Generally, I try to avoid Question Time, as I can only spit so much blood before I collapse in a heap. Luckily, there's NCIS on the other side, and watching Jethro Gibbs kick arse is infinitely more preferable to seeing politicians worm their way out of a straight answer.
For reasons beyond my ken, I did tune into the last half of QT, to be confronted by the mug of Nigel Farage, head of the United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP are kind of like a posh version of the English Defence League, except instead of going on marches where you shout abuse at Muslim folk, you have nice parties where you lament the moral decline of the nation. They don't want to beat up immigrants, essentially, just put them on the first boat home.
Anyway, when the panel were discussing people from That London being told if they want social housing, they have to move up here, to the Grim North, Nigel seized his chance. Clearly, this was all the fault of those foreign people who just need to rock up at immigration at Heathrow and they're given a free house - if Daily Mail readers were listening, they'd add in a free BMW and plasma TV to the deal.
Sadly for the would-be leader, when the subject was thrown open to the audience, one young man put his hand up and stated he worked for the immigration services and that Nifty Nige was talking what is known as complete bollocks. Despite having shushed down a few quiet mutterings during his own lecture, Farage then proceeded to try and shout the poor lad down constantly.
I actually wouldn't be too surprised if we're told that the guy was a BBC plant, put there to help push the broadcaster's left-wing, liberal, pro-Europe agenda.
The problem I have is that in cases such as this, we end up with John Ford of the myth getting far more space than the truth: fine when you're looking to make a great western with the Duke, not so good when you're dealing with the lives of real people. Perhaps Farage should have looked to another reason why there is such a shortage of social housing - the fact huge chunks of it have been flogged off.
On a similar note, tabloids like the Daily Mail like to slam Health and Safety as being detrimental to a good life. It gets in the way, slows down people trying to do their job. But, surely the advancement of such procedures has saved countless lives over the years? When do you hear about times where careful evaluation of danger has helped? Perhaps we all like being enraged and don't want to hear stories with happy endings.
But back to Farage and his shouting. It's a common tactic I've noticed in politics these days: when someone disagrees with you, or has provided evidence to derail your point, you shout enough so that nobody remembers them. Or, as our esteemed Prime Minister does, when you've been caught talking shite, spin it back on your accuser by saying they have no sense of humour. Works every time!
Friday 27 April 2012
Wednesday 25 April 2012
Time Bomb
It's strange how a bad start to the day just puts a crimp on the whole thing. I woke up this morn feeling tired, it was raining as I waited for the bus, which then ran late so I missed a connection to another. By all of ten seconds or so.
In my mentally not-quite-awake state, I found a target to blame. Somebody who got on the bus and got off again two stops later - a mere five minute walk, I reckoned. The lazy get! If I were now ruler of the world, I'd order the DCAF to get a guided missile landing on their house right about now. Searching through the rubble for their stuff should prove to be good exercise. Nobody causes me to be late and escapes my wrath. At least not in my head.
I'd also like to sick a small nuclear device on everyone involved in those wretched BT adverts infecting the television and billboards. The annoying main guy in it drives me to indescribable levels of rage, though that should be reserved for the absolute bellends who created him and write his obnoxious dialogue. Scum!
It's not all bad, though. At the weekend, I found a vinyl copy (from 1981) of Dare by the Human League for only £2.50 in a charity shop. It's always great when you find treats like that. As an aside, it got me thinking about Philip Adrian Wright, the guy who did the slides for the band. Apparently, he works with his partner, a designer, and I wondered whether he did it for something to do, or because he has to work still. You'd like to think it wasn't the latter - I mean, he co-wrote Don't You Want Me?, which sold shedloads! Not bad for a guy who couldn't play any musical instrument three years before. Kudos, dude.
After all, most of us only work for the wedge. It's a rare bod indeed who can work purely for the love of it. Artists who have an established enough name not to need to bow to commercial pressures, perhaps. Professional athletes, too and being one of them is one of the few things in which your place in the global pecking order can be absolutely decided. This means you have real targets to focus on when you have to get out of bed at 4am to hit the gym.
Usian Bolt, for example, is the fastest man in the planet over 100 metres. It's an indisputable fact - and the only way you change it is by beating his time without the use of drugs and/or rocket boots. It's not like if you're in a band and another sells more records than you - when that happens, you can just blame society's failings for not seeing your genius. If Bolt beats you on the track, it's because he's faster than you.
The rest of us don't have this luxury of knowing our place in the pecking order of things. We sit at our desks and mess about on computers and, in my case, never really see the results of what I'm doing. In fact, some days I reckon all the reports I put together are shot into space to ensure they don't have to be read by anybody. So if an alien race invades because they heard about poor performance in my office, I'll take the blame as we're led away to toil in their salt mines.
In my mentally not-quite-awake state, I found a target to blame. Somebody who got on the bus and got off again two stops later - a mere five minute walk, I reckoned. The lazy get! If I were now ruler of the world, I'd order the DCAF to get a guided missile landing on their house right about now. Searching through the rubble for their stuff should prove to be good exercise. Nobody causes me to be late and escapes my wrath. At least not in my head.
I'd also like to sick a small nuclear device on everyone involved in those wretched BT adverts infecting the television and billboards. The annoying main guy in it drives me to indescribable levels of rage, though that should be reserved for the absolute bellends who created him and write his obnoxious dialogue. Scum!
It's not all bad, though. At the weekend, I found a vinyl copy (from 1981) of Dare by the Human League for only £2.50 in a charity shop. It's always great when you find treats like that. As an aside, it got me thinking about Philip Adrian Wright, the guy who did the slides for the band. Apparently, he works with his partner, a designer, and I wondered whether he did it for something to do, or because he has to work still. You'd like to think it wasn't the latter - I mean, he co-wrote Don't You Want Me?, which sold shedloads! Not bad for a guy who couldn't play any musical instrument three years before. Kudos, dude.
