may you never be so shamed
Possibly the most touching John Peel tribute yet, nicked from the Vic:I spotted the great man at Glastonbury once. After skirting my shambling hero-worship intro, he promptly dispatched longtime cohort 'The Shend' to get my friend and I a beer. I was 19. From Droitwich. John Peel, who we'd met literally minutes previously, was buying us beer. Christ on a bike. With only a couple of chairs in the whole tent we sat at the feet of Messrs Ravenscroft and Shend. Hesitant chitchat ensued for a while before a young William Ravenscroft appeared to interrogate his old man as to the clean towel situation within the Peel tent/household. Sent packing with a verbal clip round the ear, including numerous and quite shocking extremely non-BBC 'phrases', Peel launched into "I'm sure it's just an age thing but our William seems an almost constant source of embarrassment to me lately. Just the other night I was sat at home watching some god-awful late film and he wanders into the room, seats himself in the chair next to me and starts nodding off. It's almost 2am and he's quite obviously shattered so I say to him 'Son, it's late. There's a direct link between sleep and fatigue so why don't you get yourself to bed?' To which he replied 'Come on Dad. You know if I go to bed now I'm only going to masturbate.'"
pathetic
I really will have to fall back on inventing the lunchblog, it seems.Today: penne with chicken and artichoke, in a creamy sundried tomato sauce. Was going to go for a meat-free day, but thought if there are proper, organised nibbles at the Melbourne Cup party this arvo, I might be limiting my freeloading options. None of the horses even have especially stupid names, so boring.
look ma, I'm MP3blogging
Okay, so it’s the result I expected, and hardly even disappointing in the wake of our own appalling re-election a couple of weeks ago. But still, this fervent rant from TISM seems even more appropriate today than when it was first performed, 21 years ago…
Newtown Festival
Left the house 24 hours ago to go and see bands play and dogs frolic in the park. Now I'm sitting at work with a skinned knee, a melted wrist and a hard-hat with GAY RACIST written on the front. I probably should have had more to eat, or less to drink, or just gone home at some point.But no regrets, apart from the pain in various parts of my body. The gozleme that served as breakfast and lunch and dinner was tasty, Peabody grunted out a set of their current heavier style, ran into people I know every twenty minutes, Laura Imbrooglywoogly played a new song or two and made an open call for a new drummer, Darth Vegas showed M. Lira sticking to his guns with a band that basically sound like Vicious Hairy Mary playing circus music (though packed with keyboards and horns), Bluejuice were far more impressive on a small stage outside than last time I saw them in a big room, $5 longnecks of Coopers from icebuckets out the front of the Courthouse rocked super-hard, and Andy's backyard & toilet queues provided glorious haven in between pub and bands.
Gem of the day goes to The Drugs for livening up their demotion from main stage headliners to small stage afternoon-fillers by making play out of their loss of a bass player; pre-recorded intros heralded the arrival on each song of another Sydney indie luminary contending for the role (then being unceremoniously voted off, Australian Idol stylee). Representatives of Frenzal, Dappled, Devoted, Peabody and the Hoodoos all doll up in Ronald McDonald outfits for their turn, and return en masse to dack Ian Baddely onstage in the last song.
Dud of the day: The Cops having too much of a crowd to get in front of the mixing desk and see if they sounded any less like murky sludge from there.
After the bands finish, it just gets murkier as more beer follows the sun down. I know I managed to corral a posse to stroll Annandale-wards and catch most of Smudge's set at the SER benefit, but by the time Big Heavy Stuff were playing, it's all stumbling round, drunkenly babbling, falling over and spilling my beer. So glad I committed to showing up at the Hopetoun band comp thingy tonight, instead of going home and sleeping. Or getting a motel room just to have a bath...
