Stick Your Foot Down

Long after I should have done, I finally got round to watching Drive last night, the thriller from last year that stars Ryan Gosling as an enigmatic wheel man. Worth the wait? To a degree.

Before that, it's once again a credit to the star that he's taken a less obvious route to artistic credibility despite starting out alongside Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears et al on the Mickey Mouse club. His pretty-boy looks could easily have seem him take the obvious route, so fair play to the guy for doing films like Drive.

Which is, as I'm sure has been said many times already, the kind of film Steve McQueen would have been doing 50 years ago. Gosling's nameless character has that slow, deliberate talking style (plenty of pauses) that Mr Cool himself perfected. Toothpick constantly in gob, there's very few moments we see him react to anything on an emotional level, and most of them seem to suggest some deep-seated anger issues.

So: our man works as a stunt driver and mechanic by day and does getaway driving at night, offering clients a five minute window for his services. Unfortunately, two pieces of bad judgement cause all manner of problems. First, his boss at the garage gets in with gangster Bernie Roses (superbly played by Albert Brooks) to fund a racing team to which the hero will be the star driver.

Secondly, the driver gets involved with his neighbour, the initially-apparent single mother Irene. Only in turns out the wee bairn's dad is doing time, and when he gets out it appears he's in hock to a bunch of heavies. Offering to act as driver for a job to clear the debts and ensure the young family are left alone. Naturally, it all goes South is big style.

Two things surprised me: first, this was a way more gruesome film than I was expecting. People are terminated in spectacularly violent fashion, with close range shotgun blast to head and fork to eyeball being two of the most, umm, memorable.

Also, there actually isn't that much high-speed hi-jinks. There are several scenes of driving round LA, but only two of yer-actual chase scenes. If anything, this is more of a straight crime thriller, which leads to the problem of predictability - it falls into cliche a tad at times.

All the same, Drive looks brilliant. Director Nicolas Winding Refn makes nighttime LA look cool and sleazy, helped by a top soundtrack choc-full of 80s esque electro-pop. Performances are top notch all round - extra credit must go to Gosling for not losing his style despite wearing a ridiculous jacket throughout most the film.

Loses points for not having enough Christina Hendricks, mind.

Sensory Depravation

I've been a right slack sod on the blogging front the past few days. This has, in main, been due to the somewhat tropical conditions in merry England the past few days.

Noel Coward famously noted that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Well, Noel, only if I have to, as it has a tendency to drain me of any energy whatsoever. Such weather is all very nice if you can lay in your shorts on the sofa, listening to the Beatles with a large supply of cold beers at hand, but not so when you have to turn up to work in a badly-air conditioned office. Especially when going around in your bare feet, shirt buttons all undone is not approved of by management. Nazis!

All the same, it's given me the opportunity to sort out the contents of my MP3 player to get some more appropriate soundtracks on. A song like Bye Bye Pride by legendary Aussie outfit the Go-Betweens (of whom I need to write more about) is perfect, as is the likes of the Beach Boys or the late 80s XTC.

All of which reminds me that despite my disdain of faceless global companies that have no concern for the fate of humanity beyond their role as consumers of their goods, I do show a weird level of brand loyalty at times.

Principally, this is towards Sony. Since picking up one of the original Playstations back in 1999, I've stood by them since, resolutely refusing to even consider picking up a Xbox, even if they’re going for peanuts. I've also given my Japanese friends plenty of wedge for their music products – carrying a Walkman rather than an Ipod. I even sided with Sony Records in that case against George Michael*.

It’s the Walkman that’s got me writing this. It’s a fine piece of kit: I can get about 1000 songs on it, pick up FM radio and it’s even got a little microphone on it, which makes it very handy for quickly recording any musical ideas my band gets before their lost to the ether. Pretty sweet for £80 new.

It also has this weird little function called SenseMe™ Channels. What it does is read all the songs you've got saved on them and put them in the categories Extreme, Energetic, Relax, Upbeat, Mellow, Lounge, Emotional and Dance. How does it work, you ask? To quote two great men, I don’t know, but it does!

Or does it? Well, it can do: Depeche Mode and the Pet Shop Boys both seem to fall under Dance, which makes some kind of sense. But then it also puts Snowman by XTC in there: a sad little acoustic number. Naturally, it’s all relative – you can dance to anything, I suppose, if you've got the right sense of timing.

