No Strings Attached

As seems to happen at the end of the year, a few notable folk have shuffled off their coils. Notably, Jack Klugman threw a seven only days after I'd written about him on this here blog. James Roday may want to feel nervous about now.

However, it was the death of Gerry Anderson that touched me most. Kids today may find it hard to believe, but even in the early 1980s, a TV show featuring a bunch of puppets could still bring a sense of awe from a youngster.

Thunderbirds is the one most people remember, and it was ace, as was Stingray. I did think Joe 90 was a load of tosh. But the best by some distance was always Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. It was totally fantastic and even today, if by chance it happens to be on somewhere, I'll make an effort to see it.

For one thing, it had a heavy sci-fi element, which has always had a sway over me. To whit: at some point in the future, humanity has managed to jaunt over to Mars. Seeing alien buildings, the idiot astros panic and open fire, somewhat understandably pissing off the locals to the degree they declare war on Earth and take one of the hapless humans as their unwilling slave.

The trick the Martians (only ever seen as glowing rings of light and a deep voice) have mastered is being able to identically duplicate anything - but first, as the introduction states - they must DESTROY. Thus, they quickly knock off top SPECTRUM agent Captain Scarlet, recreate him as a slave and send him off to assassinate the World Prez. However, the plot is foiled and the Cap somehow regains his human consciousness, surprisingly being welcomed back into the fold by Colonel White as our main weapon in the war against the Mysterons - mainly because he has now become "virtually indestructible", an ability that would see him meet and brush off various grisly fates.

What we never got a sense of was how Scarlet felt about all this. After all, it seemed clear to me that he was nothing but a duplicate of somebody who has been killed - an idea later revived (ho ho) in Red Dwarf with the character of Rimmer. Yet never once did we get any sense of existential despair from knowing that his memories weren't actually his.

Perhaps it's reading too much into it. In any case, the show looked great and had some top storylines. A lot of these featuring around the man the Mysterons gang-pressed into their service: Captain Black. Always dressed in dark clothes, eyes that looked like he hadn't slept in weeks - if they ever make a film version of the series, then I would humbly suggest myself for the role.

I was born for the part!

On top of all this, it always had a superb theme tune. Check it out and sing along at home:

"They crash him, and his body may burn

They smash him, but they know he'll return -

TO LIVE AGAIN!"

We Are Detective, We Are Select

Or so said the Thompson Twins, in their slightly odd 80s hit. Liars all, for we now know they weren't detectives at all, but pop stars. The following is a list of people who weren't crime fighters either, because they don't exist. However, they do all feature in some top TV shows.

Ironside
Sure, you may be San Francisco's top cop, but a bullet in the spine is always going to put a crimp in your day. Despite his jogging days being over, Robert T. Ironside dons his wheelchair and carries on cracking down on crime, assisted by (alongside a top Quincy Jones theme tune) the slightly bumbling Ed, posh girl working with plod Eve and young neer-do-well trying to turn good Mark.

Initially running in the late 60s, Ironside had to deal with the changing times. One episode had the team visiting a house full of hippy layabouts, one of whom describes our hero as "fuzz on wheels". To his credit, the man doesn't call on a bunch of cops armed with bats to crack some skulls and keep all their stash to help with his pain management.

Some 20 years later, the cast all got back together for a dodgy TV movie made not long before Raymond Burr shuffled off his mortal coil. It wasn't very good.

Quincy
Your favourite coroner, however, had no time for the modern fashions. Infamously, Quince once put down "punk rock" as a cause of death in an episode worth watching just for cheap giggles. Seriously, see it sometime soon.

These people are punks, apparently. Well, except Quincy. Obviously

Despite not having a first name, Dr Quincy M.E. managed to balance his personal life of pissing about on a yacht with young ladies, his normal work duties of cutting up corpses and solving a neverending stream of murders on the streets of LA.

This was lucky for his cop friends, Monaghan and Brill, who were so inept they made Chief O'Hara from Batman look like Sherlock Holmes. Every week, they would dismiss the Doc's suspicions of foul play, only for the evidence to stack up. Luckily, Quincy's boss, Dr Aston, tolerated his extracurricular activities, despite the growing number of dead bodies stacking up down the morgue.

KITT
Can it, Hasselhoff! The car was the real star of Knight Rider, and my five-year-old self will hear no different. The guy in the stupidly tight jeans was only needed to go round up the bad guys when it involved going indoors.

For one thing, KITT (or the Knight Industries Two Thousand, if you weren't around in the 1980s) was probably the coolest looking car ever seen on TV. See?

Cool as fuck

Plus he had the best theme tune you could wish. Brilliant. And you could play Pac-Man with him. I mean, what more do you want? He solves crime, has a line in banter, and he can get you home from the pub when you're totally blasted.

Jethro Gibbs
Silver-haired fox Gibbs takes no shite from nobody: as a former Marine sniper, he's probably ventilated more heads then you've had hot dinners. Subsequently swapping the uniform to solve crimes in the US navy as part of NCIS, you can be assured that if you're a dead sailor, he'll get to the bottom of it. And pray to your god if you've been mean to a little kid, because you'll be in for a heavy duty smackdown.

Gibbs may well be on this list because I aspire to be like him - as my hair greys, he's proof that it's a look that can be pulled of and like me, he has a weakness to red haired women. All I need is a team including a wisecracking womaniser, an ex-Israeli assassin, a computer geek and a perky goth covered in tattoos and I'm away.

Shawn Spencer
Save the best till last. Star of the best show of the last 20 years (Psych), Shawn uses his outstanding skills of observation and deduction to doss a living from solving crime.

Why is he great? Well, he's an idle git who'd rather be lazing in bed, listening to Tears for Fears while waiting for the Royal Rumble to start. What's not to like? Luckily, in terms of his career, he has a supportive best friend, Gus, and an ex-cop dad able to help under, albeit under some duress.

Add 80s pop reference here

It's all brilliant, and I seem to find myself recommending it to everyone I meet. Sherlock? Get away with you! Psych is funnier, brilliant guest stars (Cary Elwes! Judd Nelson! Ally Sheedy!) and a better looking cast. I still don't get why he didn't chase after the character played by Rachel Leigh Cook, though.