After all, most of us only work for the wedge. It's a rare bod indeed who can work purely for the love of it. Artists who have an established enough name not to need to bow to commercial pressures, perhaps. Professional athletes, too and being one of them is one of the few things in which your place in the global pecking order can be absolutely decided. This means you have real targets to focus on when you have to get out of bed at 4am to hit the gym.
Usian Bolt, for example, is the fastest man in the planet over 100 metres. It's an indisputable fact - and the only way you change it is by beating his time without the use of drugs and/or rocket boots. It's not like if you're in a band and another sells more records than you - when that happens, you can just blame society's failings for not seeing your genius. If Bolt beats you on the track, it's because he's faster than you.
The rest of us don't have this luxury of knowing our place in the pecking order of things. We sit at our desks and mess about on computers and, in my case, never really see the results of what I'm doing. In fact, some days I reckon all the reports I put together are shot into space to ensure they don't have to be read by anybody. So if an alien race invades because they heard about poor performance in my office, I'll take the blame as we're led away to toil in their salt mines.
Monday 23 April 2012
Happy 30th, Spec-Chums!
Apparently it's St George's Day today, but I couldn't give a toss about that. A far more important milestone is that this is the 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum hitting the public.
Uncle Clive Sinclair's finest moment helped bring gaming to a wider audience, thanks to his policy of making it affordable to normal folk. I remember we had one at school, an old 48k with the (in)famous rubber keys, and I was smitten. The time of the week we were allowed to mess about on it was always cherished by me and one of the happiest days of my childhood was when I got my own Speccy for Christmas.
So, in tribute to Sir Clive and the little bit of microchips and plastic that started me on a journey that led to terminal disillusionment at the end of Mass Effect 3 (yes, I'm still annoyed), here's my five favourite titles on my initial burst into the wonderful world of gaming.
1. Skool Daze/Back to Skool
Seminal in every word games where you played Eric, a young miscreant who needed to swipe his somewhat negative school report before it made it back home - resulting in a severe thrashing from dad, I expect.
But apart from that, you had to attend lessons, sit quiet during assembly and dodge a good kicking from the school bully. And if you did take a punch, you could always take it out on the local swot, who would always answer every questions the teachers posed.
Both games were pretty much the same, though the sequel had the added bonus of putting a girl's school next door, from which you could charm a young lady into doing your lines for you.
Brilliantly, you could also rename all the characters, so that you could have revenge on that dickhead at school who called you names, as well as make Eric's girlfriend that wee lassie you had a crush on. Wither you now, Kelly Atkinson?
2. Boulder Dash
Of course, Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy are legendary names in the platform/puzzle genre, but I always preferred this slice of taxing gaming.
The conceit was simple: every level is a cave where there's a time limit to collect the diamonds. But to make things difficult, one wrong move resulted in a big rock landing on the bonce. And that was it, really: like many of the time, it was simple but often infuriatingly difficult. Very, very addictive too.
3. Tracksuit Manager
My brother and I must have bought about 30 different footy manager games between us for the Speccy, but this was always the yardstick. Though Football Manager may be the birth of the genre, this beauty is the point where losing days at a time to a game became all-too-easy.
Rather than putting you in charge of a league team, Tracksuit Manager handed you the reins to that all-too Impossible Job: leading England to international glory. Amazingly for the time, you had about 100 players to choose from, all real-life ones too. In the days where Football Manager 2012 has apparently anybody who ever kicked a ball in its database, this might not seem much, but trust me - the fact you could stick Martin Hodge in goal or Keith Houchen up front was very impressive to us misguided youth of the time.
After working your way through qualification and the odd tour of the South Pacific (as I would always arrange, for some reason), there was the drama of the World Cup or European Championships. The tension generated when putting your troops against the likes of Diego Maradona and Ruud Guillit could have been cut with a knife.
4. Daley Thompson's Super Test
Superior joystick waggler in that it give you a wide range of sports to compete in - from the more obvious sprinting and cycling to more skill-related gigs as ski-jump and, err, pistol shooting.
Daley's stock was at an all-time high, given he'd won Gold in LA the year before, which saw this game's prequel, Daley Thompson's Decathlon, knacker more young male wrists than a subscription to Mayfair. Super Test provided many hours of fun for this young gamer,
Best of all, as well as a somewhat moving version of the theme from Chariots of Fire, it didn't have that impossible bastard High Jump event that its predecessor had.
5.Mercenary
The road to Grand Theft Auto begins here, methinks, with this sandbox-style game even receiving a 99% score in Your Sinclair.
And quite right too. Mercenary saw you play the titular role of a bod trapped on a war-ravaged planet after their spaceship elected to stop working. The plot was simple: earn enough cash to get it fixed up by working for one or both of the factions scrapping for control. You had the whole planet to explore and huge underground complexes. Miles ahead of it's time, it also spawned a couple of decent sequels a few years later for the Amiga.
Uncle Clive Sinclair's finest moment helped bring gaming to a wider audience, thanks to his policy of making it affordable to normal folk. I remember we had one at school, an old 48k with the (in)famous rubber keys, and I was smitten. The time of the week we were allowed to mess about on it was always cherished by me and one of the happiest days of my childhood was when I got my own Speccy for Christmas.
So, in tribute to Sir Clive and the little bit of microchips and plastic that started me on a journey that led to terminal disillusionment at the end of Mass Effect 3 (yes, I'm still annoyed), here's my five favourite titles on my initial burst into the wonderful world of gaming.