That said, I struggle to see how Part Company by the Go-Betweens is Upbeat and Tonight The Streets Are Ours by Richard Hawley is Extreme. I also loved how Depressed Beyond Tablets by Half Man Half Biscuit came under Energetic, given it’s a song about being in such a bad mental state, you can pretty much do sod all (“the results of my life are a stream of nil-nils”).

Technology fail all round then, and proof needed that we still need obnoxious DJs yet. After all, you don't want to be tuned into Radio 4 at three in the morning, hoping for some relaxing tones only to have Bingo Master's Breakout by the Fall come screaming out.

*Only joshing, Georgie. And Father Figure is an ace song.

Space Age Love Story

Forty hours over 13 days: that’s the time I've put into Mass Effect 3. It would have been sooner, if I didn't have to go to work. Bah. At the end of it all, I was left with a tinge of sadness at saying farewell to the characters that I’d worked with and a whole load of other feelings about the ending. I doubt I’ll offer anything new to what has already been said out there, but minor spoilers may abound.

So: over the two previous games, our main man/woman (former in my case) Commander Shepard has been busy trying to warn everyone that a bunch of rather nasty bods called the Reapers are on their way with the express intention of wiping out all intelligent life in the galaxy, as they apparently do every 50,000 years or so. This is obviously A Very Bad Thing, and something Shep cannot emphasise enough. In response, he’s treated as being like those maniacs you see in city centres carrying a sign saying “THE END IS NIGH”.

When we get started, we’re on Earth – called to explain our lunatic ramblings. Naturally, the bad guys suddenly turn up without as much a phonecall of warning and proceed to bomb seven shades of shite out of Vancouver. One sharpish exit stage left later, and we’re left with the job of essentially nagging the rest of the universe into getting their arses in gear to prevent mass extinction. Not something you’d have thought they’d need much persuasion about, but politics is politics, and our orders are to shake some action and get everyone onside.

Most of the various people from all species that we came across previously are back, assuming you didn't let them get killed. Because I’m ace (ahem), I made it through the “Suicide Mission” at the end of Mass Effect 2 with a full complement still breathing. Therefore, they all rocked up here, though I somehow managed to completely miss Kasumi. Doh.

As per with these games, the voice acting is top notch. Martin Sheen is back and the characters of Hackett and Anderson are made sheer bad-ass by sheer virtue of being voiced by Lance Henrikson and Keith David, the former’s character despite having the same name as someone from prog-rock bores Genesis. Most notable of the newcomers is Freddie Prinze Jnr, who offers his, erm, voice talents to Lt. Vega, a chap apparently made entirely of muscle. Interestingly, the alien race who copped for it last time the Reapers rolled into town have Jamaican accents and in an inversion of stereotype, the one who can join the squad (if you bought the Collector’s Edition or coughed up extra for his Downloadable Content) is a real hardcore type who’s known nothing but war and loss. No jamming with Bob for him.

The game itself: no real major changes from ME2, just a few tweaks. Diving between cover is handy for getting better angles for shots, especially when the more-brainy mooks start lobbing grenades at you, and the new melee attack is very handy and enjoyable to use. The mining section of the prequel has been streamlined, which is good, and the way you pick up side-quests by essentially nosing in on other people’s conversations somehow works, even if sometimes you rush past someone and only hear a few words before the quest pops up in your journal.

There’s some annoying bugs in the cut scenes: a couple of times, my man’s head spun like he was possessed by the devil and in others, his eyes bulged out to the degree that I thought Marty Feldman had been raised from the dead. Bizarre stuff.

For me, and I’d think a lot of people, we’re mainly here for the story. In most aspects, we get the quality we expect. The first visit to the centre of galactic government sees leaders reluctant to help out, oblivious to the scale of the threat – nice parallels to the 1930s, there. I also got a warm feeling when old friends turned up – especially Mordin, Jack and Tali, who turned out to look nothing like I expected under that mask. The Shepard I played as showed plenty of signs of the immense stress he was put under, being charged with saving everyone everywhere. You’d need more than a few Yoga sessions to deal with that kind of pressure, I’d expect, and his nightmares of those he couldn't save gave him a nice sense of depth and development.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the ending. By accident I’d already kind of spoiled it for myself by catching sight of a headline on a news feed that said “Mass Effect 3 Gamers Protest Ending” or something. Having now played it for myself… I see their point. It’s a damp squib of an ending that doesn't tell us anything, probably leaves us with more questions and essentially ensures all the choices we've made over the past two or three games were pretty much irrelevant. We get some vague explanation of why the Reapers do what they do – which wasn't “for the lolz” as I thought it might be.