Let Your Feet Do The Talking

Shoes: they're a vital part of life. Especially if you live in parts of the world where there is plenty around that you don't want your naked feet to step in.

This is doubly so at this time of year, if you live in Northern England - the right choice of footwear is all important to personal comfort. That wise old sage Joe Strummer once noted you should wear shoes made either for running, or fighting. Now, given I have the combat skills of an elderly Thora Hird, I've tended to stick with comfortable fitting sneakers, which also have the advantage of looking good.

At this time of year, however, they're just not good enough. Heavy rain creates puddles that are regularly not stopped in time to avoid a soaked sock situation, which as we all know, is always very unpleasant. Add to that the problem of an icy pavement ensuring a nasty (and embarrassing) fall is always around the corner unless you're properly equipped.

With that, we can turn to another example of German efficiency: the Doctor Marten boot. With a couple of them on your feet, you're set for anything the English weather can throw at you. I actually came to them fairly late on, only buying a pair when I was off to visit the Baltic in wintertime. But since then, they've proved to be a vital friend: four years on, they're still in top nick and you can stomp through ice and rain with no worry of getting your toes cold.

But if you want to hear the true beauty of a pair of these wonderful boots, I think Alexi Sayle does it best.

Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. Or Gun.

So, you wait six years for a game and when you know it's finally coming, your expectation goes through the roof. Can it meet expectation? Obviously not.

Actually, that may be a little unfair on Hitman: Absolution. It was fun to play through, just not the kind of fun I wanted from it. Over the first decade of this millennium, the Hitman franchise had established itself on the Playstation 2-era as offering superb gaming, engaging us to examine situations as best we could to pull off the perfect hit. I can remember spending hours outside of gaming musing on an area, wondering how to get in and out unseen with the target eliminated.

With that in mind, my heart raced at the possibilities the next generation of console gaming would offer the makers. I envisioned puzzles so complex my head would explode at the thought of doing Agent 47 justice. Instead, we got a fairly good stealth thriller.

The story: Agent 47 is a genetically-warped freak who has made a nice living from being the world's top contract killer. At the start of the game, he's sent by the International Contract Agency (his constant employers) to knock off his former handler, Diane, as she's gone rogue. But in a series of somewhat tired plot clichés, he's subsequently entrusted with the task of protecting a teenage girl (ehhh...) in a stupid school uniform (oh, please) who is wanted by a psychotic redneck businessman and the pissed-off big cheese back at ICA. Thus, you can gather the rest.

The story actually bugs several times, as we get 47 making schoolboy mistakes you wouldn't expect of him that allow him to get out-thought by characters best described as fucking inbred idiots. Plus we have the worrying spectre of the characters known as "The Saints" - young women dressed in S&M nun outfits. It comes across as little but wank fantasy and offers the best part of fuck all to proceedings.

Let's be kind about the good things: this game looks amazing. The locations, the cut scenes - it matches the level set by games like Max Payne 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution in presentation levels. Plus the voice acting is a good level - Powers Booth and Keith Carradine are suitably hatstand as the bad guys and we can thank the Gaming Gods that they got David Bateson back in to voice 47, after initially deciding otherwise. The dude simply is the character, and his cold, emotionless tones hide the deeper anger the character feels but cannot express.

When the game gives us what we want, it excels. There are a handful of times we are given a wide area with a target and told to kill them. Naturally, we can wade in guns akimbo, but the challenge is to execute the perfect hit, which is how the game should be. But it feels a rare treat, as mostly we are given a room/area and essentially told to go from one side to the other, preferably with the most stealth as possible.

I've read reviews since I finished the game, and agree with the feeling that this strays far too much from what we expect of these games and into Splinter Cell land. It may look great, and even play well (there is a certain satisfaction from timing your runs to perfection to avoid a guard's movement) but it's not what we signed up for when we bought the game.

Despite all that, I hope they make another Hitman game and perhaps go back to the roots that made the series so compelling in the first place. We want the chance to use our imagination to knock off some poor piece of shite scum, then walk out as calm as you like. Not a quasi-stealth game with a Hollywood b-movie plot stuck to it.

Bald of Awesome, shame about the game

Not Managing to Keep Up

I've been far, far too lazy on the blogging front. I've got my excuses: right now, work is fucking me off to the point I have little inclination for typing away in my evenings. Plus, of course has seen the news that some royal has been succesfully impregnated means I will have to play the national anthem 20 times every night.

Alright, so I don't actually give a toss about some over-privileged tosspots expecting another freeloading parasite. The real reason I haven't wrote 'owt is that I bought Football Manager 2013. As any one who has dared enter this world knows, you don't escape easily. It's even pulled me away from Hitman: Absolution, of which more when I finally get round to finishing it.

As it is, I've an unbeaten run to protect. Whenever I re-enter the world of Football Manager, I always play a game as Manchester United to get my bearings before engaging on a proper challenge with a bunch of non-league no-hopers, like Workington. So far, I've managed to get close to Christmas with an impressive sequence of results, leaving the league table looking like this:

Have that one, Fergie! Sack off all those other pretenders - clearly I'm the man for the job when they drag your body out of Old Trafford.

Rapid Recollection Decline

I'm not sure the old adage "your memory plays tricks on you" holds water until you get past a certain age - that point where childhood becomes a golden age of innocence and fun until part of you snaps you back to the realisation that it was actually just really fucking boring. Moments of fun out with your mates that make up  1% of your life between having to stay in because it was raining. Again.

It's like I wonder if I really did actually watch the 1990 FA Cup final, or just think I did because I've seen the goals countless times since. Why can't I remember Kurt Cobain killing himself, when I was 13 years old at the time? Can I really not remember anything from a six month gap in early 1995?

Problems with recollection hit me the other day when I was thinking of a record store I used to frequent in my 18 months or so of living in Aldershot. For those unfamiliar, it is a small town maybe an hour on the train South West of London, most famous for it housing the barracks of a large number of soldiers. When I think of the place, I remember the last time someone punched me and, by no coincidence, it being the last time I punched somebody else. People with Northern accents were not popular.

