Shut up and sing

I’ve confessed to my sneaking love of the Dixie Chicks before so it should come as no surprise that I sought out the (relatively) recent documentary on the band - Shut Up And Sing - that chronicled the events surrounding their tour of Home and subsequent album Taking The Long Way.

The Home tour of 2003 gained more than a little notoriety when an off hand remark by singer Natalie Maines, on stage in Shepherd’s Bush of all places, about George Bush resulted in apoplexy from large swathes of the band’s traditional support - country music radio, fellow country stars and the major TV networks. The full sorry tale can be found here if you’re not familiar with the background.

I was interested in the film as I remembered being somewhat disappointed with the UK media reaction to the Dixie Chicks during the furore. From “serious” music papers there was little by way of praise for the stance that the group took (which progressively hardened as they became increasingly bewildered by the reaction in their homeland) and, in some cases, even a suggestion that they were overtly careerist in pursuing a new, liberal audience with Taking The Long Way. A view that seemed to conveniently ignore the fact that the band had sold over 30 million albums - so the careerist option might have been to, you know, just keep doing what they’d always done… There was a degree of cynicism around the evolution of their sound (and even their look) which suggested a calculated ditching of country for mainstream AOR - cynicism that didn’t seem rooted in any actual appreciation of their previous work. The new album was a logical extension of “Fly” and “Wide Open Spaces” - if anything the more overtly bluegrass record “Home”, sandwiched in the middle, was the anomaly.

Debating whether Taking The Long Way  was or wasn’t a country record (it’s recognisably country to these ears) missed the interesting story in all of this. How did a band that was as American as apple pie, singing the national anthem at the Superbowl in 2003, wind up being banned from radio, having its CDs trashed in the streets, and receiving death threats ? The shit storm surrounding the Dixie Chicks post Maines’ innocuous comments said far more about the state of mind of middle America in the early days of the Iraq war than any of the releases by rock’s established liberal standard bearers (Young, Springsteen, REM). If you wanted to understand the intense paranoia and insularity of the US post 9/11 then look no further.

It’s this story that, in part, the film tells. It also provides a revealing glimpse behind the curtains at the workings of the record industry - look away now if you want to maintain any romantic notions of music (on this scale) being just about, well, the music. The band emerge with credit - smart, funny, engaging and, largely, in control despite the vitriol aimed at them. Their increasing politicisation through the film is oddly inspiring; a growing belligerence and determination to stick to their guns against struggling tour and CD sales (the album still entered the charts at number 1). And, yes, in the interests of balance, the band are somewhat concerned with their career. However, this plays as honest and genuine - it would have stretched credulity somewhat to not expect the biggest selling female music act in the world (at the time) to be having conversations with their manager, label and promoters about being abandoned by their “fans”. I found it a fascinating glimpse behind the curtains at the workings of the industry - in the same way that Metallica’s “Some Kind Of Monster” was, albeit with less unintentional hilarity.

If Maines had made her comments in 2005 then I think the criticism would have been justified - just another bandwagon jumper as the tide of opinion turned against Bush. I don’t think she really knew what she was getting into - if you watch the footage she is clearly just joking around with a London audience far removed (geographically and politically) from her usual constituency - but it’s the bands subsequent reaction to events which is telling. The fact that they were unwittingly sucked into a debate on patriotism, freedom of speech and the rights and wrongs of a war in the Middle East, had the singer’s life threatened, lost most of their fans and still refused to back down, was laudable.

Sing ? Sure, glorious three part harmonies and, in Maines, a great country vocalist. Shut up ? No thanks.

Guitar Hero

Whilst the world has gone not-so-quietly mad for video games that make you a rock star (see here - $1 billion, 14 million units ? I really missed that meeting) it’s refreshing to see a couple of real examples of people who still understand that playing the guitar is, without question, the coolest thing that has ever been done by human beings ever. Opposable thumbs evolved so that man could hold a pick in one hand and the back of a fret board in the other.

