"...not David's voice."
Oh, look. There's a new Ray's Place up, with some smart advice on handling teenage romance.Dear Anonymous,It is never right to be intimidated by a horny lady. Try imagining that you are David Bowie when you’re dealing with her, acting all like a polished gentleman but a very busy one, always dealing with limo rentals and getting fancy suits back from a trusted dry-cleaner (use your normal voice if any of this happens on the telephone, not David’s voice). Make it up to you, not her. You’ve given the person you desire the upper hand, and the Thin White Duke would never do that. He would fly to France.
watching Rage
remember how Izzy was originally mentioned in all the hype about the old Gunners getting a new band? how he was writing material for them, but would stay in the background? then you never heard any more once they got a line-up and a name and all that?I'm really hoping it's because he pulled out, because this Velvet Revolver song (video apparently referencing EMF's first press stunt - uh, what?) is fucking pissweak. Slash looks fine and plays well, Duff looks AWESOME, even That Matt F___er From The Cult has acquired some style... but Weiland is throwing '80s Jagger moves, groaning like a hernia patient, and presumably making all the rest of the band think "oh fuck, we signed papers with this junkie retard, now we have to wait for the record to flop before we can get dropped and escape the contracts." And there's just nothing to the song. Meanwhile Axl gets to put out press releases about Buckethead being a weirdo and that's why the album's late (um, how many records has he released in the last decade, and how many have you?). CAN SOMEONE PLEASE JUST PUT A CHIP IN HIS BRAIN AND LET THEM GET BACK TOGETHER?
You know Steven Adler has a G'n'R cover band, that play when he's not too smacked out to show up? I love that.
This pile of arse made the new Beasties thing shine in comparison. I wish they'd had another set of ears to say "one beat and one single annoying repeated sound effect DOES NOT MAKE A COMEBACK SINGLE," but it's nowhere near as bad as I feared (all panic is now transferred to The Cure's upcoming self-titled album [SELF FUCKING TITLED! it's so going to suck]). And Yauch, always the best rapper in the group, seems somehow to have found a new and remarkable flow. He's knocking youngsters out from his armchair, barely disturbing his pipe and newspaper.
king of reviews?
Dave Graney reviews the new Sneeze album for I-94 Bar. He's heard it's their second (fourth, in eleven years, acksherly), hasn't paid attention to the component members other work beyond "the hits," but still loves the fuck out of it....Twenty tracks. But you'd never notice. It whizzes by your ears like a new, fast cricket ball . Lots of playing around with feels and grooves and types of songs but it all works. Several times, they have songs going they enjoy playing so much that they then extrapolate these into extended forms. Free-playing codas that follow on and become events by themselves.The singing is rich and heartfelt and the lyrics are full of life. A personal favourite in the faultless timing and delivery would have to be "(when we were kids we played) dress ups" which has all the pathos and knowing self destructive slyness that I've only ever heard in the late 60's country records by Jerry Lee Lewis. (Yeah, it’s that good).
The arrangements are spectacularly vibrant and febrile and self-conscious all at once. They do dumb things and then all pile in and heap more stupid crap in just for a stir. I would never call it a retro record as its music made from a real collective cosmology that lives now. They mean it. It’s made by people who have a deep and abiding interest in rock music. If you need references I would point you towards the Bedbugs who appeared in the TV show “F Troop” and the likewise hip and cool Sacred Cows from “Get Smart”. They have obsessed over a lot of sounds and they have done a lot of playing...
"No! Not fist - Feist!"
New interview with Leslie Feist, on the eve of her second solo debut hitting her home country. Gonzales produced: she banned him from beats and '90s synths, he banned her from electric guitars."It certainly wasn’t sexy when we were making the record," she laughs. "We were staying at the cheapest hotel in the whole city. We could only afford one tiny room, so we pushed the two single beds as far apart as we could. It was winter and there was no heat, with a draft coming through the windows, and we were shivering."
currently reading
And the family saga is handled incredibly well – the occasional cut-ins from the present-day narrator just become annoying intrusions in the story of his forebears (especially as I’m well past halfway, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to get to find much of what makes him so ineffectual). I especially love how we get to know characters so well, and feel for their sufferings and joys, but then as soon as they have kids they just become parents.