1. Skool Daze/Back to Skool
Seminal in every word games where you played Eric, a young miscreant who needed to swipe his somewhat negative school report before it made it back home - resulting in a severe thrashing from dad, I expect.
But apart from that, you had to attend lessons, sit quiet during assembly and dodge a good kicking from the school bully. And if you did take a punch, you could always take it out on the local swot, who would always answer every questions the teachers posed.
Both games were pretty much the same, though the sequel had the added bonus of putting a girl's school next door, from which you could charm a young lady into doing your lines for you.
Brilliantly, you could also rename all the characters, so that you could have revenge on that dickhead at school who called you names, as well as make Eric's girlfriend that wee lassie you had a crush on. Wither you now, Kelly Atkinson?
 |
| Rumbled! |
Of course, Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy are legendary names in the platform/puzzle genre, but I always preferred this slice of taxing gaming.
The conceit was simple: every level is a cave where there's a time limit to collect the diamonds. But to make things difficult, one wrong move resulted in a big rock landing on the bonce. And that was it, really: like many of the time, it was simple but often infuriatingly difficult. Very, very addictive too.
3. Tracksuit Manager
My brother and I must have bought about 30 different footy manager games between us for the Speccy, but this was always the yardstick. Though Football Manager may be the birth of the genre, this beauty is the point where losing days at a time to a game became all-too-easy.
Rather than putting you in charge of a league team, Tracksuit Manager handed you the reins to that all-too Impossible Job: leading England to international glory. Amazingly for the time, you had about 100 players to choose from, all real-life ones too. In the days where Football Manager 2012 has apparently anybody who ever kicked a ball in its database, this might not seem much, but trust me - the fact you could stick Martin Hodge in goal or Keith Houchen up front was very impressive to us misguided youth of the time.
After working your way through qualification and the odd tour of the South Pacific (as I would always arrange, for some reason), there was the drama of the World Cup or European Championships. The tension generated when putting your troops against the likes of Diego Maradona and Ruud Guillit could have been cut with a knife.
 |
| Rare high drama, Spectrum style |
Superior joystick waggler in that it give you a wide range of sports to compete in - from the more obvious sprinting and cycling to more skill-related gigs as ski-jump and, err, pistol shooting.
Daley's stock was at an all-time high, given he'd won Gold in LA the year before, which saw this game's prequel, Daley Thompson's Decathlon, knacker more young male wrists than a subscription to Mayfair. Super Test provided many hours of fun for this young gamer,
Best of all, as well as a somewhat moving version of the theme from Chariots of Fire, it didn't have that impossible bastard High Jump event that its predecessor had.
5.Mercenary
The road to Grand Theft Auto begins here, methinks, with this sandbox-style game even receiving a 99% score in Your Sinclair.
And quite right too. Mercenary saw you play the titular role of a bod trapped on a war-ravaged planet after their spaceship elected to stop working. The plot was simple: earn enough cash to get it fixed up by working for one or both of the factions scrapping for control. You had the whole planet to explore and huge underground complexes. Miles ahead of it's time, it also spawned a couple of decent sequels a few years later for the Amiga.
 |
| It's better then it looks. |
Friday 20 April 2012
Mayors of Simpleton
Change: I'm generally all for it. The reason we got our sorry arses out of the trees and making things like digital watches is because homo sapiens strived to create change for the better and it's not just yer actual inventions that come under this. Concepts such as equality and tolerance come about because some brave soul decided that something wasn't quite right with the world around them.
Sometimes, though, there's change for the sake of it, which is never a good thing. Blogger has recently introduced a new system for writing and publishing drivel like this, and to be frank it's a load of old crap. What was wrong with the old one? Nowt. It's better to just tweak things than bring in huge changes some of the time.
Of course, that Alan Sugar should have been given a Peerage by a Labour government says a lot. That a man whose principal goal in life, it seems, is the accumulation of capital, whose catchphrase is "you're fired" should be rewarded in such a way tells you everything about how the Labour party has moved from their apparent core values.
Mind, I wonder how many people could actually say how Sugar has made his wedge? All I know is that he made some crap computers back in the 1980s and was Chairman of Spurs through a period best known for his falling out with manager Terry Venables. Does he actually do much bar shout at idiots on TV these days? At least with Branson the Beard you know you're looking at a top class businessman - and if nothing else his record label put out both Metal Box and Dare. Shame they screwed over XTC, mind. With Sugar, I just think of the twat who killed off the ZX Spectrum. Wanker!
Sometimes, though, there's change for the sake of it, which is never a good thing. Blogger has recently introduced a new system for writing and publishing drivel like this, and to be frank it's a load of old crap. What was wrong with the old one? Nowt. It's better to just tweak things than bring in huge changes some of the time.
Which brings me, kind of, to this whole concept of elected Mayors that's doing the rounds at the moment. I'm not entirely sure if it's not just a lot of fuss over something that will make little or no difference to our lives. Though I think I might be being put off the idea by the palaver going on down in That London. The fact that a lot of people can be convinced to vote for someone like Boris Johnson is enough to put you off democracy, let alone anything else. Comedian Jeremy Hardy is one of the few people in the media to get it bang on when he said "He may seem like a lovable buffoon, but you know he wouldn't hesitate to line you all up against a wall and have you shot".
Which is bang on, really. If he'd been born 100 years earlier, he'd have been a real life General Melchett from Blackadder Goes Forth, sending thousands upon thousands of men to be slaughtered while enjoying a nice cup of tea.
Which is bang on, really. If he'd been born 100 years earlier, he'd have been a real life General Melchett from Blackadder Goes Forth, sending thousands upon thousands of men to be slaughtered while enjoying a nice cup of tea.
