Another season comes to a close and let's be frank, as a Manchester United fan, it was hard to be too disappointed with what happened on Saturday night. Barcelona are as good as the hype and we're not actually that good, compared to previous years at least. If you'd said to me in November that we would win the league and reach the Champions League final, I'd have assumed you'd been sniffing the glue.
As for the final, I'm not sure we ever stood much chance. We needed them to have a major off day and for us to play beyond our best. It didn't happen. Perhaps if we'd invested in some kind of cloning machine to make up versions of Bryan Robson circa 1984 and Mark Hughes circa 1991, we'd have been able to make a better fight of it but, alas, science still has a lot to do.
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL
1) Javier Hernandez emerging as a potentially world-class striker. When the news came through prior to the World Cup, I doubt most fans had much idea of what would happen. He got the team out of jail several times, notably at Stoke and West Brom, and his winner against Everton kept us on track for the title after the wobble at Newcastle.
2) Chris Smalling turning out to be a handy defender, which was just as well after Jonny Evans seemed to forget how to play football with any degree of confidence. Smooth on the ball in the tradition of McQueen, Pallister and Ferdinand, he can only get better by learning from the latter of those and Vidic. In his first couple of appearances, he looked hopelessly lost on the big stage, but he's proven to be a quick learner and bar the odd mistake we can put down to lack of experience, I'm never worried to see his name on the team sheet.
3) Having watched the FA Youth Cup final 2nd leg last week, we've got a few young lads who look like they could make it in Ravel Morrison, Paul Pogba and Ryan Tunnicliffe, assuming the first of those can stay out of jail. With Tom Cleverley and Danny Welbeck both impressing in their loan spells, you'd hope next season will see them given the chance to shine, especially with Giggs and Scholes getting older and Darron Gibson just not being good enough.
REASONS TO WORRY
1) The Glazers potentially preventing the kind of investment the squad needs to stay on top, especially with the Money Pit up the road finally breaking their trophy drought and making it into the big boys league. Whoever gets the poisoned chalice of the Chelsea hotseat will also doubtless have big bucks to spunk on whoever they fancy either. Luckily, Arsenal will do their usual implosion next season, so no need to worry about them.
2) Edwin van der Sar retiring. Before the 1990s, United teams usually had a pretty decent keeper who was just short of top class (Stepney, Bailey, Sealey) or a bit ropey (Roche, Leighton). Thankfully, we've been blessed with two of the best in the big Danish guy and Mr Ed. But with the Dutchman taking a well deserved break at the age of 40, the worry is that we'll go through the same fiasco we did after 1999. If we'd signed Eddie then, I reckon we might have won another European title or two. Still, thanks for the memories, big fella, and take it easy.
3) The lack of quality in midfield. Owen Hargreaves has been binned off, itself a great shame as we've sorely missed a proper ball winner in the middle of the park. Capitulations against Liverpool, Arsenal, City in the cup and Barcelona were not helped by the lack of someone to spoil the other's teams play. In the past, we've had Robson, Ince and Keane, three of the best. Here's hoping Fergie has identified a solution.
To conclude, any season we win the league is a good one by my standards. When I was a kid, I always wondered whether we'd win more championships and European Cups than Liverpool. We've done half of that, and if not for the fact of one insanely good team, we might have even equalled them on the other. Always next year.
Monday, 30 May 2011
Thursday, 26 May 2011
What's My Name?
There's various reasons I've been a right lazy sod in writing on this here blog in recent months. One of them has been that I've managed, along with my hard-rocking amigo Simon, to get a band together. We're writing songs at a good pace and hope to be shambling around on a stage near you by the end of summer.
Except we have a problem, one that has cursed bands for many a decade. That of what to call ourselves. It's a difficult task at the best of times and we've gone through countless suggestions, most of which have been dismissed for being "too emo".
