It's entirely my own fault. When possible, I try to stand right at the front at a gig - in the main part, this is because I like having the barrier to lean on, so I don't get a bad back from being stood in one place too long. I also like feeling close to the music, and the people involved, observing their playing techniques and the like. Tragic as this sounds, this habit also allowed me to shake hands with Morrissey once, a moment that rakes in my all time Personal Top Ten.
Attending a gig last night, I did the same. But I wasn't watching Joan Baez or the Durutti Column here. No, I was stood right in front of Bob Fucking Mould! And that means noise. A lot of beautiful, fast noise. As a result, my ears are still ringing.
Nevermind. Bob has long been a strong proponent of the power trio, starting with Husker Du, then with Sugar and now teaming with up bassist Jason Narducy and drummer Jon Wurster to record Silver Age and embark on this current tour. The album is a return to Mould's vein of fast rock music with power-pop references thrown in. My advice would be to go listen to it if you liked the last few Husker Du albums and most of what he did with Sugar.
Prior to the main attraction, support act North Atlantic Oscillation did their 30 minute set. From Scotland (a clue being one member having the St Andrews cross on his forearm), their music is interesting enough, with enough electronic effects that you feel it must take hours to set up all the wires, their main issue is that they lack any kind of on-stage personality. I can imagine they come across a lot better on CD.
Then the main attraction. Yes, so Mould is 52 years old and looks like Alexi Sayle's skinnier brother, but that doesn't mean he still can't rock like a bastard. The band jump right in by playing the entire first half of Sugar's Copper Blue album. Another album you really, really need to hear if you haven't done already.
As stated at the start, they were loud, with pretty much no let up throughout. Mould has made albums with an acoustic or electronic slant, but this is pure power trio rock, with no slowing down throughout. If it at times the volume seems hard work for the audience, the sheer hard work the three put in up there on stage puts it in context. I don't think I've ever seen a band sweat so much - it was dripping from the guitars, the drummer's shirt was drenched by the end and Mould's glasses actually had perspiration congealing on them by the end, so that it looked like they were covered in milk.
Alongside the Sugar material, there's a fair chunk of the new album and a healthy amount of Husker Du classics. So, so what if the ringing in my ears might keep me up for a few nights? I saw Bob Mould do what he does best.
Tuesday 21 May 2013
Saturday 18 May 2013
Frank Talking
As I pointed out not long after I decided (why?) to write this blog, Frank Castle aka The Punisher is one of my favourite comic book creations.
As any geek knows, attempts to get Frank on film have been mixed. The 2004 one with Thomas Jane wasn't too shabby, suffering perhaps by changing the location from New York to Florida (due to being cheaper to film there), but Jane did a fine job. He was better still when he voiced the character in a video game the following year.
To his dues, he backed out of a sequel due to feeling the script wasn't any cop. Judging by Punisher: War Zone, he was right. As a fan of the character, it must have been a bit of a downer. Still, he got to play a guy with a massive penis for a few years in Hung, so at least the work was still rolling in. Until last year, where he decided to revisit the terror of criminals everywhere in a short film.
Dirty Laundry was apparently made for very little, with Jane and Ron Perlman putting their time in for free. It's a sign of how out of the loop I am that I only got round to watching it. My verdict? It's pretty damn good, with a level of violence straight from the comic books. There's rumours of a Punisher TV series in development - if Marvel or whoever has any sense, they'd get Jane involved. The man looks the part to a tee. The issue comes with whether any TV network has the balls to not shackle Frank down with PG standards. We want to see him cutting the guts out of sex traffickers, throwing people from the top of skyscrapers. Stuff like that.
You can Dirty Laundry it on youtube. Be warned though, there's some pretty extreme punishment to be seen.
As any geek knows, attempts to get Frank on film have been mixed. The 2004 one with Thomas Jane wasn't too shabby, suffering perhaps by changing the location from New York to Florida (due to being cheaper to film there), but Jane did a fine job. He was better still when he voiced the character in a video game the following year.
To his dues, he backed out of a sequel due to feeling the script wasn't any cop. Judging by Punisher: War Zone, he was right. As a fan of the character, it must have been a bit of a downer. Still, he got to play a guy with a massive penis for a few years in Hung, so at least the work was still rolling in. Until last year, where he decided to revisit the terror of criminals everywhere in a short film.
Dirty Laundry was apparently made for very little, with Jane and Ron Perlman putting their time in for free. It's a sign of how out of the loop I am that I only got round to watching it. My verdict? It's pretty damn good, with a level of violence straight from the comic books. There's rumours of a Punisher TV series in development - if Marvel or whoever has any sense, they'd get Jane involved. The man looks the part to a tee. The issue comes with whether any TV network has the balls to not shackle Frank down with PG standards. We want to see him cutting the guts out of sex traffickers, throwing people from the top of skyscrapers. Stuff like that.
You can Dirty Laundry it on youtube. Be warned though, there's some pretty extreme punishment to be seen.
Monday 13 May 2013
Mud, Sweat and Beers
Because I'm a pathetic specimen of a human being, I really enjoy watching The Big Match Revisited on ITV4 (or, given the normally show it about 9am on Saturday, I record it first). Currently, they're working through the 1978/79 season and it's never less than amusing to spot the vast changes we've seen in English football over the last 30 years.
For one thing, they show plenty of games from outside the top flight, which I believe was part of the contract fromt he Football League - Match of the Day on the BBC used to do the same. This means you get to see clashes like Brentford against Watford in the Third Division, where the young Luther Blissett, in the days before he was inspiring Italian anarchists, maintaining dignity (and scoring a goal) while taking sickening abuse from the crowd. Top man.
