Cocktails and Records

Air Supply
Lost in Love

I used to hate Air Supply when I was a kid. They were always clogging up the airwaves of our local AM station and seemed to be on Australia’s music TV show Countdown all the time. They were slow, melodic and boring. They looked like a bunch of maths teachers. They were not Adam Ant.

It wasn’t until I was on an accidental cruise around Norway a few years ago that I realised the error of my ways. Every evening we found ourselves in an onboard bar staffed by a handful of cheerily efficient Filipino waiters. Their only failing was their limited shipboard music collection.

On the first night I recognised the saccharine sounds of Australia’s finest dullards instantly and grimaced to myself – this was going to be a long evening. The waiters clearly loved them however, humming happily along to Air Supply’s sappy love ballads as they polished the martini glasses.

It transpired that the waiting staff liked Air Supply a lot. Over the course of the next two weeks we discovered that their albums went on, guaranteed, every night straight after the cocktail piano entertainment. And by the end of our sojourn at sea I realised that the waiters were right. Air Supply are one of the great MOR soft rock singles bands of the late 70s/ early 80s.

Or another, perhaps more palatable way of looking at it, is this is the greatest song that Teenage Fanclub never wrote.

‘Lost in Love’, Air Supply, 1980

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I was stuck on a train today with nothing for company but a Chinese tai chi manual (apparently written by a Mrs Li, but I can’t be sure of this) and a copy of Select magazine from December 1991 (with the terminally dull Lenny Kravitz on the cover).

From these I gleaned the following:

1. A picture does say a thousand words. This is good in the case of the tai chi book as I can’t read a word of Chinese, but not so good when it comes to the ‘16 page photo supplement’ in Select which features the close-up delights of Erasure, Jellyfish, Levitation, Jesus Jones and Miles Hunt amongst others. Did anybody ever actually stick these on their wall?!
2. Mrs Li and Select magazine take the weight of responsibility in their respective areas of expertise quite differently. Mrs Li has a stern look accompanying the many arrows in her pictures – it is very important that your flailing limbs are in exactly the right place. Select has the onerous task of reviewing the months new releases, and they certainly had their work cut out for them in December 1991. This month saw the release of classic 90s albums Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub (4 stars) and Loveless by My Bloody Valentine (5 stars) , but what did Select award album of the month? Intastella’s Stella and the Intastella Family of People. I remember reading about Intastella but I absolutely cannot remember what they actually sounded like. How can I not remember something supposedly that good?

And with that said, I’m off to find some Intastella.

I went to see Teenage Fanclub last Thursday night. It was a strange experience.

As if it needs saying any more round these parts, I love Teenage Fanclub. I have all the albums, I have loads of singles, I’ve seen them play many, many times, I’ve kept interviews they did with the NME in 1991 and I even know Raymond McGinley’s birthday (I’m not that sad, it’s just because its around the same time as mine).

The band played a fantastic show at Koko – all the hits, some choice B sides (‘Please stay’!) – all executed superbly. But somehow it just didn’t work for me.

I think the problem is that I may have reached the tipping point in my absolute intolerance for other people. It has been getting worse and worse and worse over recent years, and I have now got to the point where I allow myself to spend more time contemplating the potential for tall-people-gig-tax and the feasibility of penalties for talking and texting through quiet songs, than actually getting swept up in the music.

As a music fan this is pretty distressing. You’re meant to relish live music (and I still do sometimes if it’s in a small or seated venue) but here I am at a proper rock gig by a fantastic band, letting the side down and just not coping.

It can’t be getting older, as the Fanclub’s audience of my fellow 30/40 something Word reading brethren suggests. So what is it? Is this a phase that I will get over and I’ll gradually become more accepting and tolerant? Or should I save myself from anymore misery and just ban myself from attending gigs? If so, anyone want to buy some My Bloody Valentine tickets?