Of course, a name means jack if you're lucky enough to be successful. The Beatles are brilliant as a band, but the name is pretty crap. It's only acceptable because they're the Beatles. A great band name is only really useful when you're starting out, for standing out on a poster, for example. The Teardrop Explodes is a great example of this
They were also a rare example of having a "The" in your name and it not being total crap, funnily enough alongside their rivals Echo and the Bunnymen. Indeed, the one rule we set ourselves in this task was we wouldn't a "The" band. Much as I love outfits like the Clash, the Jam, the Church and the Beat, they're not the sort of monikers that would pique my curiosity in a list. A Certain Ratio, XTC or My Bloody Valentine on the other hand...
But we're still struggling. Any suggestions would be very, very welcome...
Except we have a problem, one that has cursed bands for many a decade. That of what to call ourselves. It's a difficult task at the best of times and we've gone through countless suggestions, most of which have been dismissed for being "too emo".
Of course, a name means jack if you're lucky enough to be successful. The Beatles are brilliant as a band, but the name is pretty crap. It's only acceptable because they're the Beatles. A great band name is only really useful when you're starting out, for standing out on a poster, for example. The Teardrop Explodes is a great example of this
They were also a rare example of having a "The" in your name and it not being total crap, funnily enough alongside their rivals Echo and the Bunnymen. Indeed, the one rule we set ourselves in this task was we wouldn't a "The" band. Much as I love outfits like the Clash, the Jam, the Church and the Beat, they're not the sort of monikers that would pique my curiosity in a list. A Certain Ratio, XTC or My Bloody Valentine on the other hand...
But we're still struggling. Any suggestions would be very, very welcome...
Thursday, 19 May 2011
Start As You Mean To Go On
Five Brilliant Debut Singles
John Lee Hooker - Boogie Chillen' (1948)
I'm not entirely sure if this was the man's first release, but given he is (as I'll point out at any given opportunity) the coolest person who ever lived, he starts this article.
Sparse - it featured Hooker playing his electric guitar accompanied only by the stomp of his foot - it chugs away on a single chord riff over which the Man tells a tale of being a youthful fella who just wants to check out the music playing in the nightspots, to the objections of his concerned parents. Eventually, though, when he lies in bed one night, he hears "papa tell momma/"Let that boy boogie-woogie"/And I felt so good".
Though a bluesman, and one who would perform classics like It Serves Me Right To Suffer, Boogie Chillen' stands as a classic song of the excitement of youth and discovering the feelgood factor of music for the first time.
The Go-Betweens - Lee Remick (1978)
As we all do, when I got together with my good lady, we both bombarded each other with our respective favourite bands to get the other "into" them. Her most successful volley so far has been Australian cult favourites the Go-Betweens, who started their highly acclaimed career with this jaunty little love letter to an American actress.
Charmingly, it doesn't try to be too fancy about it: the chorus just notes that "I-I-I-I-I love Lee Remick/She's a darling" while the verses have brilliant couplets like "She was in the Omen with Gregeory Peck/She got killed - what the heck?". Musically, it's fairly basic, as the songwriting duo of Robert Forster and Grant McLennan were hardly proficient at the time, but it all adds to the charm.
The Specials - Gangsters (1979)
I was smitten with Two-Tone from an early age, with Divine Madness being the first album I ever owned. But the Specials were the ones who pinned down the whole sound perfectly with their debut single and subsequent album.
Kicking off with the shout of "Bernie Rhodes knows, don't argue!", Gangsters is helped by having one of the great riffs of all time, a groove you can dance to and Terry Hall's deadpan vocals about "living in real gangster times". Of course, it nicked from Prince Buster's source material, but that didn't matter so much when the "re-packaging" of the ska sound became so much better than the originals.
The Wild Swans - The Revolutionary Spirit (1982)
Bill Drummond reckons this was the best thing they ever put out on Zoo Records, and I'm inclined to agree, even in the face of the Teardrop Explodes' sublime Sleeping Gas, which also featured Wild Swans frontman Paul Simpson on keyboards.