Getting teenage girls so right, and then devoting this massive volume to the genetic history of a hermaphrodite raises a load of obvious questions about Eugenides’ personal views
Morrissey can't handle the truth
Stephin Merrit vs Boz Boorer & Alain Whyte FITE!His new album, "You Are the Quarry" (Sanctuary), demonstrates more than ever that the best lyricist in rock, Morrissey, still surrounds himself with dull musicians incapable of properly filling out his introspective kitchen-sink dramas. Plodding generic rock 'n' roll accompanies "Where taxi drivers never stop talking, under slate-gray Victorian sky: Here you'll find despair and I." At this level of lyric artistry, these warmed-over arena rock backdrops are a waste. One longs to lock him up for a year with, say, the pop orchestra the High Llamas, so lyrics like "I've been dreaming of a time when to be English is not to be baneful, to be standing by the flag not feeling shameful, racist or martial" can be matched by equally thoughtful arrangements.
when I was fourteen, I knew and liked these songs
If you were going to have a round-robin naming 50 reasons why Hysteria by Def Leppard is actually a great record, what would the 13th be?13) the way "pour some sugar on me" was kept outta the number one spot by a power ballad (cheap trick's "the flame") so the lep went "oh, so it's like that huh? DEPLOY POWER BALLAD" and next thing you know "love bites" is the number one single.
"Er, it was probably about £900,000," replies the chef, gamely. "A lot of it went straight up the chimney."
Bill Drummond's still out working on the Soup Line. But neither his hosts nor the Grauniad interviewer (Dave Simpson - ex-MM bod?) can avoid bringing up what is obviously standing as his most impressive artistic act:Disaster averted, there is a two-hour wait for the soup to cook, during which Drummond attempts to justify the Soup Line. He talks, slightly sheepishly, about it being his own personal ley line, and denies that it's a conceptual piece. ("It's not something that can be sold or generates money.") Ultimately, though, he admits he's not really sure why he's doing it.Even less publicised, except for Drummond mentioning the URL in a profile of Stewart Home he wrote (I know!) for the same paper a few months ago, is youwhores.com, which for some reason diverged from its creator's intention fairly promptly. Who would have thought?"I know I have a problem. You know where you wake in the middle of the night with some idea, but you think better of it in the morning? That bit - the rationale bit - doesn't happen to me. Sometimes I think, 'Let's just act on it,' and maybe some reason will come along afterwards. Obviously, there's one major thing where I haven't worked out the reason." He's referring, of course, to the money incident. So is the soup-making one way of banishing the tag of "the man who burned a million quid"?
"If we had ever guessed the shadow that would be cast over us ... " He doesn't need to expand. Which is why most of Drummond's concurrent little "jobs" go unpublicised, such as www.mydeath.net, a website where people can post suggestions for their funeral, inspired by two friends who died of cancer and had "really crap funerals".
tonight at Cult Sinema
JABBERWOCKY (1977)Terry Gilliam's often-neglected solo directing debut. An adaptation of the Lewis Carroll poem with both narrative and comedy enhanced, revelling in the opportunity to portray the middle ages in all their authentic filth and squalor.
“I don't think it's necessary to have a meaning in a film”, said Gilliam at the time. “I think it's important to make people laugh and I seem to have done that. But there have been complaints about the gore and defecation - I had a girl from the radio interviewing me the other day demanding why I had done a film about defecation.Jay Katz notes: "Amongst all the excrement, garbage and filth, Gilliam and his co-writer [Charles Alverson] actually have a little to say about big business, but mainly JABBERWOCKY is very, very funny. Strong stomachs are required, however."“It's really not quite like that but there are situations when people are very funny relieving themselves. There's nothing in the film you won't find in a Brueghel painting…”
Check out some contemporary reviews for more advice.
Starring Michael Palin, with Harry H. Corbett, John LeMesurier, Warren Mitchell and appearances by Max Wall, Bernard Bresslaw, Terry (PYTHON) Jones, Neil (BONZO DOG DOO-DAH BAND, RUTLES) Innes, Gorden (THAT BLOKE OUT OF 'ALLO 'ALLO) Kaye, Dave (I WAS DARTH VADER, YOU KNOW) Prowse and Gilliam himself.
Shorts at 7.30, feature at 8.30, entry free but donate and get a raffle ticket for a DVD of Rumble Fish. Annandale Hotel on Parramatta Road: beer at the bar, Thai food in the beer garden.