On a positive, Buzz Aldrin makes a cameo, which was pretty cool – after all, for all our whizzing around space in a gameworld, he’s a dude that’s done it for real and walked on the moon.

My main qualm was the lack of any epilogues of sorts to show us how everyone got on after we’re done with them. The actual fate of Shepard I can deal with, it’s the other people I want to see, like did Tali get her house on her homeworld? And on the topic of her, I didn't feel the whole romance sub-plot got a proper resolution either. How does Vega get on in N7? It’s as if Bioware can only end a game on a cliffhanger rather then a true resolution. While the Metal Gear Solid series lacked Mass Effect’s level of immersion, it did end the whole storyline with the feeling that just about all loose ends were tied up: we knew who lived or died and what the future held for those still with us. Except Nastasha. I missed her sexy, three-packs-a-day voice in MGS2 and 4.

Of course, the more ambiguous/rubbish (delete as applicable) ending for the Mass Effect trilogy may well be because it’s not over after all. I fully expect some DLC* in a few months (weeks?) that will offer to tie up loose ends in exchange for a few more of my pounds. That kind of thing is enough to piss anyone off, and it appears to have done so to a lot of folk out there. Did it leave me feeling cheated? A bit. Put it this way, I ran through ME2 twice in quick order to explore the choices. I’m very reluctant to play through this one again at the moment. Except that I do have that ME2 file where I made a lot of opposite choices, so it'd be interesting to see how that makes things different...

If/when the new content comes out (and on previous form, there will probably be three or four of these), I actually hope they don’t change the actual ending. Yes, it wasn't what a lot of people wanted or expected. But there you go: epic fail for Bioware/EA, but one they can perhaps learn from, rather than try to rewrite to please daft fuckers like me.

*Which reminds me that there’s another DLC for Dragon Age II that I’ll end up buying now I've finished with Mass Effect 3. I really am a complete fucking mug.

Leaving Home

It seems hard to believe it’ll be 13 years in October since I found myself starting the first year of my degree. 18-years-old, a naive, nervous kid from Cumbria transported down near That London. At the time, my mother thought I was running away from her, like they all do at such moments. Why hadn't I gone to Preston or Newcastle, only a two hour drive from home?

The reason was exactly that. The freshly-adult D.C. Harrison hadn't liked the shy, bumbling teenager he had thus so far been. I blamed my parents insomuch as they had brought me up in some crap hell-hole of a one-horse town where I was labelled a "puff" for daring to read outside lessons and would routinely take a kicking during enforced rugby matches that seemed less a competition and more an exercise in seeing who out of the other 29 could bounce on my head the most.

Thus, I decided that by going to university hours away from anybody who even vaguely knew me I could reinvent myself as some kind of cool cat to whom all the pretty girls would flock to, attracted by my Northern brogue. As it turned out, it was more a problem than anything, as I had to repeat myself about three times, as most of my fellow students hadn't heard a Northern accent outside the Gallagher brothers.

On the plus side, it was good to be away from the heavy working class machismo that I'd been brought up in. For the first time, I was hanging out with people from every combination of race, religion and sexuality. It was nice to be in an environment where a chap could, if so wished, flirt with another fellow and not expect to then suddenly find themselves in hospital as a result.

Sometime in Fresher’s Week, the Student Union had an event that was based around a Stock Exchange concept. The large screen (usually used to show football games) featured a list of drinks with prices, which fluctuated – I assume – dependent on what was selling. Being a tall chap, we were able to stand right by the bar and still be able to see what was going cheap over everyone else’s heads.

In hindsight, it seems a pretty stupid idea, doing as it does encouraging everyone to mix drinks like mad and induce mass hoying of ring. It certainly happened to my neighbours, though I someone managed to keep enough common sense to stick to the piss-weak lager they were serving on tap. Within weeks, a friendly skinhead on my course called Big Dave (and haven’t we all known a Big Dave at some point?) introduced me to Newcastle Brown Ale, which we worked out of all the bottled ales gave the best value for money and therefore became my tipple of choice throughout the rest of our studies. Strangely, I've not touched it since graduation, not even on my trip to LA in 2005 where it was bizarrely advertised on billboards all over Hollywood as being a drink for attractive young hipsters, rather than for factory workers from places like Wolverhampton and Hull to guzzle before the usual Saturday night scrap at closing time.