This song came about in large part due to the generosity of Bunnymen drummer Pete De Freitas. Using an early royalty cheque, he agreed to fund and produce a Wild Swans single. When the drummer failed to show, he took on that role too, putting in his usual blistering performance to propel the song into the cosmos.
The rest of the band match him, with Jeremy Kelly's intense guitar strumming and Ged Coyne's keyboard playing taking it higher, higher... Paul Simpson puts in his mystical lyrical imagery to the usual great effects. It's a song that I struggle to describe because it might not make sense to many - but to me, it's a glorious piece of art.
The Smiths - Hand In Glove (1983)
It's also hard for me to convey just how much the Smiths meant to me when I was aged 15 and 16, but perhaps I don't really need to as I know people either relate or don't.
The key is, I think, to avoid all the Morrissey-related cliches about how he understood what being a solitary teenager was like. So, instead, I'll just say that this is a fucking great record that sounds unlike anything the band would later record. Marr's harmonica blares out before giving way to the Moz bark. I can remember hearing it for the first time, aged about 14 or so, and thinking "what the fuck is this?", so different was it from the prevalent Britpop trends of the time. A light went on somewhere in my head, and life was never quite the same again.
John Lee Hooker - Boogie Chillen' (1948)
I'm not entirely sure if this was the man's first release, but given he is (as I'll point out at any given opportunity) the coolest person who ever lived, he starts this article.
Sparse - it featured Hooker playing his electric guitar accompanied only by the stomp of his foot - it chugs away on a single chord riff over which the Man tells a tale of being a youthful fella who just wants to check out the music playing in the nightspots, to the objections of his concerned parents. Eventually, though, when he lies in bed one night, he hears "papa tell momma/"Let that boy boogie-woogie"/And I felt so good".
Though a bluesman, and one who would perform classics like It Serves Me Right To Suffer, Boogie Chillen' stands as a classic song of the excitement of youth and discovering the feelgood factor of music for the first time.
The Go-Betweens - Lee Remick (1978)
As we all do, when I got together with my good lady, we both bombarded each other with our respective favourite bands to get the other "into" them. Her most successful volley so far has been Australian cult favourites the Go-Betweens, who started their highly acclaimed career with this jaunty little love letter to an American actress.
Charmingly, it doesn't try to be too fancy about it: the chorus just notes that "I-I-I-I-I love Lee Remick/She's a darling" while the verses have brilliant couplets like "She was in the Omen with Gregeory Peck/She got killed - what the heck?". Musically, it's fairly basic, as the songwriting duo of Robert Forster and Grant McLennan were hardly proficient at the time, but it all adds to the charm.
The Specials - Gangsters (1979)
I was smitten with Two-Tone from an early age, with Divine Madness being the first album I ever owned. But the Specials were the ones who pinned down the whole sound perfectly with their debut single and subsequent album.
Kicking off with the shout of "Bernie Rhodes knows, don't argue!", Gangsters is helped by having one of the great riffs of all time, a groove you can dance to and Terry Hall's deadpan vocals about "living in real gangster times". Of course, it nicked from Prince Buster's source material, but that didn't matter so much when the "re-packaging" of the ska sound became so much better than the originals.
The Wild Swans - The Revolutionary Spirit (1982)
Bill Drummond reckons this was the best thing they ever put out on Zoo Records, and I'm inclined to agree, even in the face of the Teardrop Explodes' sublime Sleeping Gas, which also featured Wild Swans frontman Paul Simpson on keyboards.
This song came about in large part due to the generosity of Bunnymen drummer Pete De Freitas. Using an early royalty cheque, he agreed to fund and produce a Wild Swans single. When the drummer failed to show, he took on that role too, putting in his usual blistering performance to propel the song into the cosmos.