It had a couple of decent places to buy music, though. Plus an Our Price. One was a small shop located in the nightmarish vestige of the shopping centre (of sorts) in the town centre. I think I bought Giant Steps by the Boo Radleys, Otis Blue and Shine 5 on cassettes for a fiver there. It may well have been a fire sale, as it closed down shortly afterwards.

There was also a cool little video game store, for some reason labouring until the terrible name of 'Kart Klub'. I bought a Playstation 2 there, and the guy behind the counter recommended some horrific RPG game that involved vampires in a mansion the size of Ohio, apparently, which was enough to make me suspect their judgement was duff.

But anyway, the other record store, my brain tells me, was called Spinna Disc. Or I think so. The internet seems to support this but when I try to find it on Google streetview I just come across some pizza takeaway place. And isn't that depressing in a way? But then I worry that perhaps it never existed in the first place and my memory is false. Honestly, I'm worried I'm becoming an unreliable narrator in my own life.

Music to Make Me a Mad Man

Meanwhile, back in the real world, not one currently being invaded by aliens (see last post for details), I've had my tolerance for it shortened by hearing an abomination of a cover version the INXS classic Never Tear Us Apart by someone called Paloma Faith.

I'd never heard of the lady in question before, and I'm sure she's a nice enough lady who loves her mam, but her reading of the song is (to these ears) a complete fucking disaster. For one thing, you're onto a loser by going up against Michael Hutchence: the guy was complete sex on legs and the best rock icon of the 1980s, so Faith has no chance of getting close in those stakes. Secondly, the arrangement of the song is tired arse gravy and she even seems to struggle to hit the notes from the original.

But what really stoked up my wish for Immediate Nuclear Holocaust was the whole bag o' shite was put out due to an advert campaign by British department store chain John Lewis. This is part of a trend of adverts using "contemporary" versions of 80s classics, usually in some acoustic fashion. I'm not saying it's a bad thing in the scale of human suffering, but the people behind it need to be tracked down and stopped.

I think the whole mess began, oddly enough, with an actual indie popster. Fyfe Dangerfield, best known as singer from Guillemots, did a version of Billy Joel's She's Always a Woman that got picked up for a particularly gruesome John Lewis Christmas campaign ad. Given I hate the works of Joel, this didn't bother me too much.

However, when it was Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want being sacrificed at the alter of Don Draper wannabes everywhere, something needed to be done. I know it isn't illegal, and it isn't really doing any harm, but I still find my blood boiling whenever I hear these songs anywhere.

Perhaps the problem is that all these young stage-school trained singers don't have anyone writing songs for them anymore. In the first days of pop, you had the whole Brill Building teams knocking out songs by the hour. Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman churned out loads of hits for the glam rock bands, Stock, Aitken and Waterman did the whole production line approach in the 1980s.

But I can't think of any modern equivalent. This is the age of the Simon Cowell-type figure, who has the talent brought to them live on TV, before moulding them in the fashion of the day and binning them off when the next thing comes along - wither Shayne Ward? And while Cowell might have many talents, writing songs is not one. So they naturally just run through rock and pops back pages, offering slightly modernised versions of the classics.

Then when you need something with a bit of edge for a more serious project such as selling Christmas presents, luckily all those old alternative classics will do a good job. The way things are, I expect Dead Souls to be used in life insurance ads within the end of the decade.

ALF Must Die!

What have I done? By buying XCom: Enemy Unknown have I just thrown away at vague vestiges at any kind of real "life"? Probably.

Already, its received rave reviews from just about everywhere. Which isn't surprising, as I expect a lot of video game journalists are around the same age as me. Thus, they remember the original UFO: Enemy Unknown in 1994 as a high watermark of the drama you can get from being sat at a computer. So I was very keen to sample an updated version of this, with the added bonus of being old enough to (hopefully) be better at the resource management side of the games that is as equally vital as killing aliens.

The basic gist isn't hard to work out: nasty things from space are coming to get us, and they obviously need stopping. To do this, we (the player) have been charged with leading XCOM, the squad formed to get the job done. Cut scenes add a sense of drama as we're introduced to the backroom bods developing new weapons and cutting up aliens on the autopsy table. A handy tutorial eases you into the battle scenes, which I imagine will be very handy for younger players.

Because, XCOM works on a turn based system, which in an age of 100mph racers and frantic first person shooters, may seem a little quaint. You also can't just go wading into the field guns ablazin', hoping to kick some ET arse. Patience, forward planning and using your whole squad are order of the day, making the scraps more like a game of chess.

For me, so far, having only bought the game on Monday, it has created moments of incredible high tension: a solider hiding in cover - do I risk them running across open ground or play safe? The aliens punish bad moves without no mercy, and the fact you can name your troops just makes it worse when you fool yourself it's a good friend of yours under fire: Captain Simon "Crash" (the games provides nicknames for those that last long enough to gain the experience) Vint has managed to hold the line for me so far, though, so top work Si!

XCOM Enemy Unknown is one of the most compelling video game experiences of my life, even only this early into the game. I'm faintly aware that tradition dictates a whole heap of shite from another universe is about to fall on my lap (they can't keep throwing mooks at me, surely), but that adds to the drama. Around every corner could be some huge fucker like Predator waiting to munch on my poor troop's lower intestine. If you don't hear from me a while, I'll be hunched over my control pad, worrying about just that...

Football in the Family

As I've written before, football has changed to an incredible degree over the past decades. Players are paid more, top level grounds are of much better quality for players and spectators and just about every professional game in England is filmed for posterity. Often, the past is made to look overly romantic by people who weren't there, much like many aspects of life.

Journalist and broadcaster Gary Imlach's My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes is a book I really should have read a long, long time ago. The central thread seems to be one of regret of a son not asking his dad more questions when they had the chance, and a mission to fill in the blanks of his own knowledge of the old boy's life, but there's also plenty on the realities of being a footballer in the post-war era.

