And he rode forth to the Wirral, where men's hearts grow black.

^^^Nice 14th century diss of West Kirby from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight there.^^^

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Rufus Wainwright recorded his Rufus! Rufus! Rufus! album to come to terms with the fact he didn't really get the original Judy Garland one, and I went to California to get his version of San Francisco from it out of my head. Perhaps the most expensive way possible of getting rid of a song?

Not much to say about California which isn't clichéd, which isn't the same as not having anything to say, but I will say that it's very much like those sets of California, eg the exterior scenes in Curb Your Enthusiasm, which don't look real but are in fact incredibly accurate. Clean streets and concrete, slow-moving cars, good-looking people, just this weird a priori sense of liberalism in all around you.


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On my way to California I had to spend four hours in Newark airport, and aside from pressing my nose to the glass and looking at the New York skyline like young Vito Corleone, I drifted around and listened to Dream Operator by Talking Heads as I watched the pilots having lunch with each other and sharing pilot-anecdotes in the fake diners and looked at the bitching families buy 500 cigarettes out of sheer desperation and resentment of one another. Because the Talking Heads album True Stories is, and I've said this before, the very sound of shopping centres, and airports are shopping centres.

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There is a book called 'Oranges are not the only fruit.'

If I wrote a book about my time in California, I would call it 'Cinnamon is not the only spice.'

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Were I ever to write a book about pop music, I would call it 'Ode to Wigan Pier'.

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How nice is the 'oh-oh-oh' bit at 33 seconds, and other points, in that song just above? I love it when people do that. If I were a singer I'd probably do that all the time.

One of the main reasons I like the first wild beasts album so much (and the second too but less so) is that it's basically the sound of a band doing what i always wanted, which is doing 'that' all the time just as I would in my non-existant band. my favourite bits in songs are always when singers push the melody a bit out of its boundary, as in I Touch Myself or the splendid middle 8 of this boy where lennon is on the verge of going mental. Kurt Cobain was also good at it, to the point where he did an entire performance in this undefinable way that i'm trying to define. I always wanted a band to consist solely of these bits in songs where people mess about.

Piss-taking, is what I mean, but doing it straight-faced. Aint nuttin better.



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I was watching one of those Jonathon Dimbleby documentaries about Africa before and he said something along the lines of:

"I don't want a lie, just a small picture of something that may or may not be true."

That's a great thing to say!

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Some recent reviews:

Wave Pictures- Sweetheart

Matthew Dear- I Can't Feel (I would not really give this four stars, FACT's stars are like astrological stars, they never correspond to reality)

Uffie- Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans


Arcade Fire- The Suburbs


Klaxons- Surfing the Void

Glasser- Home

Antony and the Johnsons- Thank You for Your Love




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"Cos I'm so tired of waiting in restaurants,
Reading the critics and comics alone."


This couplet is the key to understanding Rufus Wainwright, I think. I don't think Rufus Wainwright is a hedonist in any real way. It's about the emptiness of trying to enjoy yourself. Eating in a restaurant, a (slightly) extravagant and decadent thing to do, especially when you're on your own, which suggests it's a regular habit, and ending up reading the easy parts of a newspaper, cos you're afraid of adulthood. And only a genius could give us so much with so little.

"With a waiter,
with a face made for currency,
like a coin in ancient Rome."

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Barely anyone respected Mutya Buena's solo album at the time, but you still hear 'Song 4 Mutya' and 'Real Girl' all over the place*, and rightly so.







*in New Look but since when was that nothing?


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"We flurry quickstacks past too many hills."

Poetic genius from James Lightfoot on trains. Betjeman would be proud.

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Some lyrics I've noticed recently which sound so natural and normal but would never be spoken by anyone:

"From the moment I saw him I fell"
-Judy Garland's Trolley Song. Just 'i fell', it ends there. Queer.

"Fire,
I'll take you to burn."
-That song about Fire.

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They played a country song in a branch of Spar in Germany which had the refrain:

"We could be happy,
Relatively happy."

Marvellous.

I think at one point he even sang, 'pretty relatively happy'

Double qualifiers! Amazing. For what is love without doubt? As Wittgenstein probably once said.

