing up and saying "I never got to meet..." I need to write out something to be said when I pop my clogs (hopefully in the very far away and distant future)
I managed to make it through an entire half-an-hour without anyone pointing at me and yelling "unbeliever!" and we moved on to the wake where it soon became clear that neither of her kids actually recognised me - no real surprise as it had been about 30 years since we last saw them
When I did introduce myself to her daughter she apologized for not having recognised me and said, "You've broadened out, haven't you?" - and then, realizing what she'd said, added, "Of course we all have..." she added - looking down at her stick-thin contours
The Son finally came over and it was an odd experience because he was larger and bald and tattooed he was exactly the same and pretty much how I imagined he would turn out. When he finally smiled in recognition it was like the kid I had known peered out from behind older eyes
I don't really have a point to this post. If you are religious and enjoy singing hymns then I'm glad that you have that. If you have recently met with someone who you used to know and find that, underneath all the exterior changes, there is still some of that person in you then think about what you have gained and not what you have lost. As Paul Simon once said - after changes upon changes we are more or less the same
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