The rest of the band match him, with Jeremy Kelly's intense guitar strumming and Ged Coyne's keyboard playing taking it higher, higher... Paul Simpson puts in his mystical lyrical imagery to the usual great effects. It's a song that I struggle to describe because it might not make sense to many - but to me, it's a glorious piece of art.
The Smiths - Hand In Glove (1983)
It's also hard for me to convey just how much the Smiths meant to me when I was aged 15 and 16, but perhaps I don't really need to as I know people either relate or don't.
The key is, I think, to avoid all the Morrissey-related cliches about how he understood what being a solitary teenager was like. So, instead, I'll just say that this is a fucking great record that sounds unlike anything the band would later record. Marr's harmonica blares out before giving way to the Moz bark. I can remember hearing it for the first time, aged about 14 or so, and thinking "what the fuck is this?", so different was it from the prevalent Britpop trends of the time. A light went on somewhere in my head, and life was never quite the same again.
Sunday, 15 May 2011
End of the Road
As anyone who knows me knows, I own a car, which I happen to love very much. However, circumstances have decreed that I am no longer able to drive it.This is partly due to having that fit the other week, which means that I am legally not supposed to be behind the wheel of a vehicle when there is still the chance I might wig out and plough headlong into a line of schoolchildren, or something. But a more pressing reason (to me, at least) is that when I took it in for it's annual service, I was told that the chassis had corroded beyond the point of no return.
Of course, this is the risk when you decide to buy a car made in 1987 purely to satisfy a childhood dream and because it looks so damn good. In the immediate future, this means in the next couple of days, I'll have to go down to the garage and say my final farewells to my chariot over the last two years. She took me to Stanstead Airport through the driving rain at stupid O'clock in the morning, she spirited me on many journeys back up North. Now, all that awaits is a trip to the knacker's yard.
Heartbreaking, I'm sure you agree. But of more pressing concern to me is the fact I have to get back on the sodding bus to get to and from work every day again. This means having to get out of bed an extra 20 minutes early and getting home 20 minutes later, with the bonus prize of getting soaked if it happens to be raining. Which living in Manchester, tends to happen a fair bit.
I'm not expecting any sympathy from anyone, but I would like to take this opportunity to offer silence in memoriam of my car, born 1987, died 2011.
Friday, 13 May 2011
Taking an Adventure
A month or so ago, at a loose end on the gaming front, I asked my especially excellent friend Terr (whose The Moving Finger blog is well worth reading if you have any interest in the wonderful world of games) for a recommendation. She suggested Dragon Age 2, which she had recently reviewed.
I needed a little persuading - as I have said on numerous occasions, the whole traditional RPG world of swordplay and slaying dragons holds no appeal, and the Dragon Age franchise appeared to be well in this vein. However, I was assured that the game featured a crucial strength that would appeal to me: an engaging storyline.
And how right she was. I put a good 50 hours into my first play through, and it didn't feel at all wasted. Mercifully, it was accessible enough for the likes of me to get straight into the action without the need to spend hours working out the combat mechanics, probably due to the real time nature of it. At times, it can be a wee bit dull mashing the x button a lot and hoping the AI ensures your other team members don't plunge headlong into suicidal moves, but never enough that you don't carry on to see what happens next.
The meat of the game circles around your interactions with various characters with whom you can form friendships, rivalries or romances, though in the case of the latter it appears a bit half-arsed and doesn't seem to make too much difference to much. Kind of progressive that gender doesn't mean much in this world, mind.
Graphically, it's nothing to shout from the rafters about, but the ability of personalise your characters appearance is always welcome in my house, despite my usual uselessness at making my guy look anything like me. The voice acting wasn't too shabby either, with plenty of comedy and sadness to play with the emotions.
With a story moving through the best part of a decade, it was pleasing to see the results of my actions bear fruit, such as a random encounter with an elven woman whom I'd saved as a child from a psycho killer some years before. With the bulk of the game set around a single city, it was easy to get a feel of being part of a community and wanting to do the "right" thing to benefit it. Of course, the interesting part will be to play again as a total bastard and see how different things work out.