Stewart Imlach was a genuine football star of the late 1950s, playing for Scotland at the 1958 World Cup and starring for Nottingham Forest when they won the 1959 FA Cup. A long way from his roots in a Scottish fishing village, the kind of place everyone leaves, not moves to. A star in youth football, he was picked up by Bury, quickly making a name as a quick left winger. Becoming a much watched player, he's soon on his way to Derby County, a move which doesn't work out, and he's passed onto Forest, where he plays his part in the their last shot of glory before the Clough years.

In that game, he was considered by most witnesses, including the legendary Stanley Matthews, to be the Man of the Match. He was a hero at the top of his game playing for a team with the potential to win further honours. However, football being as it was at the time, within a matter of years, he has dropped down two divisions through various managers' whims. At Coventry City, he is sold on by the man who did more for players' rights than just about anyone - Jimmy Hill. The author manages to interview the man, and is initially shocked when he can't remember the exact details of why he didn't want his dad - only to reflect that Hill would have dealt with hundreds of footballers over his long career.

Where the book succeeds best is showing the life the players had: Imlach Snr spent his summers doing various joinery jobs to bring in extra cash, he first finds out about his transfer by reading it in the local paper and there's the fact that Scottish players lost out financially from being in the squad that went to the World Cup. There's also vindictive managers and those that run the game treating players as little more than serfs due to the "Retain and Transfer" system that they were so reluctant to scrap, despite it turning out to be infringing on players' rights as workers.

Towards the end of the book, Gary Imlach works on trying to get his father awarded an actual "cap" from the Scottish FA: at the time, they were only given to players who played in a "Home" international against England, Wales or Northern Ireland. Even in the modern era, the authorities remain obstructive and inept. An English company makes him a replica instead, much to the old player's pride. That the Scottish FA should behave in such a way towards a man who represented his country with honour comes across as contemptible.

My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes works excellently as a biography and a general football book - essential reading for fans of the game.

Closer to the Truth?

As a fan, it's been strange seeing the rise of Joy Division from cult act to existing in the mainstream. In 1997, it was hard to find out much about them. In 2012, they are rightly considered one of the seminal bands of British pop music, influencing countless others and being the topic for endless dissection.

There's been films, documentaries and plenty of books. In the print camp, there's another, albeit one with a greater deal of authority than the others. Unknown Pleasures - Inside Joy Division is bassist Peter Hook's record of the lifetime of the band, following on from his account of the Hacienda nightclub through the 1980s.

When writing his own memoirs, the wrestler Mick Foley relates some advice he was given about it not being about settling scores. Well, our Hooky has elected to disregard that, leaving us a book that could be subtitled Why Bernard Sumner is an Arsehole, such is the amount of petty potshots at his one time close friend.

Which is a shame, actually, as the other vast majority of the book is a really enjoyable read for fans of the band. There's plenty of information I'd not heard about before and the writing style flows well through a story where (you'd imagine) everyone knows the ending. Where it scores best is the tales of being in a band on the make: there's the off-told tale of Hooky buying his first bass the day after seeing the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, but also plenty of the struggles of writing material, finding the right people and then scraping for gigs in the ultra-competitive Manchester punk scene.

The fascinating aspect of Joy Division is how everyone fell in place in the manner it did. Hook and Sumner are both struggling nobodies in 1977, self-taught and fired up. Within two years, they end up with an enigmatic frontman, one of the best drummers around, the perfect manager, the perfect producer and the one label who'd let them all get on with the job.

It's not just the band and the other well-known figures who Hook regales. Friends Terry Mason and Twinny act as roadies and mischief makers, figures from Hook and Sumner's Salford roots there to keep their toes on the ground when the plaudits start rolling in.

The figure of Ian Curtis looms large over everything, understandably, and Hook is at pains to point out the man he knew, in contrast to the bad husband of his widow's only account, Touching From a Distance. As many have done, Hook questions who the real Curtis was, and whether all the people in his life were players in some grand piece he was conducting.

A little note from the ending also tells its own tale - in the list of those mentioned no longer with us (sadly way too long) is "New Order". Hook's conflicts with his former bandmates have been all over the media for a while now, but one point from the Joy Division history backs him up: the surviving three never considered continuing under that name as they had long understood that if anyone left, the name would be scrapped. You may wonder why New Order weren't the same, and that they had best been left in the past after their initial split in the mid 90s.

Unknown Pleasures is a more than worthwhile read, then. Some great pics too! The question is, how do the others remember the same events?

Suzie Q, I Love You

My family aside, there's been one constant in my life since the day I was born, and that's Suzie. Here she is:

The day after I dropped into the world, my mother's Aunty Betty came to visit. Somewhere between the door and the maternity ward was a stall selling stuffed toys made by (I think) patients recovering from major heart surgery. She picked up Suzie, and she's been with me ever since, moving with me to university and then to Manchester, where she's sat up in the corner of my bedroom. She'd come on holiday with us to Butlins when I was young, I could barely stand to be away from her. Obviously she became less a comfort blanket over the years, but I still look her over to the States a few years ago. Didn't feel right to go there without her.

When I was younger, I would insist to my mother that we celebrate her birthday, which is obviously the day after mine. Much to her credit, she indulged me in this and would buy a card for her and a little cake.

For her age, she's holding up well. Better than me, in a lot of ways. All the same, observant readers may have noticed that the poor girl is missing an eye. Not as a result of one of my many petulant childhood strops, you may be surprised to hear. No. It was that little shit of a brother of mine that did it, and he's still not forgiven. I must have pissed him off, the way brothers do, but all the same there was no need for retaliation of that level.

What made it even worse was that soon after, his school had a "Teddy Bear's Picnic" type thing. Our mam, being ever-resourceful, dolled Suzie up with a pirate costume, complete with eyepatch. Thus my brother won a prize, showing that being an evil scrote pays off and there truly is no karma in this world.

I'm not sure if it's tragic having such memories of childhood still hanging around when you're into your 30s, but it feels reassuring that she's still around. I wonder if there's ever a time I'll let her go: maybe when my brother has spawn of his own, I'll hand her over to try and wade them away from his path of darkness. Or maybe I'll cling on to her till my final days, and like one of those mad old cat women, name her as my sole inheritor of whatever I have left by that point.