In hindsight of that year, it was maybe enough to survive. There were stories abound of burn-outs: indeed, I once helped a completely zonked-out vague acquaintance to bed after a frankly colossal all-day bender involving most drugs known to man washed down with a small lake of alcohol. A few days later I found out he’d been checked into the psychiatric wing of the local hospital. Happy ending: he subsequently took on a monk-like lifestyle and graduated with a first. Several lads I knew on my course dropped out before the first year was out, red-eyed and lost.

I nearly ended up there myself: I confess to playing up some kind of cliché as hard-drinking Northerner, helped by the fact that most of my fellow students (bar the Irish) couldn't hold their booze. Come Easter, however, a single bottle of beer at the start of the evening was enough to send me to my bed for a restless night of throwing up to the point of dry-retching. The false bubble of indestructibility was burst and I spent the next few months pretty much teetotal.

Lying in bed after that night, I came to the realisation that when it all comes down, you can't hide who you are from that nagging voice in the back of your head. I'm the least cool, hip person in the world and am tough as a Daisy. Subsequently, I limped through my degree with diminishing interest, preferring to spend my days playing Pro Evolution Soccer on Playstation and watching about four episodes of the Simpsons a day.

Three years concluded with me limping back up North with a heavy sense of “is that it?”, set to enter a two year spell in the Phantom Zone of unemployment that ended when a friend rescued me, setting in motion a series of events that saw me gratefully dragged up to the lifeboat HMS Manchester.

Years on, on a return visit to home, and after a fair few drinks, I made some kind of apology to my parents for being such a pain back then, especially for having the feelings described in the second paragraph here. My dad told me not to be so bloody daft.

Prolonged Talks

“No”. It’s not a complicated word, is it? Yet as the old adage goes, some people just won’t take it for an answer.

To whit, recently I decided to join the modern world and get yer proper wireless broadband in the flat. For the past five years, I've made do with one of those dongle things you plug into your PC. In the main, it worked fine but it got to the point where it was the same cost to upgrade and besides, I wanted to get my Playstation online.

So, the nice guy from the company came round, drilled a hole in the wall, fitted a wire through and pissed about up the telegraph pole a while. Not bad for a £19 connection fee and after a couple of days, I was assured that my new super-dooper broadband was doing the job. Therefore, I could cancel the contract for my dongle (a word I find hard to type/say without resorting to a Finbarr Saunders-esque “fnarr” and saying lines like “ah, I'll just plug my dongle into the socket”).

Not a tricky job, you would think. In the ideal world, it would go thus:

Me: Hello. I would like to cancel my connection to your mobile broadband.
Phone Person: Are you sure?
Me: Yes.
PP: Alright then. (types) There you go.
Me: Thank you.

A shame, then, that we have to live in this world, where concepts such as convenience and customer service go flying out of the window in the name of chasing a few quid. Put through to some poor sod working in a call centre in (presumably) India, he seemed positively distraught that his company wouldn't be getting my £20 a month anymore, as if his boss would come round to his house personally and extort the money from his family.

As it turned out, I was a “Gold” customer and therefore applicable for some big bonuses. Strange, as this was the first I’d heard of it. I was offered an Ipad or a new laptop. This may sound tempting, but my logic chip reasoned that anything given in exchange for me signing on for another year was probably a piece of old crap.

After another ten minutes of various offers, I managed to state that I’d rather just finish it all up. Instead, I was put through to the chap’s manager. He then proceeded to repeat pretty much everything I’d already heard, asking how long I’d had my laptop (I lied and said a year, rather than the truth, which is about six years, in a vain attempt to stop him going on) and how the Ipad they were offering was part of a range “just out this week, so this is a very good deal” and so on.

I’m fully aware I’m partly to blame for ending up on the phone for the best part of 30 minutes. I could easily have just said “look, I know you have a job to do, but for fucks sake, can you just close my fucking account, as I do have some vestige of a life to be getting on with”. But my mother brought me up to be good mannered: I've also inherited this from my dad, who can often be seen frothing with rage about some company as he dials the number, only to turn into politeness personified once he talks to somebody.

Eventually, I was seeming to get my way after stating I didn't want to pass on my contract to anybody I knew, that I knew I was losing my points (whatever they were) and that I didn't want to keep my dongle (fnarr) as a backup. Me being me, of course, by the end I felt like I should apologise to the poor sod - it's not like working in some call centre all day dealing with the likes of me is easy - instead of being pissed off that an apparent simple procedure sucked half an hour of my day away. Go figure.

Pitch Imperfect

"Tradition" is one of those words I've always viewed with some degree of suspicion. After all, it used to be traditional to stick an arrow at high velocity through the neck of any Scotsman who wandered South of Carlisle. Nowadays, thankfully, the Tartan Army are free to travel into a brave world of colour television, decent football and non-"Heavy" beer*.

