Cocktails and Records

It’s that time of the year when everyone does their end of year list/retrospective thing looking at the best and worse of the year. I suspect that these lists are often intended to make the lister look really cool and on the case. I’m nowhere near cool or on the case but that’s not going to stop me…

THE CRUCIAL STUFF

Cocktails

The cocktail of choice this year, apart from the superlative martini, is the bitter (yet sweet) Negroni. That’s equal parts:

• Campari
• gin
• sweet vermouth

Ice. Stir. Bitter. Pink. Nice.

Records

Midlake have probably been my band of the year. The Trials of Von Occupanther was a fantastic album which although released in 2006, I only really got into this year.

I seemed to have missed the boat in 2007 in terms of live music. Last year was superb (Steve Reich, Konono No. 1, Amadou & Mariam, Nicole Willis, Teenage Fanclub doing Bandwagonesque) but little has cut it this year other than well, Midlake, Orchestra Baobob (at the Jazz Cafe last month) and The Bad Plus (at the ICA in July).

Staying on the stereo from this year:

• Japan’s super kick ass jazz group, Soil and Pimp Sessions (which was probably was the gig of the year, but I sadly missed it)
• Laura Nyro’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession
• CSS’s Lets make love and listen to death from above 7″
• Art Blakey’s Mosaic
• East Kilbride’s finest, The Pearlfishers’ Up with the Larks
• The very best of ethiopiques - excellent compilation of 70s Ethiopian soul and jazz
• the Carousel soundtrack. Obviously.

EVERYTHING ELSE

Good things

• The excellent dream I had where I went drag car racing with Bill Wyman. We ran into Morrissey at the track and he bought me an icecream. A nice time was had by all.
• Getting sunburnt in Scotland.
• John Howard, former Prime Minister of Australia, losing his seat to Maxine McKew, pinko former ABC journalist. Poetic justice.
• The rise and rise of Charlie Brooker.
• Leo Hickman’s The Final Call: In Search of the True Cost of our Holidays - a really well researched and well written book about how tourism is destroying the world. Sadly, I read this whilst on holiday in France.
• The fact that I managed to start writing this blog after many years of procrastination.

Bad things

• 99.9% of all primetime TV output. Will we ever be free from reality TV?
• Richard Dawkins managing to put even me off aethism.
• BBC Radio London shunting Norman Jay’s excellent music programme to digital, only to replace it with Heckle and Jeckle style presenters and lazy talkback radio; something that there’s not nearly enough of on BBC Radio London…
• The number of people I keep encountering who hate current London mayor Ken Livingston so much, that they would seriously consider voting for professional buffoon Boris Johnson instead.
• Having to pretend to care about Madeleine McCann.

Merry Christmas everyone - see you on the other side.

I’ve recently had a good moan on the main site about people talking and taking photos on camera phones at gigs (as has, I’m pleased to say, marmiteboy on his blog).

It seems that the Royal Festival Hall in London has come up with its own way of tackling this. OK, it is the Royal Festival Hall which, as a seated venue has its own set of rules and conventions, but before the Imagined Village gig this week (Martin and Eliza Carthy, Billy Bragg, Sheila Chandra et. al.) we were solemnly informed that taking photos was dangerous for the performers.

Members of the audience snickered at this extremism but we all obeyed. 

I wish making inane comments about the bass player’s hair was dangerous for the performers too.  

I was out with a colleague this week to a work networking thing, the kind of event that is only made bearable by the free booze.

Stood by the bar and fastidiously avoiding doing any actual networking, my colleague and I engaged in shoptalk until her attention was captured by a black and white photo of a classically mid 70s looking guy clutching a beer. She wondered who it was.

‘Oh, that’s Phil Lynott, you know from Thin Lizzy’ I said.

She looks at me and says with an accusatory tone ‘So is that the kind of music that you like then?’

I don’t, as it happens, particularly love Thin Lizzy, but then I wouldn’t exactly throw the radio out of the window if they came on either. I am sensing ‘issues’ here though and respond wearily in the way you do when you like lots of music but don’t really want to reel off 500 bands or singers to someone to illustrate the point.

‘Well, not them especially, but I like rock music I guess, I like loads of stuff.’ I then decide to risk returning the question. ‘What kind of music do you like?’

‘I love Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos’ she says.

Now I am used to people looking appalled when I tell them what kind of music I like (see earlier post on the musical Carousel) so I try to be non-judgemental about what other people listen to. And as I have pretty wide taste in music this usually isn’t an issue anyway. Unfortunately though, I really loathe both Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos. Angsty American female singer/songwriter’s are not my thing.

But it is too late. A look of dismay/contempt/disbelief has already swept across my face. She obviously senses this and explains that they have ‘personal’ meaning because they apply to a particular time in her life.