The Man Who Was Not With It

In terms of hits, the most popular post I've made on this here blog was the one about Felt. They're a band that never sold anything in their lifetime, but whose legend grew. As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, I found out that the documentary about their frontman, Lawrence of Belgravia, was being shown in Manchester and I'd got tickets.

So along I went to the Museum of Science and Industry (a fine attraction, for anyone visiting this wonderful city), which it turned out was the only place willing to show it. So thanks for fuck all, the Cornerhouse, the supposed "cutting edge" cinema in Manchester.

Dave Haslam, well known DJ from his times at the Hacienda, had put the event together and thus kudos must go to him. Charlatans front man and Felt fan Tim Burgess brought his newly bleached locks down to do  an introduction of sorts and then it was onto Paul Kelly's film, sometime in the making. Not so much a documentary about Lawrence's life as a whole (Felt fans will be disappointed if they expect to see much of that band, though drummer Gary Ainge appears), but more of the past few years as the man tries to get by despite problems with substance abuse, finances and apparent mass indifference to his craft.

It's a beautifully made piece which anyone with any interest in the man should see. There's laughs to be had at the way Lawrence carries on (and I wonder if he's totally aware of this and plays up to it) but also plenty of pathos: at the start, he's being evicted from his flat and later on, he sells a precious guitar to raise some funds. Throughout, he comes across as a man in love with being in a band and who believes someday he'll reach his goal of being famous and not have to use public transport to get around.

There is some biographical detail on him - passing references to a brother and sister and how he never understood why original Felt member Nick Gilbert left because he thought the band put a pressure on their friendship. Lawrence thought the band was worth sacrificing a friend for.

Whether he's right or not is left for us to decide. The man himself just seems to follow whatever ideas he has - from jangling indie guitars in the 80s, glam rock stomp with his second band Denim and subsequently leading "the world's first b-side band", Go-Kart Mozart. It's to his credit that he states that while he likes the idea of being a millionaire, he'd never reform Felt, even for huge sums of cash, and you believe him.

Afterwards, there's a short Q&A with Lawrence and Kelly, during which we learn the former has been signing on the dole pretty much throughout his whole career in music, having never made any kind of fiscal rewards that his talent doubtless deserves. He's also resigned himself to never having a relationship again as "girlfriends get jealous of the band" and Kelly states that instead, he sees a girl somewhere he finds attractive and lives out the whole relationship in his head before conceding it would never have worked out.

With luck, there will also be a DVD release next year, so that other Lawrence fans can view this entertaining flick. As a little bonus on the day, I also got a Go-Kart Mozart key ring. Ace!

Still Lost in Space

I can remember the first time I saw Red Dwarf. I must have been around nine or ten years old, my parents had gone out for the night and an older cousin had been slipped enough cash to give her night up to keep an eye on me and my kid brother.

Having always kind of looked up to her, when she said she wanted to watch something, I was more than acquiescent. Within minutes, I was asking questions like "why has he got a H on his forehead?" and "why has he got those teeth?". Thus began a love affair with a show that has recently made a comeback.

To those in the dark: Dave Lister is the lowest ranked member of the titular crate, a huge mining ship. Unmotivated, laid back but also sharply intelligent, his immediate superior and bunkmate is Arnold Rimmer, whose ambitions to better himself are thwarted by his own idiocy and lack of self-awareness. Through a series of events, Lister is put into stasis for what is only supposed to be a few months, but when a radiation leak kills the rest of the crew, ends up being long enough for him to safely exit. That being, three million years. Holly, the ships AI, brings back Rimmer as a hologram recreation to keep him from going insane from loneliness. They are then joined by a creature that evolved from Lister's cat, which was pregnant and safely sealed in the hold when the disaster happened. Later on, they found Kryten, a robot who had been stranded when the ship he was serving on crashed but had continued his duties to the long-dead crew.

At its peak, around series' II to V, it was as funny a show as Britain has produced, introducing a new insult to the lexicon with "smeghead". Writers Doug Naylor and Rob Grant had a knack for sharp dialogue and using sci-fi clichés to great effect. It was only when series VI moved off the ship into the smaller Starbug vehicle (used as the writers were short on dialogue for Holly, and this removed the AI from the show) that it moved into a "monster of the week" antics.

After a four-year gap, the show returned to some fanfare, though with only Doug Naylor at the helm. This and series VIII showed a major dip in form. Bringing Kristine Kochanski (Lister's great lost unrequited love) back was a desperate move and the reception may be why the BBC were less keen on more. Instead, freeview channel Dave stepped in for the Back to Earth specials, which were nothing special bar a nice little scene where Lister meets Craig Charles, the actor who plays him.

Despite that, a new, full series has arrived with the first episode last week. And... it was OK. A few laughs, but nothing major. The central cast has been trimmed back down to the central quartet after the disaster of an extended set of players in VIII. However, by giving us a hologram of Rimmer's older brother and his robot companion, it felt like we were back to the problems with VI of flying in a different problem every week, rather than just giving us the crew interacting with one another and finding ways to kill the boredom of being trapped in deep space.

On the plus side, Danny John-Jules as Cat still seemed sharp, and there was just about enough to merit further watching in the hope of improvements.

Autogeddon

These last couple of weeks, I've had the temporary use of a car after over a year reliant on public transport. For one, this means I get an extra 25 minutes in bed in the morn, which can only be a good thing.

In exchange, I have to put up with my short patience on the road. It's genetic, you see. My dad in general is a guy so mild mannered he makes Clark Kent seem like the Hulk. Once on the road and stuck behind a tractor (which happens a lot in Cumbria) he is prone to go into rants so profane Malcolm Tucker would blush.

Like father, like son. In the afternoon especially, my blood pressure rockets and I'm thankful just to get home without seeing a vein in my forehead popping. Seeing some knobhead doing 50mph in a 30 zone makes me have fantasies of being a traffic cop so I could pull them over and shoot the tyres out. Then maybe dish out a kicking, Jack Regan style.