But first I'll be playing through the prequel Dragon Age: Origins, which I picked up last week. In a clever touch, after I complete this, I can use my save file when starting a new Dragon Age 2 game, and the decisions I make will effect certain events. It's a very cool way of ensuring continuity in a series, and I'd hope it carries on with the sequel, which the ending of Dragon Age 2 is essentially suggesting will be forthcoming.
I needed a little persuading - as I have said on numerous occasions, the whole traditional RPG world of swordplay and slaying dragons holds no appeal, and the Dragon Age franchise appeared to be well in this vein. However, I was assured that the game featured a crucial strength that would appeal to me: an engaging storyline.
And how right she was. I put a good 50 hours into my first play through, and it didn't feel at all wasted. Mercifully, it was accessible enough for the likes of me to get straight into the action without the need to spend hours working out the combat mechanics, probably due to the real time nature of it. At times, it can be a wee bit dull mashing the x button a lot and hoping the AI ensures your other team members don't plunge headlong into suicidal moves, but never enough that you don't carry on to see what happens next.
The meat of the game circles around your interactions with various characters with whom you can form friendships, rivalries or romances, though in the case of the latter it appears a bit half-arsed and doesn't seem to make too much difference to much. Kind of progressive that gender doesn't mean much in this world, mind.
Graphically, it's nothing to shout from the rafters about, but the ability of personalise your characters appearance is always welcome in my house, despite my usual uselessness at making my guy look anything like me. The voice acting wasn't too shabby either, with plenty of comedy and sadness to play with the emotions.
With a story moving through the best part of a decade, it was pleasing to see the results of my actions bear fruit, such as a random encounter with an elven woman whom I'd saved as a child from a psycho killer some years before. With the bulk of the game set around a single city, it was easy to get a feel of being part of a community and wanting to do the "right" thing to benefit it. Of course, the interesting part will be to play again as a total bastard and see how different things work out.
But first I'll be playing through the prequel Dragon Age: Origins, which I picked up last week. In a clever touch, after I complete this, I can use my save file when starting a new Dragon Age 2 game, and the decisions I make will effect certain events. It's a very cool way of ensuring continuity in a series, and I'd hope it carries on with the sequel, which the ending of Dragon Age 2 is essentially suggesting will be forthcoming.
Monday, 9 May 2011
We're In Love With National Health
It's true that you never really appreciate something that is always there until you actually find yourself in need of it.
So it was of me on Thursday just gone. For reasons I can't explain at this moment, I had some kind of fit/seizure. I'd like to tell you more about it, but that whole period of time has remained a black hole for me. By what my work colleagues tell me, however, it wasn't pretty. Needless to say, I wound up in an ambulance and subsequently in hospital in a state of some distress.
Which brings me to my point. The NHS may well be the best thing this country has ever produced: the fact is I was wheeled in and treated without any questions being asked. It didn't matter who I was or how much money I had. I was examined by a doctor and given the various tests needed.
Of course, I'm sure every person reading this resident in the UK will be able to fire criticisms at the NHS. But with any organisation designed to help the well-being of tens of millions of people, there's always going to be numerous issues. I saw some myself the other day: I walked past pensioners lying on trolleys in corridors, for example.
But surely it's an issue with organisation and funding? Something that hit home hard for me was how vital the NHS is to our health as a nation - it needs loved and nurtured the way it would do us. Perhaps the results of the recent council elections will tell the Liberal Democrats that people aren't happy with the level of the cuts - our doctors, nurses and their support staff need more funding, not less.
So it was of me on Thursday just gone. For reasons I can't explain at this moment, I had some kind of fit/seizure. I'd like to tell you more about it, but that whole period of time has remained a black hole for me. By what my work colleagues tell me, however, it wasn't pretty. Needless to say, I wound up in an ambulance and subsequently in hospital in a state of some distress.