Everyone else, it seems, are happy to give Johnson plenty of publicity to portray his public image as a harmless idiot. He seems to bring out the worst aspects in the English psych of tipping our hat and deferring to the posh guy, because, y'know, they're the ones born to rule and all that.
Not that I'd unequivocally give my support to Ken Livingstone either - he's kind of a George Galloway lite, a huge ego overwhelming any good intentions he may have. Which is a shame, as he was one of the few politicians in the 1980s who supported gay rights and knew that if you wanted peace in Northern Ireland, you were going to have to talk to the IRA eventually.
Mind, he could probably do with all the support he can garner. When you have members of your own party putting the boot in it's not looking too good. And that's before you get into Lord Alan Sugar telling everyone that Kenny isn't the man for him. Nothing wrong with that, of course, free speech and all. But then
Not that I'd unequivocally give my support to Ken Livingstone either - he's kind of a George Galloway lite, a huge ego overwhelming any good intentions he may have. Which is a shame, as he was one of the few politicians in the 1980s who supported gay rights and knew that if you wanted peace in Northern Ireland, you were going to have to talk to the IRA eventually.
Mind, he could probably do with all the support he can garner. When you have members of your own party putting the boot in it's not looking too good. And that's before you get into Lord Alan Sugar telling everyone that Kenny isn't the man for him. Nothing wrong with that, of course, free speech and all. But then
Mind, I wonder how many people could actually say how Sugar has made his wedge? All I know is that he made some crap computers back in the 1980s and was Chairman of Spurs through a period best known for his falling out with manager Terry Venables. Does he actually do much bar shout at idiots on TV these days? At least with Branson the Beard you know you're looking at a top class businessman - and if nothing else his record label put out both Metal Box and Dare. Shame they screwed over XTC, mind. With Sugar, I just think of the twat who killed off the ZX Spectrum. Wanker!
Wednesday 18 April 2012
True Romance of the Cup
It’ll have come to no surprise to anyone that the Football Association has managed to completely screw over Liverpool fans ahead of this year’s FA Cup final. It’s merely another symptom of the level of fuckwittery of the people running the best sport in the world.
To whit: the final, by tradition, is held on a Saturday, kicking off at 3pm. They already messed about a bit last year by having a full league schedule on the same day, meaning a lot of people wouldn't have had the chance to watch such a big game due to being at their own team’s game. Now, this year they've decided to hold the game in the early evening. Unfortunately for Liverpool fans, this means that by the time the game finishes, they’ll have long missed the last train back North, due to engineering works that have been scheduled for the last 18 months. Naturally, the FA didn't bother to check this as the shift in time was important to things like “maximising viewer revenue streams” and “brand awareness in other markets”. The actual poor sods paying stupid money for a ticket don’t seem to have raised much interest.
The common myth is that Manchester United destroyed the integrity of the cup. In 1999, we flew off to Brazil to take part in the inaugural World Club Championship, withdrawing from the FA Cup due to fixture congestion. Pundits have long since perpetuated the myth that this moment above all meant nobody could take the oldest football competition in the world seriously anymore. Of course, it’s a line that ignores just about all the important factors.
(As it happens, I wasn't best pleased about it myself, thinking we should have just played a bunch of reserves against whoever we drew, and I was especially miffed when we subsequently embarrassed ourselves in the games. That the whole farce of a tournament was never repeated shows it was all a colossal waste of time.)
The FA, I suspect, are quite happy someone else is taking the flak for the fading of the glory of the cup. For it ignores their own series of decisions that have seen most fans see playing in it as a fairly low priority:
a) Let’s start with the fact they sold the name of it, so that commentators on TV have to refer to “The FA Cup, sponsored by Ann Summers' New Vibrator Range” or whoever has stumped up the cash this year.
b) Getting rid of semi-final replays. Alright, maybe I’m biased as a United fan, as we had some crackers of these in 1985, 1990 and 1999.
c) And on the topic of semi-finals, deciding to play them at fucking Wembley. It’s been said many times by many people, but it somewhat obviously removes any allure of playing in the final. We know why it’s been done (because the FA need to pay off the stupidly huge bill for building that pile-of-crap new Wembley stadium), but the fact last Saturday of having' tens of thousands of scousers having to get down to London to a early afternoon kick-off is absolute madness.
d) Finally, and more obviously, fucking around with the times of games to suit TV. Chelsea vs Tottenham on Sunday started at 6pm on a Sunday evening. What kind of time is that for a football game?
Not that the FA are unique in this kind of thing. In the past, the people running football were in for the power, the prestige (especially club owners) and the money (especially the authorities). These days, you suspect, they've got rid of the first two in that list. Football corruption in certain nations is rife, especially around a betting industry that is gaining more prominence, but is generally ignored by a complicit media. Andersred has written a superb article on how the powers-that-be in football refuse to do anything about the crucial issues concerning the game.
My own club has suffered from this attitude: I’m even aware that the people in charge of Manchester United probably don’t like me. When I go to a game, on average ten times a season, the most I spend is on my ticket and £3 on a programme. They’d much rather have some one-off tourist in the seat, who’ll visit the club shop and spend a fortune on souvenirs.
Football isn’t dead, even if the body is beginning to smell funny. The success of clubs like AFC Wimbledon shows that supporters can make things happen on their own terms. The rest of us may have to make do with casting envious glances to Germany, where supporters are treated with at least some degree of respect from their clubs.
To whit: the final, by tradition, is held on a Saturday, kicking off at 3pm. They already messed about a bit last year by having a full league schedule on the same day, meaning a lot of people wouldn't have had the chance to watch such a big game due to being at their own team’s game. Now, this year they've decided to hold the game in the early evening. Unfortunately for Liverpool fans, this means that by the time the game finishes, they’ll have long missed the last train back North, due to engineering works that have been scheduled for the last 18 months. Naturally, the FA didn't bother to check this as the shift in time was important to things like “maximising viewer revenue streams” and “brand awareness in other markets”. The actual poor sods paying stupid money for a ticket don’t seem to have raised much interest.