Speaking of football, it also used to be traditional for the two teams playing in the FA Cup final to knock out a dodgy song apiece. My own team have been guilty of some horrors, especially when they tried to get clever and hire Pete Waterman on Move Move Move (Big Red Drum) in 1996. The fact Eric Cantona decided soon after that he'd had enough of football cannot be a coincidence. Throughout that decade, I can remember a few teams getting in celeb fans to beef up sales: for the ’97 final you had Suggs for Chelsea and Bob Mortimer for Middlesbrough. The latter did a cover of Chris Rea’s Let’s Dance, thereby exhausting the town's entire creative pool.

I could be wrong, but I think the pioneers for this kind of atrocity were Chas and Dave, always ready when their beloved Tottenham Hotspur made the final. In 1981, they (cough) hilariously made midget midfield maestro Osvaldo Ardiles the centrepiece of the number with his line “in ze cup for Totting-ham”, sung in his native Argentine tones. Bizarrely, when they made the cup final again a year later, Spurs forward Steve Archibald (a man whose bumfluff beard made David de Gea look tough) achieved the obscure feat of appearing on Top of the Pops with two different (ahem) artists on one show when he did his bit for his club team before rocking up with the Scottish national team for their World Cup anthem We Have a Dream. Personally, I've never dreamt about my two centre halves crashing into each like drunken hippos, leaving the Soviet forward a clear run on hapless keeper Alan Rough and sending the team crashing out, as ever, in the first round**.

Anyways, football teams don’t seem to make records these days. Not even the England team, which used to knock out a crock of shit every time they qualified for the World Cup, as did Scotland. Some of these travesties include 1982s This Time (We’ll Get It Right) – which they didn't, obviously, unless getting it right meant Kevin Keegan missing a sitter against Spain to see them knocked out. Four years later, the boys were proclaiming that We’ve Got The Whole World At Our Feet, which seemed a bit presumptuous. Not that it mattered, as Diego Maradona had the whole ball at his hand after he managed to outjump England ‘keeper Peter Shilton, despite being a fat shortarse.

Using a previously unseen degree of common sense, in 1990 the Football Association decided it may be an idea to involve people with experience of writing cutting-edge pop music. Hence, we get New Order singing a song with a wisely tenuous connection to football, vague allusions to the current prevalence of ecstasy in the clubs and John Barnes rapping about nothing in particular. Which, incidentally, was the sum total of what he did at the tournament itself.

But if you want the old school done right, then check out Old Trafford Blues by Martin Buchan, the b-side to Manchester United's 1976 cup final record. Written by the man himself, he tells us all about his teammates, including such lyrical crackers as "then there's Brian Greenhoff, he's got lots of skill/And he really needs it to play with Gordon Hill". Meow, Martin! Despite the title, the backing track is more like incidental music from George and Mildred. Still ace, though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtazqV2apzA

*Only joking, Scots readers.
** Sorry, again.

Press Gang

Stood in a shop the other day, I browsed the row of music magazines and found myself asking the question “who buys these anymore?”

14 years ago or so, I would buy Melody Maker every week and Q and Uncut every month. Back in the late 90s, Uncut used to give away a great free CD every month where you’d have stuff like a Mansun b-side alongside the Go-Betweens. There’d be interesting features on cinema as well. Q, despite it’s current state as a tedious celeb mag, used to be pretty good reading too. Melody Maker was fine too, this being before its ill-advised final throw of the dice in becoming a glossy that brought about the executioner’s axe.

Looking at it with hindsight, I realise that I was basically trying to educate myself about music that I wanted to hear. Living in the back end of nowhere, we had no record stores. The Internet was still a fairly new thing and finding information wasn't that easy. In the sixth form common room, nobody else seemed to know much beyond what was in the charts: by chance, I’d stumbled upon the Smiths, Joy Division and the Jam. From the radio, REM and the Lightning Seeds tickled my fancy but the fag-end of Britpop was truly desperate: wither now, 3 Colours Red? Though I did buy theaudience album, I have suspicion that may have had something to do with my teenage hormones getting excited by Sophie Ellis-Bexter.

Thing is, at the age of 18 I packed myself off to uni at some town close to That London. There were record stores where I pick up LPs by Stevie Wonder, Sam and Dave and just about anything New Order did. There were people I met who knew about music and would lend me stuff. Add to that limited student resources and the music press seemed a tad irrelevant.