Which brings me to my point. The NHS may well be the best thing this country has ever produced: the fact is I was wheeled in and treated without any questions being asked. It didn't matter who I was or how much money I had. I was examined by a doctor and given the various tests needed.
Of course, I'm sure every person reading this resident in the UK will be able to fire criticisms at the NHS. But with any organisation designed to help the well-being of tens of millions of people, there's always going to be numerous issues. I saw some myself the other day: I walked past pensioners lying on trolleys in corridors, for example.
But surely it's an issue with organisation and funding? Something that hit home hard for me was how vital the NHS is to our health as a nation - it needs loved and nurtured the way it would do us. Perhaps the results of the recent council elections will tell the Liberal Democrats that people aren't happy with the level of the cuts - our doctors, nurses and their support staff need more funding, not less.
Friday, 6 May 2011
Birthday Bash
No Ripcord, a esteemed organ I have contributed crap to for some time, is celebrating it's 12th birthday. As part of this, they've published my article about the top 40 on the day I was born.
http://www.noripcord.com/features/uk-top-40-singles-28021981-part-one
If you missed it first time, take a look. It's a piece of work I feel a little bit of pride towards.
http://www.noripcord.com/features/uk-top-40-singles-28021981-part-one
If you missed it first time, take a look. It's a piece of work I feel a little bit of pride towards.
Monday, 2 May 2011
Shiver to Comformity
You have to love a bit of career suicide, and the music business is full of bands who over-reached themselves on tricky second albums or in attempts to move towards artistic credibility. After all, not everyone can be like the Beatles and go from Love Me Do to Tomorrow Never Knows in the space of a few years.
Sometimes there's heroic 'failures', though. In 1998, Mansun were a pretty hip band after their debut album Attack of The Grey Lantern had topped the UK album charts on the back of fine singles such as Wide Open Space and Taxloss. Singer/songwriter Paul Draper also give the album a vaguely prog-rock feel by ensuring the whole album had no pauses between songs and putting in characters in several songs.
For the follow-up, Six, he took his progressive ideas to another level. Lead single Legacy made the top 10 despite being over six minutes long and featuring lyrics like "all relationships and emptying and temporary" and "nobody cares when you're gone". But even this seemed like a conventional pop song compared to the rest of the album.
From the cover alone, accusations of Mansun turning totally prog were always going to be on the cards. Featuring plenty of pictorial references to the songs - especially to the TV show The Prisoner - it wouldn't have looked totally out of place on a Marillion album, especially with the tracklisting putting the album into "Part One" and "Part Two" with an interlude inbetween.
The opening title track would have just added to it: despite a great chorus, it turns from being a fairly atypical (albeit excellent) indie-pop song into something very different with the direction shifting a good couple of times (at least) and leading to the refrain "life is a compromise anyway". Listeners less prepared may be eased a bit by the following Negative, which follows a slightly more easy-to-grasp structure whilst rocking like a bastard.
From here, however, it all gets a bit weird. Shotgun namechecks Winnie the Pooh, Anti-Everything architect Richard Rogers and Cancer commentates on Christianity, with the slightly bizarre line "I've been emotionally raped by Jesus".
The 'interlude', Witness to a Muder (Part Two) is guitarist Dominic Chad's song about the last minutes of the life of Brian Jones, of whom he was long obsessed with. Narrated by Tom Baker (in the days before he became hip again), it works surprisingly well as a break amongst the noise of the other songs.
Part Two features only four songs, but they're great ones. Television is loud and Special/Blown It (Delete As Appropriate) may well be Draper's confession of what the album would do to his career, singing that "I've blown everything I've ever done, I've fucked it up, shot my load". The theme continues with Legacy, with "I wouldn't care if I was washed up tomorrow" being slightly apt given the reception Six would get from many critics.
It ends with Being a Girl, which sees Draper muse that "Being a boy's like sucking on a lemon... I feel like being a girl/Being a girl, and my life never tasted sweeter". It's a barking track on which to end the album, which is probably appropriate enough.