The common myth is that Manchester United destroyed the integrity of the cup. In 1999, we flew off to Brazil to take part in the inaugural World Club Championship, withdrawing from the FA Cup due to fixture congestion. Pundits have long since perpetuated the myth that this moment above all meant nobody could take the oldest football competition in the world seriously anymore. Of course, it’s a line that ignores just about all the important factors.
(As it happens, I wasn't best pleased about it myself, thinking we should have just played a bunch of reserves against whoever we drew, and I was especially miffed when we subsequently embarrassed ourselves in the games. That the whole farce of a tournament was never repeated shows it was all a colossal waste of time.)
The FA, I suspect, are quite happy someone else is taking the flak for the fading of the glory of the cup. For it ignores their own series of decisions that have seen most fans see playing in it as a fairly low priority:
a) Let’s start with the fact they sold the name of it, so that commentators on TV have to refer to “The FA Cup, sponsored by Ann Summers' New Vibrator Range” or whoever has stumped up the cash this year.
b) Getting rid of semi-final replays. Alright, maybe I’m biased as a United fan, as we had some crackers of these in 1985, 1990 and 1999.
c) And on the topic of semi-finals, deciding to play them at fucking Wembley. It’s been said many times by many people, but it somewhat obviously removes any allure of playing in the final. We know why it’s been done (because the FA need to pay off the stupidly huge bill for building that pile-of-crap new Wembley stadium), but the fact last Saturday of having' tens of thousands of scousers having to get down to London to a early afternoon kick-off is absolute madness.
d) Finally, and more obviously, fucking around with the times of games to suit TV. Chelsea vs Tottenham on Sunday started at 6pm on a Sunday evening. What kind of time is that for a football game?
Not that the FA are unique in this kind of thing. In the past, the people running football were in for the power, the prestige (especially club owners) and the money (especially the authorities). These days, you suspect, they've got rid of the first two in that list. Football corruption in certain nations is rife, especially around a betting industry that is gaining more prominence, but is generally ignored by a complicit media. Andersred has written a superb article on how the powers-that-be in football refuse to do anything about the crucial issues concerning the game.
My own club has suffered from this attitude: I’m even aware that the people in charge of Manchester United probably don’t like me. When I go to a game, on average ten times a season, the most I spend is on my ticket and £3 on a programme. They’d much rather have some one-off tourist in the seat, who’ll visit the club shop and spend a fortune on souvenirs.
Football isn’t dead, even if the body is beginning to smell funny. The success of clubs like AFC Wimbledon shows that supporters can make things happen on their own terms. The rest of us may have to make do with casting envious glances to Germany, where supporters are treated with at least some degree of respect from their clubs.
Monday 16 April 2012
Family Values
Books about rock bands can be incredibly dull, especially if you’re a fan. Long drawn out descriptions of how everyone met, dry descriptions of how dull the recording process is and lists of chart placements. If you’re lucky, you get the various members calling each other names over who had the last brown M&M backstage in Kansas in 1980.
The exceptions tend to be about those bands/singers with unique personalities: the Smiths and the Clash spring to mind. To that, we can add British Sea Power, who have the advantage of their one-time manager Roy Wilkinson also being a journalist. Also, he was the older brother of two of the band, perhaps putting him in the ideal position to write Do It For Your Mum - a kind of memoir of his time pushing them onwards through the dodgy world of being a fairly successful band.
To this listener, British Sea Power may well have been the only band of the first decade of this century that really mattered. Their albums were superb, their live performances usually compelling. I remember first seeing them somewhere in London not long after they’d signed to Rough Trade, having known one of the people who did their press. She’d told me they were “from your way”, though we only caught the last 15 minutes of their show. However, this involved them stomping their way from a one-chord glam/drone rock affair, with their guitarist climbing the lighting rig and their keyboard player arming himself with a military drum, leaving the stage to march through the crowd. Clearly, I thought at the time, this was a band worth getting into. Wilkinson’s book has tales of people who thought the same, but to the extremes. There are fans who cover hundreds of miles to see a show on the other end of the country before turning up for their job the next morning – typical of a lot of bands, I would imagine.
But the crux of the story contained in Do It For Your Mum is around another member of the Wilkinson family.
Even as the band forms in the late 1990s, Ronald Wilkinson is a World War Two veteran well into his 70s, having brought up his six children in the small Cumbrian village of Natland. When his two youngest sons Scott and Neil form a band, he suddenly takes a deep interest in both them and indie rock in general. Nick Cave becomes a firm favourite - the only other musician to his ears who can be ranked higher than British Sea Power.
Indeed, it’s the tales of Wilkinson Snr that make up the best parts of the book. He’s constantly questioning Roy about the band, wanting to know every aspect of their development and why things aren't moving faster. He tells his son that he’s tried to contact U2 about getting a support slot, reasoning that even though the Irish supergroup are “charlatans, everyone knows that” it’ll be “good exposure”. Reading every text source he can get his hands on, he also urges his sons to further heights with the words “do if for your mum, do it for the Butthole Surfers”, having decreed the heroes of 80s Underground Indie to be a A Proper Band.
As stated, the book works due to Roy Wilkinson’s skill as a writer. The band themselves don’t really appear all that much: having interviewed Neil “Hamilton” Wilkinson and guitarist Martin Noble many years ago, I can confirm they’re lovely chaps, and the feeling in the book is that the whole band are a bunch of laid-back types who deal with the madness of being in a rock band with some ease. For the main part, at least - eventually, the road takes it toil and crankiness turns to quasi-revolt towards their manager's ideas.