Now, a decade on, I’m surprised there’s still so many of them going. Uncut and Mojo seem to go through a routine of having Dylan, Beatles and the Stones on the cover with tags like “shocking new revelations” about Led Zep or suchlike. The NME has long ceased to be seen as a serious magazine, not helped by it’s relentless bandwagon jumping in recent history.

A book once stated that the past was a different country. That may well be so, but in music terms, it feels like one that’s been mapped to the point where we know what colour kex Jagger was wearing at Altamont. Perhaps they've given up on trying to compete with the websites in breaking new bands – I can remember Uncut attempting to create a buzz around Hamell on Trial, which struck me at the time as an odd horse to back.

Regardless, they seem to be recreating the worst aspects of Classic Rock magazine, where nothing of worth was created pre-punk. Their time is surely limited and I'm not sure they'll be missed - not in the way the completely fab Your Sinclair was anyways. Now that was a magazine.

Cause and Effect

I do apologise for the lack of blog activity the last few days. There's only one excuse: Mass Effect 3 is out and I've been far too busy saving the universe to do much else bar eat crisps and shower. So far, it's proving suitably epic and my mind isn't focused enough to write my usual tosh here. They'll be some activity in the week, I promise.

Locals Shops for Local Gamers

As I mentioned in my somewhat unfocused rant from Monday, I had been let down by a video games store in my desire to purchase Mass Effect 3. Yesterday, I trooped up to town and got my £5 deposit back and on leaving, reflected it may be the last time I set foot in one of those shops, if rumours are to be believed.

It's not too surprising. A lot of businesses are struggling these days - video games and music being two areas copping for it the most, in the main part due to the rise of websites such as Play and Amazon, which are often a fair bit cheaper. A lot of people may crow or not give a toss if some chain goes bust ("they were always dead expensive anyways") but as I noted, the people who work in these places are often teenagers looking to make a bit of spending cash. I certainly don't envy them (or anybody else, for that matter) trying to find new employment.

As an ardent gamer for the best part of 25 years, it's coming to an end of an era for me. On the days my brother and I were dragged wherever by my parents, going to a games store was just about the highlight of the day. Even if I didn't have the change to buy anything, looking through the racks to find a potential purchase was enough. Besides, I could always beg 50p from my dad if I could get the pleading expression on my face right. Or I could, ahem, persuade my brother to chip in, back in the days where I could physically intimidate him.

Back then (a term which makes me sound like a right old git), you got most of your games from little shops owned by nerdy looking guys with beards who would boast of once having a conversation with the guy who made Manic Miner. All these seemed to disappear around the time big business sussed out that there was serious money to be made in the industry.

Yet even the likes of HMV are now struggling, which doesn't make for good prospects for what little indie shops are left. Though I've used online shopping a fair bit myself, I would miss the choice. After all, how many of us wake up in the morn and think "I fancy a new game/album/book" - not anyone in particular - and jaunt out for a search for something that looks a bit interesting. It's how I came out buying Fallout 3, something that turned out very well, so this is one shopper who will miss the days of casual browsing. I may get used to eventually buying everything online, but it'll take a while.

Failing to Keep Calm and Carry On

As I've noted before, like Peter Griffin, a lot of things really Grind My Gears. I think it’s a result of being an overly anxious sort that I get wound up easily, resulting in inarticulate rants against anyone unfortunate to be in the vicinity. A friend reckons I’ll come out of the other end of this at the age of 50 as a kind of Buddhist Guru type, permanently chilled out and prone to dishing out pearls of wisdom to my kid brother’s children/grandchildren that I imagine will be forthcoming now he’s just got engaged.

Not now, though. No, for now I remain a man permanently on the edge of an aneurysm brought on by things like:

1) If any one organisation has gone straight to the top of my shitlist, it’s GMPTE. That’s the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive, for those outside the confines of the Best City in the World (Super Scientist and Stud Muffin Professor Brian Cox said so, which makes it true).

I could easily go off on one here about the lack of decent, affordable municipal transport provision in the city, but the main source of my ire is that on trooping to catch the bus one recent morn, I found myself waiting for 25 minutes longer than expected. Later that day, on checking online timetables, it was revealed that the schedule had been changed. Just a shame, then, that GMPTE had failed to change the timetables at the actual stops.