So, first up, Tad Kubler from The Hold Steady. New album “Stay Positive” is another belter and, midway through slow burner “Lord, I’m Discouraged”, boasts the year’s finest constructed guitar solo. The recorded version is probably best but there’s a decent live version here: 

Camera work is a little erratic but kudos for the silly hammer-ons in classic guitar aloft to the heavens pose.

Second up is Tom Morello on stage with Springsteen performing a reworked (and bloody marvellous) version of “The Ghost Of Tom Joad”. Now I’m not usually one to get bothered too much about technique in guitarists (Satriani, Vai etc. leave me cold) but check out the wibbly-wibbly fret wankery on this:

All of which hopefully puts clutching a tiny plastic replica of a Les Paul into some sort of perspective.

Some memories are best left…

Spent a highly productive couple of hours at the weekend watching video clips on YouTube of old ZX Spectrum games… As I say, highly productive. I haven’t posted specific links, search and ye shall find.

What struck me, apart from a sense of being really quite old and really quite sad, was just how terrible they generally were. This, in turn, made me think that perhaps I shouldn’t have spent such a vast proportion of my early teenage years pounding away (steady) on rubber (easy now) keys but, instead, should maybe have used my time more wisely: principally by talking to girls.

Some extensive research this evening (two Google searches) have revealed a wide array of emulators that I could download to replay the likes of Knight Lore, Sabre Wulf, Skool Daze, Commando, Airwolf (officially the most irritatingly hard game ever made) or Manic Miner.  However, I’ve decided to consign them all to the dustbin of history and use my time more wisely: principally talking to girls (wife and daughter). I was sorely tempted by Doomdark’s Revenge but running it involved DOS emulators and all sorts of jiggery pokery, so my usual technical risk aversion took over.

It’s the nature of memory to embellish - to reinforce positive or dampen negative experiences of the past. The collective store of stuff (a complicated concept that I have explored before) now available on the web distorts this nature; things that were previously lost (except in your head) are now only a couple of clicks away. With this embellishment stripped away I was concerned that something important was lost - my fond childhood reminiscence wrecked on discovering that things that I thought were great were a bit, well, lame. But memories have potency because they also retain the essence of who you were at the point the memory was created. So, trivially, whilst orginally playing, say, Elite, I felt like a space trader, flying round the galaxy, running the gauntlet from pirates and the police. Sure, looking at the footage of it now I see some crude wire frame graphics and wonder at how it held my attention for so long but some of the magic of being 13 (and there wasn’t much to start with - we’re back to the pounding away and rubber I guess…) is still there.

What will be interesting is how individual and collective memory develops in the future as more and more of our lives are recorded, or available to be called up on demand. Well, interesting to self confessed nostalgia junkies like me, anyway. 

Emo kids vs The Daily Mail

I’m no great lover of My Chemical Romance but any enemy of the Daily Mail is a friend of mine: see this from today’s Guardian.

I can understand why listening to emo might make you want to self harm though - it’s mostly bloody awful. What happened to proper goths anyway ?  

 

 

Danny Federici RIP

Danny Federici passed away a few weeks ago. Don’t know how it passed me by, guess it got lost in the general muddle of things, but caught the news in the obits in this month’s Word magazine.

I won’t pretend to know much about him, beyond his role in the greatest rock and roll band on the planet, but it’s a sad day. It would seem E-Streeters are mortal too.  

 

Up

Top at Xmas. Dead and buried four weeks ago. Promoted today.

I’m not a fan of capitalising words for the sake of it, nor of extraneous exclamation marks, but forgive me this small indulgence:

COME ON !!!

Teething problems

Conscious that I have somewhat lax in charting my daughter’s progress. Somewhat lax, frankly, in charting much at all but, hey, it’s not the quantity but the quality, right ? Eh ? Oh.

Teething problems used to be one of those expressions that I would carelessly bandy around. It occupied a simple place in my mind, relating to nothing more than a set of issues or problems associated with the early beginnings of something. Had a few teething problems setting up the wireless network. That sort of thing.