Pressures begin to tell on him as well. There’s a touching moment where he reflects that while working with the band has brought him much closer to his dad (to the degree it actually begins to annoy him), it causes him no shortage of understandable angst at causing his relationship with his daughter to suffer.
There's also his frustration at not being able to push the group to the heights enjoyed by former support acts like the Killers and the Libertines. It's an understandable position: the band were hardly death metal and many of their singles had both the melodic strength and anthemtic nature of, say, Mr Brightside. Yet it appears that British Sea Power will have to be content with what they have. A shame, but there's always the music and there's always family: Do It For Your Mum is a worthy tribute to the values of both.
The exceptions tend to be about those bands/singers with unique personalities: the Smiths and the Clash spring to mind. To that, we can add British Sea Power, who have the advantage of their one-time manager Roy Wilkinson also being a journalist. Also, he was the older brother of two of the band, perhaps putting him in the ideal position to write Do It For Your Mum - a kind of memoir of his time pushing them onwards through the dodgy world of being a fairly successful band.
To this listener, British Sea Power may well have been the only band of the first decade of this century that really mattered. Their albums were superb, their live performances usually compelling. I remember first seeing them somewhere in London not long after they’d signed to Rough Trade, having known one of the people who did their press. She’d told me they were “from your way”, though we only caught the last 15 minutes of their show. However, this involved them stomping their way from a one-chord glam/drone rock affair, with their guitarist climbing the lighting rig and their keyboard player arming himself with a military drum, leaving the stage to march through the crowd. Clearly, I thought at the time, this was a band worth getting into. Wilkinson’s book has tales of people who thought the same, but to the extremes. There are fans who cover hundreds of miles to see a show on the other end of the country before turning up for their job the next morning – typical of a lot of bands, I would imagine.
But the crux of the story contained in Do It For Your Mum is around another member of the Wilkinson family.
Even as the band forms in the late 1990s, Ronald Wilkinson is a World War Two veteran well into his 70s, having brought up his six children in the small Cumbrian village of Natland. When his two youngest sons Scott and Neil form a band, he suddenly takes a deep interest in both them and indie rock in general. Nick Cave becomes a firm favourite - the only other musician to his ears who can be ranked higher than British Sea Power.
Indeed, it’s the tales of Wilkinson Snr that make up the best parts of the book. He’s constantly questioning Roy about the band, wanting to know every aspect of their development and why things aren't moving faster. He tells his son that he’s tried to contact U2 about getting a support slot, reasoning that even though the Irish supergroup are “charlatans, everyone knows that” it’ll be “good exposure”. Reading every text source he can get his hands on, he also urges his sons to further heights with the words “do if for your mum, do it for the Butthole Surfers”, having decreed the heroes of 80s Underground Indie to be a A Proper Band.
As stated, the book works due to Roy Wilkinson’s skill as a writer. The band themselves don’t really appear all that much: having interviewed Neil “Hamilton” Wilkinson and guitarist Martin Noble many years ago, I can confirm they’re lovely chaps, and the feeling in the book is that the whole band are a bunch of laid-back types who deal with the madness of being in a rock band with some ease. For the main part, at least - eventually, the road takes it toil and crankiness turns to quasi-revolt towards their manager's ideas.
Pressures begin to tell on him as well. There’s a touching moment where he reflects that while working with the band has brought him much closer to his dad (to the degree it actually begins to annoy him), it causes him no shortage of understandable angst at causing his relationship with his daughter to suffer.
There's also his frustration at not being able to push the group to the heights enjoyed by former support acts like the Killers and the Libertines. It's an understandable position: the band were hardly death metal and many of their singles had both the melodic strength and anthemtic nature of, say, Mr Brightside. Yet it appears that British Sea Power will have to be content with what they have. A shame, but there's always the music and there's always family: Do It For Your Mum is a worthy tribute to the values of both.
Thursday 12 April 2012
Side Project
Against my better judgement, I've decided to start another blog. I've long wanted to write more about football, specifically Manchester United, but just wanted a decent angle to do so.
So, I've embarked on a mission to write short (around 500-1000 words) biographies on everyone who has played for the club in the time I can recall being a supporter - since the summer of 1988 - up to anyone who has played for us this season. I figure it could make for a half-decent history of the team over the last couple of decades.
I don't expect it to garner anything but the smallest of interest, or even care that much, as I'm doing it mainly for myself. Though one hope is that by the time it's finished, it'll be a superb tool in helping any United fan waste an afternoon at work.
I'm fully intending on continuing to work on The Tedious World, however. Any excuse to write random bits of crap and stick them on the internet has to be taken, after all.
For what it's worth, Some Redshirts Live Forever can be found here. I may sort out the crap layout at some point in the future.
So, I've embarked on a mission to write short (around 500-1000 words) biographies on everyone who has played for the club in the time I can recall being a supporter - since the summer of 1988 - up to anyone who has played for us this season. I figure it could make for a half-decent history of the team over the last couple of decades.
I don't expect it to garner anything but the smallest of interest, or even care that much, as I'm doing it mainly for myself. Though one hope is that by the time it's finished, it'll be a superb tool in helping any United fan waste an afternoon at work.
I'm fully intending on continuing to work on The Tedious World, however. Any excuse to write random bits of crap and stick them on the internet has to be taken, after all.
For what it's worth, Some Redshirts Live Forever can be found here. I may sort out the crap layout at some point in the future.
Saturday 7 April 2012
Blunt Insight
It's been said by many before, including me, the standard of football pundits on the country's national broadcaster is absolute crap.