Part of this, I reckon, is down to getting older. Trivial things seem to bug me a lot more than they used to. Some of those high up on my shit list include:

Bus and Taxi Drivers
First thing my pop told me when I started learning: "never trust anyone driving a taxi or bus". Sound advice. Buses know their strength and use it with no regard to anyone else, taxi drivers just canter round the city using their own interpretation of the Highway Code.

Dozy Gets at the Lights
You all know the type, those who seem to slip into the Twilight Zone when waiting for the light to turn green, then seem to need an extra five seconds to remember how to shift the car into gear and release the handbrake. Honestly, life is just too short to have it spent stuck behind someone who can't tell the difference between red and green.


Lane Swappers
Driving down the Kingsway, heading South of the city, can be an annoying experience. Matters are not helped by fuckwits bombing down the dual carriageway, switching between the lanes at rapid pace to try and earn a few extra seconds. If, like me, you try to leave a wee bit of a gap between yourself and the car in front, then it's an open invite to these arseholes, who tend to then promptly slam on the brakes. When I am King, I will ensure these people are tracked down, have their cars taken away and crushed to the size of a Rubik's Cube.

Question Time

In a stroke of good luck, I happened upon mention of Lawrence of Belgravia finally getting a showing in Manchester. Naturally, I moved quickly to snap up tickets.

I've heard plenty of the documentary, about the Lawrence of Felt/Denim/Go-Kart Mozart non-fame, to know I wanted to see it. It's being shown in various cities across the country, and it's about time it made it to Manchester. By all accounts, it's a very well made film.

But what's this? Lawrence himself will be at the screening and fielding questions afterwards? Cue much excited jumping up and down.

So, do I become a total fanboy and take all my Felt vinyl LPs (and Ballad of the Band EP!) down for him to sign, along with getting pictures of him looking slightly annoyed with me grinning like a total arse? October 13th will reveal all.

(Incidentally, if any Lawrence fans read this before then and can think of any decent questions to ask, let me know, as all my journalistic training will doubtless abandon me and leave my mind blank.)

When the Soul Rebels Grow Up

Everything comes back round again, they say. Such it is for the critical verdict on the career of Dexys Midnight Runners and their unique leader (and only constant) Kevin Rowland.

Starting out playing soul music with a Midlands slant in the post-punk years, Rowland managed to antagonise just about everyone he could (record label, bandmates, the press) over three albums in the first half of the 1980s. The last of those, Don’t Stand Me Down, managed to kill stone dead a career that just a couple of years prior had seen them top of the singles chart both here and the States.

What followed was a spell in the wilderness for Rowland, personal issues not helped by a crippling drug habit. When he finally got it together to record a fine album of covers of songs that held special significance to him, he shot his chances down in flames by insisting on promoting it while wearing clothes generally seen on women. Legend (doubtlessly incorrectly) has it sales of My Beauty were counted in the hundreds.

In the new century, several “greatest hits” type tours under the Dexys name helped pay the bills and the media decided to grant both the debut Searching For The Young Soul Rebels and Don’t Stand Me Down the genius label they deserve. Come On Eileen, meanwhile, remains the wedding disco standard of all time.

A new album, therefore, was always going to get plenty of attention, especially with Rowland deservedly becoming a icon of English (Irish) eccentricity of sorts. On Some Day I’m Going To Soar, he’s teamed with Mick Talbot (ex-Style Council) and veterans of the Young Soul Rebels line-up Pete Williams and Jimmy Paterson. Talbot was originally in the band long enough to play on a chart-topping single (Geno) back in 1981.

With an album tends to come a tour, with the Manchester stop being at the Bridgewater Hall, more suited to Dexys’ more theatrical stylings. Prior to the band, we’re treated to a burlesque show, to which I was a bit ambivalent. Perhaps that’s just me living in the post-internet age where you can see all manner of naked flesh in a heartbeat, so the idea of mild titillation left me reading a magazine instead. She was a fine looking woman, no doubt, but perhaps I was additionally disconcerted when the act was performed to the theme tune from Perry Mason.

Then the band itself, now called just "Dexys" for some reason, and the larger part of the gig is set out as blasting through the whole album in sequence. The material itself works better on stage: Williams, who played bass on the album, gets someone else to do that job and instead takes the role of Rowland’s foil, reacting to his lyrics and throwing in the odd line/backing vocal himself. It’s all a bit like a show by James Brown or Bruce Springsteen – Williams taking the Bobby Byrd role and Jimmy Paterson being like Clarence Clemons, the “Big Man” whose solos (there’s more on stage than on the album) get some of the biggest receptions of the night.

As a concept, the music works well: middle aged man questions his life, gets infatuated with a lady, proclaims his love, which is then returned. Unfortunately, he then decides he’s “incapable of love” after all, leaving her somewhat annoyed. Nothing too new, perhaps, but Rowland does it well. The whole package may well bring heckles of “self-indulgent”, but Kev has never been one to shy away from such matters: after all, he has that ultra-conviction going back over 30 years from the days he was belting out covers of Northern Soul tunes.

What certainly is self-indulgent is getting a young lady to play his love interest for the music. Although Madeline Hyland may look the part, the bottom line is that she’s not a great singer and it’s just as well the most she has to do is engage in some dialogue.

Once she’s gone, the rest of the album (both on album and stage) does fade away a tad and the night doesn’t pick up again until the encore, when they blast through Tell Me When My Light Turns Green, Come On Eileen and This Is What She’s Like. The second of those was drawn out to perhaps too long a length, and I'd rather have had them give us Let's Make This Precious instead. But nevermind, a great gig and always nice to see a band make an effort with presentation.

In a Special Place

Anyone who knows me can tell you I have a thing about "epic" music. It's not a matter of size so much, more ambition and scope of vision. After all, No Bleeding by the Wild Swans has only been released as a Peel Session track, yet is one of the most glorious bits of music I've ever heard.

Head Swan Paul Simpson is someone who went in for writing epic paeans to the cosmos and I've recently got into the music of someone else who had similar goals - Mike Scott, leader of the Waterboys, whose desire to make "The Big Music" eventually brought the exceptional 1985 album This Is The Sea.