No more. Teeth are not to be taken so lightly. Until now I had been ignorant, and blissfully so, of the evolutionary misdesign evident in encasing the hardest substance in the human body within flesh from whence it must burst forth. Only it doesn’t so much burst as inch. Very slowly.

So far, four of said teeth have sliced their way through Neve’s gums. None of them came quietly. The remaining twenty four are presumably lurking, waiting, biding their time. And then, after a few years, they will all fall out. As I said, it feels like an evolutionary mis-step. Or, as my wife eloquently suggests, it’s shit for all concerned. 

 

Spinning in his grave

I should have known better. Confidently asserting, at the start of the football season, that Forest would finish with automatic promotion, posting in December that we were top at Xmas… It was asking for it, wasn’t it ?

So, here we are in mid April, three games to go, and Forest find themselves mired in fourth place, behind the footballing giants of Doncaster, Carlisle and Swansea, and facing up to another stab at the play-offs. I think we know how that will end (and I’m not thinking of a lap of honour round the new Wembley, triumphantly holding aloft a cup) so it seems likely that yet another season in Division Three beckons.

I wonder what Clough would have made of it ? He was canny enough to know that noone would ever achieve what he did at the club - partly a consequence of his own genius and partly due to the changes in the game since the money rolled in - but surely a regular mid table finish in the top flight shouldn’t be beyond a club in the seventh largest city in Britain ? I’ve just finished reading Duncan Hamilton’s excellent book on his time with Clough; he was the football reporter with the Nottingham Evening Post through Clough’s time at Forest. Provided You Don’t Kiss Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough pulls few punches, taking a relatively unflinching look at Clough’s less desirable personality traits and, particularly, his relationship with drink, but it’s all the richer for it. The more rounded view of Clough renders him, ultimately, in a far more sympathetic light and the final chapters are profoundly sad (particularly for a Forest supporter) as drink robs the great man of his wits, his place in the Premiership and, finally, his job.

Equally recommended, albeit I remain less convinced as to its accuracy as a biographical portrait, is David Peace’s The Damned Utd which chronicles Clough’s 44 days in charge at Leeds. It’s written as fiction and, as a character study, is terrifyingly compelling; I’m just not sure if it’s terrifyingly accurate.

 

Hasta la vista

I have a new toy. Finally caved in to my consumerist desires last week and bought a new laptop. It’s too early to start buying things on the basis of it being good for my daughter’s education so I’m justifying this on the basis that it’s only the third computer that I’ve owned in the past 18 years which just feels like I’m not trying hard enough. According to Moore’s Law that should mean that my new purchase is 512 times more powerful than my first PC…

In some respects the first PC I ever had shouldn’t really count. A mighty 386, pre-internet, it was basically a glorified word processor which saw too little service during my degree (although I did get very, very good at Minesweeper). It also put me off PC gaming for life: too many hours spent trying to make Frontier: Elite 2 work on a woefully under-specced machine.

Second PC is still sat upstairs and, to be honest, there’s nothing wrong with it. However, I have romantic notions of sitting wherever I like in the house, tapping out lines of inconsequence, and so needed to upgrade to a laptop. First impressions are generally good (much quicker, great screen) but I do have some reservations about my operating system. I was a bit dubious about changing from XP to Vista but finally figured that it couldn’t be all that bad… and, don’t get me wrong, it’s not, it’s just that it’s obsessed with updating itself. I’m currently running with virtually no software, save for the OS and Norton 360, and every time I switch on something’s improving itself in the background. It’s all well and good - for now - but I can’t help but wonder how much of my new found performance hike from my old model is going to be swallowed up by upgrades I don’t really need.

Could always turn them off I suppose. If only they hadn’t made it so hard… Before you know it we’ll be in thrall to Cyberdyne, having our decisions made by Skynet and relying on Sarah Connor to bail us out of a nuclear apocalypse. Let’s hope it’s not Lena Headey, eh ?