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Good thing about country music is that it's about sin and loneliness from the point of view of fervent religiosity. So everything is connected to God, and God is connected to everything. And thus we're in double-meanings territory, my territory. Here's one of the best examples of this. Did you ever drink a cup of loneliness with him? I'm sure this can't be the only time someone's compared taking communion with a late night drink with another man (which the song is all but explicitly about), but it's so special.



Country music is inherently conservative, from the sound to the lyrics- GOD GOD GOD DRINK GOD LOVE (-VIA GOD) GOD- to the performers and especially of course the audience. Even the guy's name is 'George Jones' for heaven's sake.

But 'taint a thing to be afraid of.

'Devil got the best tunes, God got the best buildings.'

says Jonathan Meades. Perhaps true, but there are exceptions...

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And the sound of country music. Simple, blocks of lyrics and sounds, with slide guitar that sounds like swaying grass weeping between them from one to the other. The sound of redemption, of being washed of sin.

"If there is a sin,
Then there is a sinner too,
If there is a lie,
Then there is a liar too."

I do like priestly artists, I do.


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"Shoulders and knees,
Elbows and waists,
How can you be in two places at once?
You twist yourself
All out of shape,
Whoop there it is, do it again,
The world is fiction,
Special effects,
You can't believe what is coming next,
Sparks of light,
Balls of fire,
Whoop, what are we living for?"


I do think Talking Heads write about intoxication, and the sheer existential absurdism of parties and having fun, better than any band o' lads you'll find from here to anywhere. So, Kasabian, your career's been wasted! But we already knew that.


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needs wants acts omissions

Gavin pointed out recently that the first verse of 'pretty woman' by troglodyte orbison contains the lyric, 'you are not the truth'. As someone who has based their life around finding moments of profundity and intellectual perfection in pop music, I'd never noticed this but it does merit some consideration. What it means, either semantically or philosophically, we are unsure.



Pretty Woman is a crazy song, though. At the start, it's just about seeing a fitty on the street and that's that. But by the last verse, we're suddenly talking about needs and his eternal loneliness. Wild extrapolations.

"A need can mean nothing but should be held higher."
-Hot Chip.

A lot of music from around then is good like this. I like songs about unrequited affection, and there surely must be more songs about that than any other subject. But a lot of the songs from the early 60s were about love that was TOTALLY unrequited. I like that. The Chiffons were, of course, the masters of this. Beatles songs were always about having someone, then losing them, or someone being a tease, and you get somewhere but they're never properly yours. 'I want to hold your hand' carries with it the prospect that it could actually happen. Whereas Chiffons songs were always about having NO CONNECTION whatsoever to the person of your dreams. They're just about staring and admiring, never speaking, always dreaming. My dad once dismissed Ys by Newsom as 'Dear Diary music' which is kinda accurate but the chiffons are teenage girl Dear Diary music and it's just wonderful.


"Sooner or later,
....I hope it's not later."

"If I were a queen"


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I remember when there were lynx adverts when I was 17 that featured a guy spraying lynx on his torso and then going out with this clicker thing that had a dial on it. Every time a woman looked at him in any vaguely positive way he'd click it. And people at my schools bought these clicker things and would click away all day. It was, so obviously, a physical manifestation of everything I have ever despised. A competitive element very quickly entered it between the guys, and this quantity not quality principle wasn't helped by the fact that they felt any glance was a sign that the woman felt he was an adonis and all she could hear was 'sweat' by inner circle' going round and round in her head non-stop. So they'd always have improbably high numbers at the end of the day, I mean in the seventies and so on. Cunts, deluded cunts.


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"Why do I always fall in love with any woman who shows the slightest bit of interest in me?"

-That guy from eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

"Men always think that whenever women say anything to them it means they want them. We're really just saying things."

-My mum.

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If Roy Orbison had one of those counter things it'd just have one click but he'd have done it so hard the button would be snapped off.

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I mean here's another example of how early 60s american pop always seemed to about distance and walls between people much more than it is now. 'You don't know how I love you' is a really common lyric from that time. You'd never get a popstar singing that these days. It's all about being a prick and imperfection. Which I like too, of course. I'm just saying.



I thought the singer of this song was a girl for a very long time. Nice and androgynous, that's how we like it.


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Incidentally there's a chiffons lyric, "I don't know what I don't know."

Which is much better than Karen O's "I know what I know" if you ask me.


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Check out that. One theme, successfully carried through the whole blog. Bang.