Raised in Edinburgh and Ayrshire, Scott turfed up in London and eventually got a deal with the Enigma label, who were expecting to release solo albums. Instead, he created the Waterboys name, saxophonist Anthony Thistlethwaite also signed up, bringing drummer Kevin Wilkinson to play on the sessions for the debut self-titled album.

However, it was the follow-up A Pagan Place that Scott began hitting his pace. Half recorded in 1982, half in 1984, the latter saw new recruit Karl Wallinger join to play piano. Completing the core line-up were Wilkinson back on drums and Roddy Lorimer helping out on trumpet. Naming a song The Big Music, Scott was setting the template of what he was looking at.

On the next album, This Is The Sea, he realised his ambitions. A gloriously "huge" album, it took all the best aspects of the previous albums and amped them up. In the lead single, The Whole of the Moon, there's a real "throw in everything" vibe that matches the lyrics, where Mike Scott tries to fit in as many words as possible at the climax - and yet it works incredibly well in the same way early Springsteen does. Allusions to the Boss are helped along by Thistlethwaite being able to bang out a huge sax solo in true Clarence Clemons fashion.

In a time where huge rock sounds made by Celtic lads seemed in vogue (Big Country and Simple Minds were having hits, U2 had broke into the big time), the Waterboys fit to a degree and This Is The Sea was their first album to make the top 40. It may have done better if not for Scott's insistence on not miming on Top of the Pops and a general reluctance to embrace "fame" the way Bono or Jim Kerr did.

Shortly after the album was released, Wallinger left. Full of his own music, he took the name World Party and did his own thing. Steve Wickham took his part as full-time Waterboy and encouraged Scott to move over to Ireland, where the local music would flavour his subsequent Fisherman's Blues album. Perhaps after realising what the Big Music could be so perfectly, it was natural to go back to the roots, as had been hinted at by the title tracks of the two previous albums.

A coda to the Big Music period came in 1991, when a compilation of the band's work was released - The Whole of the Moon was also re-issued and hit #3. More recently, Scott released the album An Appointment with Mr Yeats in 2011 under the Waterboys banner, putting his music to the prose of top Irish poet, W.B. Yeats - a man whose work ended up having a big impact on my own life. This Is The Sea, however, acts as a high water mark of just how bloody huge British rock music could sound.

Talk Yourself Into It

In an interesting turn of events, last week I got an email inviting me to attend a job interview. This threw me a wee bit, as I'd applied for the job with a quick, half-arsed application over a month ago. Yet here I am, asked to put on my best shirt to go and attempt to convince them I'm the man for them.

This may take some doing, as I've had the grand total of three interviews. One was unsuccessful, but got me asked back for another six months down the line, in which I did get the gig. Years later, I did well enough in another but the job seemed a crock of shit, so I stuck with what I had at the time.

My current occupation came about after I jacked in the journalist life to spend a year bumming around temp jobs while trying to work it out with a band. After a month spent filing and generally dossing around, the office manager was in need of someone fast. I could use a computer, work a spreadsheet and turned up on time, therefore I got the gig and £250 a week. Result!

Four years later, however, it does feel like I need to move on, hence applying for other jobs in the first place.  The plus side, in the unlikely event I'm successful, would be a bit of extra dosh and working closer to home. Excellent. But of course, it'll be more work, which isn't so good, for more than the usual (i.e. I'm a lazy bastard) reasons.

As it may turn out that finally (he says, worried of jinxing the whole thing) I've found a decent bunch of bods to make music with, with the final part of a singer potentially being about to fall into place. This is an issue in that I'm pretty certain my energy levels have taken a huge fall since my mid 20s peak. Back then, I could get up at 6.30am, finish work at 5pm, travel to the darkest corner of Salford to work on songs till close to midnight and get home around 1am, to repeat the next day with no real problems.

Now, aged 31, I get home from work at 4pm and even after a fairly easy day, want to lie down all evening. To quote many a bad film, am I getting too old for this shit? Maybe I should pack in work and use my life savings to commit a whole year to following my dreams. But then, as we all know, it would only mean on my last day that I would end up killed by a bomb of some variety, planted by one of my many enemies. Damn.  

Empathy Is Not a Dirty Word

I try to stay chilled out about things in this world whenever possible. I get stressed out, I get pissed off, I get sick. But with the news that charity Save the Children are launching a campaign to raise cash for children living in poverty in the UK, I've got really wound up.

Of course, I've not been living in a hole. I've known a while there are young kids out there who aren't getting enough in the way of proper food and clothing. Times are hard and getting harder for a lot of people. But this story brings it home.

It's too easy to dismiss people who this affects. The media will tell us these people have squandered their money on booze, fags and betting. Politicians will put the boot in too, to justify their callous behaviour with their own expense fiddling now a distant memory in the public mind.

Take Douglas Carswell, the MP for Clacton: "I don’t actually mind charities making political interventions but I totally disagree with them in terms of the causes of child poverty. We have actually spent a very large chunk of taxpayers’ money creating a state of dependency in this country – that’s one of the main causes of child poverty."

And then there's Philip Davies, the Conservative MP for Shipley. He reckons: "It is just a publicity seeking campaign. I think people will see through the fact that this is an organisation that has been campaigning for as much money as possible to be sent abroad for many years so it’s no good now telling us there’s no money left to go round to British children."

What a pair of complete and utter drizzling shitehawks. I have to love it when politicians use words like "dependency" in regard to the people at the bottom of the ladder. This from people so far detached from the realities of life, who are chauffeured around and often have second homes on the public's expense. You almost wish for them to just come out and say "look, you people are scum. If there are no jobs, just go to one of our new state-assisted suicide machines. You're of no value to anyone".

The truth is they believe being poor is a lifestyle choice, not the end result of the politics we've been living under for too long. Several years ago, the writer and comedian Robert Newman spoke about "Employed homeless" people in the States - folk who worked a full week, but couldn't afford somewhere to live. He warned it was coming this way, and I fear he was spot on. Support for those who need it will continue to be taken away, legalised loan sharks will thrive and the scrapheap will get bigger.

For now, Save the Children have set a target of half a million pounds for their appeal. I expect it will be met, and then our esteemed Prime Minister will crow on about how this shows "The Big Society" at work. The fucking tosser.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

It's "bye bye" to Manchester for Dimitar Berbatov, then. Never has there been a player I can remember at United who polarised opinion to such a level between thinking he was a genius or complete shite.