Random ramble regarding recent SF on TV…

I should declare some stuff up front. I don’t come into this post without baggage so, here goes, just so you know where I’m coming from:

I love Buffy The Vampire Slayer, was pretty partial to Angel (despite its best efforts to derail itself with various underwhelming plot strands the central premise was always strong), and was mortified that Firefly was canned after one season. So you may be feeling the love for the Whedon at this point. Five by five. I also think that the reworked Galactica is mostly brilliant (some misgivings on season 3) and have been a long standing fan of the Star Trek franchise - peaking with late period Next Generation and DS9 before rapidly losing interest through Voyager and abandoning ship as the appalling theme music soft rocked its way over the opening credits to Enterprise.

So far, so American. Back across the pond I have been a curious by-stander to the relaunched Doctor Who and over expectant but subsequently disappointed viewer of its spin off - Torchwood. I can’t claim to be a longstanding fan of The Doctor, it seemed to largely pass me by when I was younger, but the Russell T. Davies incarnation has managed to single handedly provide some of my TV high points over the past couple of years. Unfortunately it has also provided some of my TV low points as well; often in the same episode. However, it was the return of Torchwood that prompted this post.

Davies has never made any secret of his admiration for Buffy, Angel and Whedon. They informed much of the relaunched Doctor Who - certainly in tone - and Torchwood was practically a direct steal (”inspired by” might be a more charitable view). So, we have a series which is an inter-related spin off of another show, albeit one that aspires to more adult themes, utilising a popular character from the “parent” show and making them the focus. Buffy begats Angel, Who begats Torchwood. For Captain Jack Harkness, read Angel. For the rest of the members of Torchwood, read the “Scoobies” from Buffy or the Angel Investigations team.

Torchwood takes place in Cardiff where, handily enough for regular plot developments, a rift in space/time has opened (see also: the Hellmouth under Sunnydale in Buffy or the worm-hole that DS9 is parked outside of). Various aliens pop up: Torchwood sorts them out, led by former time-agent, but now immortal guardian of humanity from alien invasion, Captain Jack. (This is very different to Angel - former vampire, now immortal vampire-with-a-soul guardian of humanity from demon invasion).

Anyhow, I don’t really object to revisiting a good idea, as long as it’s executed well. And there’s the rub. Torchwood just doesn’t deliver. The budget isn’t big enough to create something that’s worth watching for visuals alone, the characters started out under developed and haven’t been nourished much over the course of a season, and the scripts aim for flirtatious wit and sexual tension but feel forced and clumsy. Ironically, in seeking a more adult audience, Torchwood actually delivers less well than its parent show on adult themes: its definition of adult seems to be confined to sex. And sex of the end-of-the-pier, nudge nudge, wink wink variety rather than something that sheds light on human desire or lust or passion or, god forbid, love. Compare the frankly tedious bisexual antics of Jack (okay, he’s attracted to men and women, wow, we get it, it’s really not that shocking or interesting) with, say, any of the later scenes between The Doctor and Rose to see how real, complex relationships can actually be explored with a SF backdrop. Funnily enough, and returning to my Torchwood-is-Angel-in-a-not-very-good disguise theme, this problem afflicted Angel as well - Buffy dealt with “adult” themes far more convincingly (witness the episodes in the aftermath of the loss of her mother).

So, keeping an open mind…  Season 2 opens with a new arrival appearing through the space/time plot generator… hang on a minute, isn’t that Spike from, er, Buffy and latterly Angel ? I wanted to like it… I really did… but at this point I was left wondering who was next. Surely the only thing stopping Tony Head making an appearance is that most of the audience know him as the PM from Little Britain ? A more appropriate interloper from that show might be Daffyd, loudly declaring - “I’m the only gay in Torchwood” - as the rest of us look on in boredom. 

I admit defeat. I don’t think I’m ever going to like it. Fingers crossed for Stephen Moffat’s tenure at the helm of Who - here’s hoping that the need to unite a family audience doesn’t continue to result in the constant lurching around between styles and tone that, in my opinion, hampered the past couple of outings. I guess that brilliant in patches is still better than not brilliant at all.