What's irked me this time is BBC favourite Mark Lawrenson. On Football Focus on Saturday lunchtime, he states 18-year-old Arsenal player Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain should be in England's squad for this summer's European Championships as you should take the form players. A fair enough stance.
However, fast forward a few hours to that night's Match of the Day and after we watch the Norwich City vs Everton clash, Gary Lineker asks young Mark about Norwich's striker Grant Holt, who is the second top scoring English player this season. He's a player who, despite being 30 and in his first season of top-flight football, is enjoying a good spell of form. Gary wonders whether Grant could make the Euros in a few months?
"No" is the empathetic answer. Try to work that one out, though the cynic in me would suggest that if Holt played for Lawrenson's beloved Liverpool - perhaps in place of Andy "Mr £30 million" Carroll - he'd be singing a different song.
But this is the quality of football punditry on the BBC these days. Alan Shearer may well have been one of the best strikers around in his 1990s heyday, but his TV work puts him on par with the guy from the Monty Python sketch who can only answer "I hit the ball, and it was in the back of the net!" to every question. Infamously, at the last World Cup, he admitted before (I think) the Algeria vs Slovenia game that he had no idea about any of the players.
Since then, he hasn't learned much and the most we tend to get from him is "from there, he really should be scoring" when someone - perhaps Andy "Mr £30 million" Carroll - misses a sitter from a yard out. Well, thanks, Alan, I never would have come to that conclusion myself. You're justifying the license fee all by yourself, there.
Now, despite the evils of Sky, you have to give them some due for how they approach things. Sure, they have Jamie "Literally" Redknapp on the books, but at least there's Graeme Souness sitting next to him with a look of total contempt etched across his Begbie-esque features.
Also, since this season, they've brought Gary Neville into the fold. Never the most popular player outside Manchester United fans (and he wasn't all that with a lot of us, either), he's taken to the role like a natural, helping the company after they had to bin those two dinosaurs Grey and Keys. While those two (and Lawrenson and Alan Hansen on BBC) were from a different era of football, Neville is only just retired and brings that insight into his work. Weirdly, even fans who despised the guy as a player have been impressed by his honesty, directness and punditry work.
ITV seem to have taken this cue and brought in Nev's former captain Roy Keane to add a bit of directness to their coverage to counter the personality vortex of Gareth Southgate. Like Neville, he's not scared of putting the boot into United when they deserve it - contrast with Alan Hansen saying he'll back Kenny Dalglish to the hilt, when it's clear to the rest of the world that Liverpool are sinking fast.
The BBC need to sort their football footage out - fast. As an anchor, Gary Lineker has the charisma of a breezeblock and their whole approach is far too cosy. If management were brave, they'd attempt to bring in some new blood before it all descends into the realms of parody last seen with Ron Manager on The Fast Show.
Oh, and for the record, I reckon Grant Holt should go the Euros, but probably only because he's a Cumbrian lad. Get Scott Carson in there too and it'll be a fine summer for the homeland.
What's irked me this time is BBC favourite Mark Lawrenson. On Football Focus on Saturday lunchtime, he states 18-year-old Arsenal player Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain should be in England's squad for this summer's European Championships as you should take the form players. A fair enough stance.
However, fast forward a few hours to that night's Match of the Day and after we watch the Norwich City vs Everton clash, Gary Lineker asks young Mark about Norwich's striker Grant Holt, who is the second top scoring English player this season. He's a player who, despite being 30 and in his first season of top-flight football, is enjoying a good spell of form. Gary wonders whether Grant could make the Euros in a few months?
"No" is the empathetic answer. Try to work that one out, though the cynic in me would suggest that if Holt played for Lawrenson's beloved Liverpool - perhaps in place of Andy "Mr £30 million" Carroll - he'd be singing a different song.
But this is the quality of football punditry on the BBC these days. Alan Shearer may well have been one of the best strikers around in his 1990s heyday, but his TV work puts him on par with the guy from the Monty Python sketch who can only answer "I hit the ball, and it was in the back of the net!" to every question. Infamously, at the last World Cup, he admitted before (I think) the Algeria vs Slovenia game that he had no idea about any of the players.
Since then, he hasn't learned much and the most we tend to get from him is "from there, he really should be scoring" when someone - perhaps Andy "Mr £30 million" Carroll - misses a sitter from a yard out. Well, thanks, Alan, I never would have come to that conclusion myself. You're justifying the license fee all by yourself, there.
Now, despite the evils of Sky, you have to give them some due for how they approach things. Sure, they have Jamie "Literally" Redknapp on the books, but at least there's Graeme Souness sitting next to him with a look of total contempt etched across his Begbie-esque features.
Also, since this season, they've brought Gary Neville into the fold. Never the most popular player outside Manchester United fans (and he wasn't all that with a lot of us, either), he's taken to the role like a natural, helping the company after they had to bin those two dinosaurs Grey and Keys. While those two (and Lawrenson and Alan Hansen on BBC) were from a different era of football, Neville is only just retired and brings that insight into his work. Weirdly, even fans who despised the guy as a player have been impressed by his honesty, directness and punditry work.
ITV seem to have taken this cue and brought in Nev's former captain Roy Keane to add a bit of directness to their coverage to counter the personality vortex of Gareth Southgate. Like Neville, he's not scared of putting the boot into United when they deserve it - contrast with Alan Hansen saying he'll back Kenny Dalglish to the hilt, when it's clear to the rest of the world that Liverpool are sinking fast.
The BBC need to sort their football footage out - fast. As an anchor, Gary Lineker has the charisma of a breezeblock and their whole approach is far too cosy. If management were brave, they'd attempt to bring in some new blood before it all descends into the realms of parody last seen with Ron Manager on The Fast Show.