Though Six made the top 10 and went Gold in the UK, it perhaps alienated enough people that when the more straight-forward Little Kix followed in 2000, a lot of people had lost interest. It was later revealed that the band had been forced to compromise by the record company on several songs and they subsequently broke up after aborted sessions for a further album.
The strangest part of listening to Six is that I bought Legacy when it came out and I had loved Attack of the Grey Lantern at the time, but I never got round to buying this album until very recently. In a way, I reckon I wouldn't have been able to appreciate the subtleties of Six when I was 17 or so. It's a sprawling album that is occasionally a mess but also bears repeated listens to reveals the brilliance within. I reckon it could well be a work of genius that outstrips OK Computer as the best British rock album of the late 1990s.
Sometimes there's heroic 'failures', though. In 1998, Mansun were a pretty hip band after their debut album Attack of The Grey Lantern had topped the UK album charts on the back of fine singles such as Wide Open Space and Taxloss. Singer/songwriter Paul Draper also give the album a vaguely prog-rock feel by ensuring the whole album had no pauses between songs and putting in characters in several songs.
For the follow-up, Six, he took his progressive ideas to another level. Lead single Legacy made the top 10 despite being over six minutes long and featuring lyrics like "all relationships and emptying and temporary" and "nobody cares when you're gone". But even this seemed like a conventional pop song compared to the rest of the album.
From the cover alone, accusations of Mansun turning totally prog were always going to be on the cards. Featuring plenty of pictorial references to the songs - especially to the TV show The Prisoner - it wouldn't have looked totally out of place on a Marillion album, especially with the tracklisting putting the album into "Part One" and "Part Two" with an interlude inbetween.
The opening title track would have just added to it: despite a great chorus, it turns from being a fairly atypical (albeit excellent) indie-pop song into something very different with the direction shifting a good couple of times (at least) and leading to the refrain "life is a compromise anyway". Listeners less prepared may be eased a bit by the following Negative, which follows a slightly more easy-to-grasp structure whilst rocking like a bastard.
From here, however, it all gets a bit weird. Shotgun namechecks Winnie the Pooh, Anti-Everything architect Richard Rogers and Cancer commentates on Christianity, with the slightly bizarre line "I've been emotionally raped by Jesus".
The 'interlude', Witness to a Muder (Part Two) is guitarist Dominic Chad's song about the last minutes of the life of Brian Jones, of whom he was long obsessed with. Narrated by Tom Baker (in the days before he became hip again), it works surprisingly well as a break amongst the noise of the other songs.
Part Two features only four songs, but they're great ones. Television is loud and Special/Blown It (Delete As Appropriate) may well be Draper's confession of what the album would do to his career, singing that "I've blown everything I've ever done, I've fucked it up, shot my load". The theme continues with Legacy, with "I wouldn't care if I was washed up tomorrow" being slightly apt given the reception Six would get from many critics.
It ends with Being a Girl, which sees Draper muse that "Being a boy's like sucking on a lemon... I feel like being a girl/Being a girl, and my life never tasted sweeter". It's a barking track on which to end the album, which is probably appropriate enough.
Though Six made the top 10 and went Gold in the UK, it perhaps alienated enough people that when the more straight-forward Little Kix followed in 2000, a lot of people had lost interest. It was later revealed that the band had been forced to compromise by the record company on several songs and they subsequently broke up after aborted sessions for a further album.
The strangest part of listening to Six is that I bought Legacy when it came out and I had loved Attack of the Grey Lantern at the time, but I never got round to buying this album until very recently. In a way, I reckon I wouldn't have been able to appreciate the subtleties of Six when I was 17 or so. It's a sprawling album that is occasionally a mess but also bears repeated listens to reveals the brilliance within. I reckon it could well be a work of genius that outstrips OK Computer as the best British rock album of the late 1990s.
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