Hopetoun Incentive 15/11/2004
Stopped home for about two hours to eat, shower and change; stumble into Hoey, and attempted chit-chat from doorbitch Downey soon indicates to me that I am in no state to attempt to make coherent conversation. Acquire beer and watch end of Fyreflies, who despite exhaustion I enjoy much more than at Melbourne's Pony in June. Though here they lack the comedy value of four obvious ex-Nitocris fans with arms around each other's leather shoulders, banging their balding heads with a fervour that outstrips the music onstage.Derwent River Star bassist Eli has been gamely urging me to come and see them play for about six months, pressing a flyer on me upon our first introduction and going so far as to write this date up my arm last time we met. So it's with no little shame that I finally make it to a show tonight (but at least it's an important one!), and with some small relief that I actually enjoy it. Elements of the nu-twee Australasian sound are prominent - notably in the lead girl's breathy vocals and deployment of melodica & toy glockenspiel - but the song structures and general tone are more dominated by an urgently melodic post-rock approach. Perhaps a little precious: the one guy on a chair in the middle who goes from cello to banjo to ukelele to lap steel to acoustic guitar etc comes off like they're making a point of how he changes to a new instrument for every song omg. And they're definitely too reliant on a Mogwai/GYBE-style trick of starting a piece gentle and lilting but after a few minutes building up into A RUMBLING STORM OF RAWK - nearly every song does this - but they play it well, and they're a developing band. One imagines they'll yoke this communication to a broader range of dynamics as they go along.
The bump-out set-up gap is filled with more efforts to communicate, that have Dilemma laughing at me for forgetting that I know members of a band I saw last night, and me yawping dully at Jittersoph, trying to pull up... words... from brain... Phonograph still haven't got their kit set up? That's it, I'm skipping the final act of the Hopetoun Hott Female Bass-Player Competition 2004 and heading for sleep and Six Feet Under instead.
hairy poofter
From an otherwise unrelated essay at Tom Spurgeon's newish site:The woman next to me on the plane has furry arms and a dirty sweater spread across shiny white legs. She's reading a book: Harry Potter and the Need for Constant Reassurance. A word: In most of the fantasies I'd read as a pre-teen, staining the pages with orange juice and cookie dough, protagonists moved from a state of grace into a place of constant danger. Experiencing both setbacks and discouragement, at the moment of truth the hero would draw on memories of where he came from and in doing so find the strength to succeed. In the Harry Potter books, the lead character comes from crappy circumstances and experiences a seemingly unending string of impressive victories as cool adults, close friends and casual peers frequently let him know how great he is. His occasional failures stand in bold don't-hate-me relief on an otherwise perfect face, kid-lit's version of Marlon Brando's broken nose. I'm jealous I didn't think of dealing emotional crack this potent, and slightly worried that so many kids and adults respond to the bath of affirmation like a Christmas kitten sitting on an air vent.
it was B-Side "E For Ethiopia" that found favour with the DJ community
The Secret History Of Band-Aid at Freaky Trigger (scroll down a bit)from the Rocking Vic-uh
Simon Witter writes, pleasantly inspired in the wake of the Peelfest:I owe my love of The Fall entirely to Peel's rotation play of Totally Wired in my schooldays. In 1983, while freelancing as London correspondent for an obscure and unpronounceable Austrian music monthly, I got to interview Mark E Smith and his new bride and bandmember Brix in a seedy hotel in Bayswater. We hit it off beyond the confines of the interview, and I ended up getting backstage passes to all The Fall's London gigs, where MES would chop out hospitable lines of speed for me - thankfully never in the gramme-a-go doses he favoured. Then, in early 1984, I started to freelance for the NME and I finally got my first major feature, the new Fall interview. At this point, MES rang Neil Spencer and said he wouldn't see me, as he would only be interviewed by "name" writers. I didn't listen to a Fall record for at least ten years after that but I still have fond memories of standing at the bar of the Electric Ballroom with Smith, watching one of The Smiths' earliest London shows (supporting The Fall), and MES announcing loudly over his drink, with heartwarming solidarity for these newcomer namesakes and fellow Mancunians: "Look at that ridiculous bunch of cunts in their rockabilly shirts!".Subscribe yourself at the Vicarage.
two breakfasts
Up at quarter past 5 this morning to catch the live at Manning final breakfast show of Adam Spencer and Wil Anderson, less out of a particular love for their show than out of nostalgia for Spence rocking the lunchtime Theatresports styles on the same stage back in the "days".Dud: Gerling only getting to play one song when the Cops and Frenzal got two apiece.
Classic: Craig McLachlan miming fumbling through an octogenarian's labia with both hands in an attempt to finger her. Then, apparently egged on past sense by the tittering of the crowd, climbing bodily inside and pressing his hands and face against the walls Marcel Marceau-style...and upon extricating himself, pulling a flap over to offer it to Andrew Denton.
I assume this came across on air as three minutes of muffled laughter and the occasional thunk of celebrity jaw hitting floor.