Now, I know what you’re saying. “My dear boy,” you sigh. “Why didn't you take another route when it was clear the one you wanted wasn't forthcoming?” But it’s never that simple, is it? You can be stood there, in the pouring rain at 7am and you will not be moved, because you just know that as soon as you’re round the corner, that sodding bus will chug along, merrily leaving you behind. So you will not be moved. You will wait as long as it takes, even as the water drips down your hair into your eyes and the feeling in your toes begins to fade. The timetable says the bus should be there, and that’s the bus you will take.

Incidentally, the changes that were made now mean the journey between home and work takes me an extra ten minutes. So that’s 20 minutes of my life gone every day I go to work. Thanks for that.

2) This post was inspired by buying some milk this morn. Now, this is an essential purchase on a Monday as I’m unable to function without a high level of caffeine in my bloodstream. I’m sure some of you know the horror as arriving at the workplace, pouring said drink and when adding milk, seeing the flakes of manky dairy product rise to the top. Despite the “use by” date saying March 10, it has gone off. Cue sigh, a brief moment of wondering whether to risk an upset stomach by drinking it anyways before pouring it down the sink and shifting my sorry arse back to the shop.

By my reckoning, this happens once every 50 cartons of milk I buy. But everytime never fails to bring about a deep sense of existential despair in my bones, as if the sight of what should have been a reassuring cup of coffee going down the plughole is instead my very soul washing away. Honestly, sometimes I could weep.

3) That the release date for Mass Effect 3 appears to have been put back from Tuesday to Friday. Now, anyone who knows me will know how excited I am by this game, to the degree I had put in a pre-order with a Certain High Street Game Store for the full-on package with lots of useless shit included, primarily to ensue I had the extra content promised. Additionally, I have booked Wednesday to Friday off work so that I could properly hammer it without causing my lady friend immense boredom.

However, fate has decreed otherwise. Not only do I apparently have to wait three more days, but said store have decided not to sell the game after all, rumour being because they’re too skint to pay EA for the copies up front. Bastards!

It’s all incredibly trivial, I know, but as Mozzer once noted, such a little thing makes a big difference.

On a final rant, something that seriously grinds my gears that isn't minor is when some old fart Cardinal says two fellas or two lasses getting married is an “aberration” that will cause moral decline across the nation. I've not got a boyfriend, and I don’t plan on getting married at all, but if two other people want to do so, then all the best to them. It doesn't destroy the “sanctity” of anything, it doesn't mean jack shit to anything except the happiness of two people. As I know by my tragically advancing age, we’re in the 21st century now, so let’s make an effort, eh? Cardinal Keith O’Brien, to use his own words, is a “grotesque subversion” of a man who probably wants people to be as miserable as possible so that they may take guidance from some old dude in Rome rather than seek fulfilment through concepts such as love and emotional peace with a partner they are able to be with free of stigma and prejudice.

He’s probably just jealous of all those happy campers having hot guy-sex anyways.

History Lesson

I can't help but admit that I'm a total geek when it comes to the history of Manchester United. I love knowing obscure facts and trivia. The worst part is that I can't help correcting people on such things - such as the dad of a friend talking about us beating West Ham 6-1 in 1966 and me butting in "it was in 1967, actually".

Because of this, I've really enjoyed Andy Mitten's series of books featuring former players talking candidly about their careers. We're The Famous Man United and Glory Glory! covered the 1980s and 1990s, now United! United! does the same for the 70s.

It was the most turbulent – and least successful - decade for the club since the 1930s, with five managers overseeing the legendary Busby team of the 60s decline into relegation. A single FA Cup win (plus the Division Two championship) were all the silverware fans had to cheer.

From 1973 to 1977, the club was managed by the flamboyant Tommy Docherty. Though his first full season saw the club endure relegation, they bounced back with a style sure to make older Reds misty eyed, based on youthful energy and skillful wingers. In 1977, they defeated Liverpool 2-1 in the FA Cup final a year after losing out to Southampton – a victory made sweeter as it prevented them from winning an unprecedented treble that United themselves would do in 1999.

All looked good: the forward line of Jimmy Greenhoff and Stuart Pearson (both interviewed here) offered flair, strength and mobility, wingers Gordon “Merlin” Hill and Steve Coppell had pace, unpredictability and industry backed up by young full backs Jimmy Nicholl and Arthur Albiston. The general view was that United would challenge for the big prizes.

Days after the cup victory, it was revealed Docherty was having an affair with the physio’s wife and was sacked with immediate effect. He was replaced with the more sedate Dave Sexton, whose more studied style of play never endeared him to the crowd, not helped by his sale of Stretford End heroes Hill and Pearson, replaced by the industrious Mickey Thomas and aggressive target man Joe Jordan.