Of which reminds us of the old cliché about black players - that they were soft and couldn't handle the rough stuff. To which you can only wonder if they ever saw Cyrille Regis play? The man was built like a tank and was capable of battering his way past the overweight carthorse centre halves that most teams employed back then.
"Overweight" is certainly a theme you get from watching players back then, as plenty of the lads showing off their stuff may have wished the shirts had a little more "give", judging by the ample bellies on display. If you think Sam Alladyce has only looked that chunky since he packed in playing, think again. After all, a victory celebration of about ten pints of beer was the norm back then. Though for the losing team, commiseration could come in the form of ten pints of beer.
Luckily, the pitches of the time pretty much prohibited any kind of quick movement, with that vital ingredient of "grass" often being left out of the mix, leaving the surface looking either like Ypres 1917 or Southport beach. Though running fast wasn't an option, neither was standing still, lest you be sucked into the quagmire like in some dodgy horror film - and nobody was going to be able to pull the likes of Larry Lloyd and Mickey Droy back out, that's for sure. It makes you watch in awe that the likes of Steve Coppell and Laurie Cunningham could glide on the mud like it was a bowling green.
Watching old football games can also provide a nice little sociological insight in normal life at the time. The pitchside adverts are for the likes of Visionhire - the idea of people renting a TV may seem a bit alien to people these days, but it was the norm back then. I can remember my mother paying the subs for her parents in town back in the day. Eh ba gum.
And of course, through it all, there's the magnificent Brian Moore, whose head did indeed look uncannily like the London Planetarium. The only downside is watching it in the knowledge Liverpool end up as champions! Bah!
For one thing, they show plenty of games from outside the top flight, which I believe was part of the contract fromt he Football League - Match of the Day on the BBC used to do the same. This means you get to see clashes like Brentford against Watford in the Third Division, where the young Luther Blissett, in the days before he was inspiring Italian anarchists, maintaining dignity (and scoring a goal) while taking sickening abuse from the crowd. Top man.
Of which reminds us of the old cliché about black players - that they were soft and couldn't handle the rough stuff. To which you can only wonder if they ever saw Cyrille Regis play? The man was built like a tank and was capable of battering his way past the overweight carthorse centre halves that most teams employed back then.
"Overweight" is certainly a theme you get from watching players back then, as plenty of the lads showing off their stuff may have wished the shirts had a little more "give", judging by the ample bellies on display. If you think Sam Alladyce has only looked that chunky since he packed in playing, think again. After all, a victory celebration of about ten pints of beer was the norm back then. Though for the losing team, commiseration could come in the form of ten pints of beer.
Luckily, the pitches of the time pretty much prohibited any kind of quick movement, with that vital ingredient of "grass" often being left out of the mix, leaving the surface looking either like Ypres 1917 or Southport beach. Though running fast wasn't an option, neither was standing still, lest you be sucked into the quagmire like in some dodgy horror film - and nobody was going to be able to pull the likes of Larry Lloyd and Mickey Droy back out, that's for sure. It makes you watch in awe that the likes of Steve Coppell and Laurie Cunningham could glide on the mud like it was a bowling green.
 |
| Viv Anderson runs with the ball, probably to prevent the onset of trenchfoot |
And of course, through it all, there's the magnificent Brian Moore, whose head did indeed look uncannily like the London Planetarium. The only downside is watching it in the knowledge Liverpool end up as champions! Bah!
Thursday 9 May 2013
Every Single One Of Us...
If anything was going to shift me out of my blogging apathy, it would be the retirement of the one man outside my family who has been responsible for a great deal of joy in my life.
I was five years old when Alex Ferguson jaunted down from Aberdeen to take the job of returning Manchester United to the top of English football. Anyone who knows their football history knows it wasn't easy, and there were times most of us would have happily seen him booted back to Glasgow, but in 1993 he delivered what we all wanted, and the prize of being Champions of England was ours again. Sir Matt Busby went to his grave a few months later knowing his legacy was safe.
From then on, there have been few seasons that hasn't seen some silverware brought back to Manchester, and we've even got our hands on the top European prize a couple of times. It's been one hell of a ride, with a huge cast of players passing through. He once said his greatest achievement was "knocking Liverpool off their fucking perch" - you can argue how much of that they did themselves, but the simple fact is that Ferguson nearly tripled our number of English titles. In the early 90s, such a statistic seemed the stuff of a madman's dreams. Yet here we here, from constant underachievers to the most successful team in England over the course of one man's spell in a job.
His replacement? I remain to be convinced if David Moyes is the man for the job. I hope he is, for obvious reasons, but it's going to be beyond weird at the start of next season when another man is sitting in Fergie's seat on the bench.
I was five years old when Alex Ferguson jaunted down from Aberdeen to take the job of returning Manchester United to the top of English football. Anyone who knows their football history knows it wasn't easy, and there were times most of us would have happily seen him booted back to Glasgow, but in 1993 he delivered what we all wanted, and the prize of being Champions of England was ours again. Sir Matt Busby went to his grave a few months later knowing his legacy was safe.
From then on, there have been few seasons that hasn't seen some silverware brought back to Manchester, and we've even got our hands on the top European prize a couple of times. It's been one hell of a ride, with a huge cast of players passing through. He once said his greatest achievement was "knocking Liverpool off their fucking perch" - you can argue how much of that they did themselves, but the simple fact is that Ferguson nearly tripled our number of English titles. In the early 90s, such a statistic seemed the stuff of a madman's dreams. Yet here we here, from constant underachievers to the most successful team in England over the course of one man's spell in a job.
His replacement? I remain to be convinced if David Moyes is the man for the job. I hope he is, for obvious reasons, but it's going to be beyond weird at the start of next season when another man is sitting in Fergie's seat on the bench.
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