Oh, and for the record, I reckon Grant Holt should go the Euros, but probably only because he's a Cumbrian lad. Get Scott Carson in there too and it'll be a fine summer for the homeland.
Wednesday 4 April 2012
Don't Look Back. Or do...
For the last couple of years, for want of anything else to get me at Christmas, my mother has given me the most recent editions of Bygone Whitehaven, a series by a guy called Michael Moon (the first six alongside his then wife Sylvia). Since I was a young kid, I always had an interest in local history, inherited from my dad, so I find a lot of interest in these. Top bookshop he runs too, if you happen round that way.
Being up to double figures in this series, the author has begun using pictures of the town that are vaguely recognisible to me, born in 1981. My memories of my town in the 1980s seem, in the main, fairly grim. The main street was covered with these horrid brown brick things that would hold dying plantlife. The bricks were the same as those used to make the brutalism-inspired multi-storey car park that loomed over one end of the town. At the other end, in the harbour, were two huge silos used to store chemicals used for the detergent factory up on one side of the valley the town centre sat in. All of these are gone now, bar the car park.
As we were constantly told by teachers in our history lessons, Whitehaven used to be the third biggest port in the country, behind London and Bristol. We were also told that New York nicked their idea of having streets on a grid pattern from us as well, which strikes me as a bit implausible, but you take whatever you can when it comes to boasts when you were a kid in the 80s/90s where you were told at school that unless you had enough brains to get out of town, your options were either the army or the dole.
Coal was a major reason of why the town was such a player on the national stage, once upon a time. When you read about the 1980s in England, and of all the defining moments of that time, the Miners’ Strike would be a big one. I was too young to remember the events, but what I do recall is both my mother refusing to say the name Thatcher (it was always “that woman”) due to her staunch support of an industry that was a huge part of her family – two of her brothers were working in Whitehaven's last pit during the strike and would end up laid off when the axe fell in 1986. I can also remember the times I visited one of those uncles, whose house overlooked the pit - handy for the commute. Looking from the living room window down to the site, even then I could feel some sadness of its slow descent into dereliction. Years later, it was saved from demolition and began a worthwhile new use as a museum of the town’s mining history.
I get a similar kind of sadness whenever I take the train between Whitehaven and Carlisle and pass through where Workington's old steel works stood. The story I was always told was that railway lines made from Workington steel were the best in the world, exported as far as India. Naturally, some genius had the idea to shut the whole site down.
My town has changed almost beyond recognition in my lifetime. A lot of it is for the better: the harbour especially was a complete dump back then and it looks modern and relatively looked after these days. But when I do think back to the limited amount of past that I can, there’s sorrow and anger of a world that was allowed to pass by successive governments: West Cumbria used to have a sense of purpose and even if the work was dirty, hard and very dangerous, it created a sense of pride. Which leads to the central problem: it wasn't the removal of the industry itself (arguments about coal mining being uneconomical and creating an un-environmentally friendly fuel are valid) but the lack of anything to replace it that may leave places like Whitehaven and Workington as ghost towns in the decades to come.
Rant over, but Don Draper was right, as he so often is (the handsome swine), when he used a definition of nostalgia as ‘pain from an old wound’.
Being up to double figures in this series, the author has begun using pictures of the town that are vaguely recognisible to me, born in 1981. My memories of my town in the 1980s seem, in the main, fairly grim. The main street was covered with these horrid brown brick things that would hold dying plantlife. The bricks were the same as those used to make the brutalism-inspired multi-storey car park that loomed over one end of the town. At the other end, in the harbour, were two huge silos used to store chemicals used for the detergent factory up on one side of the valley the town centre sat in. All of these are gone now, bar the car park.
As we were constantly told by teachers in our history lessons, Whitehaven used to be the third biggest port in the country, behind London and Bristol. We were also told that New York nicked their idea of having streets on a grid pattern from us as well, which strikes me as a bit implausible, but you take whatever you can when it comes to boasts when you were a kid in the 80s/90s where you were told at school that unless you had enough brains to get out of town, your options were either the army or the dole.
Coal was a major reason of why the town was such a player on the national stage, once upon a time. When you read about the 1980s in England, and of all the defining moments of that time, the Miners’ Strike would be a big one. I was too young to remember the events, but what I do recall is both my mother refusing to say the name Thatcher (it was always “that woman”) due to her staunch support of an industry that was a huge part of her family – two of her brothers were working in Whitehaven's last pit during the strike and would end up laid off when the axe fell in 1986. I can also remember the times I visited one of those uncles, whose house overlooked the pit - handy for the commute. Looking from the living room window down to the site, even then I could feel some sadness of its slow descent into dereliction. Years later, it was saved from demolition and began a worthwhile new use as a museum of the town’s mining history.
I get a similar kind of sadness whenever I take the train between Whitehaven and Carlisle and pass through where Workington's old steel works stood. The story I was always told was that railway lines made from Workington steel were the best in the world, exported as far as India. Naturally, some genius had the idea to shut the whole site down.
My town has changed almost beyond recognition in my lifetime. A lot of it is for the better: the harbour especially was a complete dump back then and it looks modern and relatively looked after these days. But when I do think back to the limited amount of past that I can, there’s sorrow and anger of a world that was allowed to pass by successive governments: West Cumbria used to have a sense of purpose and even if the work was dirty, hard and very dangerous, it created a sense of pride. Which leads to the central problem: it wasn't the removal of the industry itself (arguments about coal mining being uneconomical and creating an un-environmentally friendly fuel are valid) but the lack of anything to replace it that may leave places like Whitehaven and Workington as ghost towns in the decades to come.
Rant over, but Don Draper was right, as he so often is (the handsome swine), when he used a definition of nostalgia as ‘pain from an old wound’.
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