Being a well- known hardcore United fan doubtless worked in Mitten’s favour in getting stories from the former heroes. We get honest opinions on teammates and managers. Martin Buchan, captain throughout the second half of the 70s into the early 80s, is complimented by many for being a great leader but is also described as "maybe not as intelligent as he thought he was" by another.

The managers also polarise opinion, especially Sexton, who did have his admirers in the team, such as Lou Macari while others believe the job was too big for a man who intensely disliked dealing with the press.

More so than the previous books, subsequent fortunes of the players after United vary wildly. Joe Jordan is enjoying no little success as assistant manager to Harry Redknapp at Tottenham Hotspur and Sammy McIlory has done wonders as manager with both Macclesfield Town and Morecombe. Gordon Hill runs a soccer school in Texas while Buchan (stated as being "cooler than the Fonz" by fans impressed by his smooth style on and off the pitch) works for the Professional Footballers Association.

At the other end, cult hero Jimmy Greenhoff lost everything when he was a cheated by a partner in an insurance business and, sadder still, has not spoken to his brother Brian, also a United player in the 70s, in decades. Gerry Daly (of the chant “five foot eight, underweight, Gerry Daly’s fucking great”) has suffered terrible personal tragedy and ill health. Several players remember Scots hardman Jim Holton, whose United career was stopped in an instant by a broken leg at Sheffield Wednesday and would die of a heart attack aged 42. Mitten fondly recalls the crowd’s chant of "six foot two, eyes of blue, big Jim Holton’s after you" by stating the man was six foot one, had brown eyes and if he did want to get after anyone, he’d have needed a motorbike to do so. All the same, Holton was good enough to represent Scotland in all three of their undefeated games at the 1974 World Cup, including a credible draw against reigning champions Brazil.

It’s true that this generation of players may be the last for whom playing for one of the biggest clubs in the world wasn't a ticket for life. Many have gone back to "normal" lives once the playing days ended: much-maligned reserve goalkeeper Paddy Roche works as a delivery driver, something you can never imagine a current top-flight player ever having to do outside gross financial mismanagement. Indeed, Lou Macari expresses incredulity when he hears of a "fringe" United player of today buying a £900,000 apartment.

The only negative I take from the books is that I'm jealous of the author for living my dream job - but at the same time I recognise the hard work the guy has put in since founding United We Stand when he was 15. True Reds won't do much better than investing in to his fine work documenting the history of our club.

Live and In Person

Like, I suspect, a lot of people, one of my big problems with modern day soul/R'n'B is the unyielding subscription to the foghorn style of singing that emerged at the end of the 1980s. The recently seven-thrower Whitney Houston started this trend before it was powered up by the likes of Mariah Carey. R Kelly would appear to cover it on the male end of things.

Old Git that I am, it all seems a long way from the days of Motown and Stax – Beyonce Knowles may well be highly regarded today, but I doubt she’d have made back-up for Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. To whit, listen to Otis Redding’s Live In Europe album to see a singer with an instantly recognisable voice giving it some major effort on the stage. There's a hardness to his voice that has been eradicated from a lot of pop music in the last 30 years.

Recorded in Paris in 1967 and released months before his tragic death, Live in Europe remains my favourite live album. How could it not be? This is Otis Redding. Backed by Booker T and the MGs. And the Memphis Horns. The perfomance was part of the Stax Revue that toured the continent and Britain, also featuring Sam and Dave among others – enough for me to have long stated that if I was Doctor Who for a day, that seeing the show would be top of my list of things from history to check out.

What makes this such an red-hot album is Otis’ showman skills – you can sense the crowd are in his grip. At the end of I Can't Turn You Loose, he screams “I know you think I’m gonna stop now – I ain’t gonna stop – HIT IT!” It’s wonderfully thrilling. Elsewhere, he manages to out-raunch Jagger on a frantic run-through of Satisfaction and take the Beatles’ Day Tripper in a totally different dimension.

The set ends, inevitabely, with Try a Little Tenderness, perhaps his anthem. In it's last seconds, his pleading reaches new heights and it's no surprise that the crowd beg him back for just a few more seconds.

What made Otis such a giant was not just his voice. With (Sitting On) The Dock of the Bay, it’s clear that he was looking to grow as an artist and take his music into new directions, fired up by how the Beatles had outgrown their early sound. Live in Europe, in a way, acts as an end of a chapter, leaving us to wonder what dimensons he (along with Stevie, Marvin and Curtis) would have taken Soul in the 1970s.