This is worse. As the Horse Overboard blog noted a while back in a review of Nick Hornby’s Songbook:

‘People whose favourite song reminds them of their honeymoon, their student days, a foreign holiday, and so on, don’t really like music much: “if you love a song, love it enough for it to accompany it throughout the different stages of your life, then any specific memory is rubbed away by use”’.

Nick Hornby is so right. I quickly changed the subject back to bitching about work.

On a recent trip to give my spare money to Rough Trade I noticed that the staff were amiable, attentive and even chipper you could say.

I really don’t know what’s going on here.

It all started a few months back when I set out one sunny morning to Soho to buy the boy a Roy Ayers LP and myself, well, anything interesting that came along. I went to Sounds of the Universe and the people behind the counter were strangely pleasant and helpful.

This was surprising, but I could handle it.

Then the same thing happened again in Ray’s Jazz and then in Vinyl Junkies where a staff member actually left the security of the counter and asked me if I needed help with anything. We then had a conversation about how great Art Blakey is/was.

Since this auspicious day, the record store staff of London have been positively oozing good humour and cheerfulness. A guy in HMV spent at least 10 minutes searching through the racks looking for a 12” I was after and the proprietor of a local vinyl emporium waxed enthusiastically to me about the delights of Steely Dan.

This has now culminated in not one, not two, but three Rough Trade staff in one visit asking me if was finding what I wanted (and telling me not to buy the new LCD Soundsystem record). In any other shop this could be irritating, but I am just so shocked that I am prepared to deal with it.

Have record store staff suddenly realised that being nice to customers might help keep them in business or is it just me?

This weeks somewhat optomistically entitled Song of the Week is ‘June is Bustin’ Out All Over’ from the musical Carousel. Although this song has been on high rotation on the stereo for months now and never fails to make me want to skip around the room with glee, I have also chosen it partly out of spite.

Everytime I have mentioned my love of the Carousel soundtrack to friends they groan, not because it’s from a musical, but because it is from a completely sexist and corny musical. I’ve no idea whether this is true or not since I’ve never bothered watching it.

The sad thing though is that I, as a good feminist, couldn’t give a toss either way because, as a music fan, I have a record collection full of blatently non-PC music. Like my content acceptance of wafer thin plots in 80s teenpics, I’ve had to completely suspend disbelief on the sexist lyrics front for years. Pop and rock music isn’t exactly known for it’s progressive views on women and female/male relationships.

Two of my sexist favourites have to be ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ by the Rolling Stones and Sheena Easton’s ‘9 - 5 (morning train)’. In ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ Mick whinges about mothers finding that cooking fresh food for their husbands is just a drag and that popping pills all day is the better option, and in ‘9 - 5′ Sheena extolls the virtues of snaring a man who works all day so she can play all night.

I think that what makes a good proper sexist song is one that dumps all that boring testosterone filled Led Zep / Guns n Roses syle objectification, and goes straight for portraying women as lazy sods who sit around all day either taking drugs or waiting for their men to come home so they can fleece them for free drinks down the disco that evening.

Not sure how Carousel fits into this though - might have to see it one of these days…

I have spent the last week in Tuscany, Italy and rather than wax lyrical about olive groves, rolling hills, medieval towns, Estruscan tombs and Chianti ‘classico’ I am going to focus on Virgin rock radio. Somehow we found our trips down the autostrada soundtracked by this radio station. It ticked all the boxes - good reception, few ads and tolerable driving music.

So it was all non-stop driving rawk music: Eagles, Nirvana, Floyd, Blink 182, Franz Ferdinand, The Clash, Kaiser Chiefs, Beatles, Manics, The Cure, Bowie, Blur, The Doors, Doobie Brothers, Springsteen, Radiohead, Avril Lavigne and Aerosmith.

Rather like having substantial tracts of my record collection thrown back in my face actually.

But what really diverted my mind away from the Italian countryside / motorway etiquette that I should have been enjoying was just what a load of old tosh rock music is. Of course, we all already knew this but Virgin radio seemed to have a gift for making it especially apparent.

Most of the above bands have spent their careers developing unique market positions with pretty acute political and lifestyle associations. At the most basic level, this is: The Clash are not Pink Floyd, Franz Ferdinand are not Blink 182. All rock bands pretend to hate ‘the man’, some more obviously so (hello Radiohead!).

But Virgin radio, with its lack of DJs, back announcements and ads particularly seemed to elide all context and all political difference. It is all just tunes and riffs. OK, Virgin wasn’t exactly playing Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict, Rape Me or Of Walking Abortion, but neither does it care about Blur vs Oasis, Dylan going electric, Kurt Cobain’s screwed up anxiety or even Don Henley’s coke fuelled Lear jet lifestyle. Rock music isn’t about rebellion or making statements, or even about cultural progression these days. That doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s all just tunes and riffs.