Even Juan Veron, whose career with us was patchy at best, was generally regarded as a brilliant player who just couldn't hack it in English football. Poor Dimi never had that excuse - after all, he'd done well for Tottenham Hotspur before his £30 million transfer four years ago. Since then, he won two championships and was top scorer in 2010/11 and yet last year, he was a stranger to the first team with only a short spell around Christmas (six goals in three games) to take from it. He had a nightmare up at Newcastle, but then so did everybody - yet the Berb was the only one to get the axe.

Perhaps he should have left last summer. Despite the Golden Boot, his being left out of the entire squad for the Champions League final against Barcelona was nothing short of humiliation - especially when you consider even Michael Owen got a space on the bench ahead of him. However, he kept his silence throughout it all and it's only now, since his transfer to Fulham last week, that he's voiced his disappointment and a feeling that he's lost some respect for his manager.

Fair enough, says I. But then I would, as I was always a fan. He was a player who could do things that made you gasp, had sublime skill and that cool thing of being able to beat a man despite having no pace whatsoever. He's probably the type I'd like to have been, if I had been good enough to play.

The real puzzler for me, that said, is why we bought him in the first place. At the time, we were English and European champions down to in large part the front three of Wayne Rooney, Carlos Tevez and Cristiano Ronaldo - a trio whose speed and ability to switch positions had caused all manner of problems for the best around.

My only guess would be Ferguson knew Ronaldo wanted away to Madrid and also that there would be problems with Tevez and his agent. Perhaps the whole system was set to change. What we do know is that in the season after those two stars left, Berb made two fatal misses against Blackburn and Manchester City that many believe (with some cause) cost us the league and FA Cup.

Which will explain why in the future, a man who scored a hat-trick past Liverpool won't go down in legend. I always wanted him to succeed. People said he only scored against the teams we beat easily, like five against Blackburn, hat-tricks against Wigan and Birmingham. Perhaps so, but given we lost the league on goal difference last season, maybe, just maybe, he could have found a few more goals against West Brom, QPR, Norwich...?

It wasn't to be for him here, though I'll always count myself lucky to have been in the crowd when he pulled off an incredible bit of skill against West Ham to set up a Ronaldo goal soon after joining. Good luck at Fulham, Dimi, and know that now you're gone, we're back to being a squad of right ugly bastards again.

Waiting for the Rainbow

As I've said before, when I get into a band or singer, I jump right in. Buy all the albums I can find, read every bit of information online, watch all the videos. The newest of these has been World Party, the creative outlet of one of Britain's most talented songwriters, Karl Wallinger.

Wallinger got his break in the early 1980s when he got a job playing with the Waterboys, whose leader Mike Scott was striving towards creating "The Big Music". His new recruit, talented on a large number of instruments, was a massive step in that direction and 1985's sublime This Is The Sea remains a wonderful slice of epic rock 27 years on, and I'll be writing about it sometime in the near future.

However, Wallinger had plenty of his own ideas and there wasn't too much room in the Waterboys for them. Instead, he handed in his cards and formed his own project, named World Party. A song of the same name, written by him, would actually appear on the next Waterboys' album, Fisherman's Blues.

From the start, the project would frequently reflect Wallinger's strong pro-environmentalism slant. The single Ship of Fools and it's parent album Private Revolution both went top 40 in the States, but it was 1990's Goodbye Jumbo that really showcased the knack for strong hooks that show World Party at their best. Way Down Now and Put The Message in the Box should have been huge hits while And I Fell Back Alone remains one of the most affecting break-up songs I've ever heard. It's telling that when the first World Party "Best Of" was released, half of Goodbye Jumbo was featured.

Commercial success in the UK would come in 1993, when Is It Like Today? went top 20 and the album Bang! hit #2. Wallinger's biggest success, however, would come via reflected form at the end of the 1990s when Robbie Williams took his version of She's the One to the top of the pops. Guy Chambers, who had co-written and produced the one-time fat dancer's most successful work, had been given a break of sorts as a touring member of World Party, co-writing a couple of tracks on Bang!

Whatever the merits of William's reading, it would soon be a very important issue for Wallinger when, shortly after releasing fifth album Dumbing Up in 2000, he fell seriously ill from a brain aneurysm that put him out of action for six years. The cash from She's the One kept the ship floating, including his own recording studio where he did most his World Party work.

Now recovered enough to commence touring and recording work, Wallinger hasn't quite made a new World Party album, but he has brought us Arkeology, a five album set of out-takes, live tracks and unreleased recordings dating as far back as 1985. Brilliantly, it's packaged as a kind of diary: dates alongside pictures of the various World Party members, (too) brief details on the songs and quotes from writers and philosophers. Certain dates Wallinger believes are important are also marked, the good point of which is that you can put your own in to "personalise" the set. However, Karl should be informed that he's put Eric Cantona's debut for Manchester United incorrectly, putting it down as his first start against Norwich City, rather than him coming off the bench in a Manchester derby the week before. The pedant in me insisted on me putting that in there.

In terms of the music, there's plenty to love. Wallinger obviously has a high degree of quality control to not include some of the songs here on the albums thus far and there's some great covers, especially the rocking run through of Little Richard's Lucille. For me, it only goes a little astray when he indulges his love of Prince a bit too much .

Arkeology is a wonderfully packaged set of, in the main, superb songs that cause you to reflect that World Party have never got the respect they deserved, a Q award for "Best Album" with Goodbye Jumbo notwithstanding - which reminds me, would any mainstream magazine give such an award to something that barely made the top 40 now?  Fans should buy this collection, and even the uninitiated who have £30 to spare could do worse to have a listen.

The Space Race Is Over

Not long after a wee robot has a good nose around Mars, the world sees the exit of the first human to walk on a piece of rock that wasn't this planet. Neil Armstrong may have came across a private, humble individual, but no-one can doubt his place in history.

It seems strange that his moment of immortality happened 12 years before I was even born, as nobody else has been up there in many years. My dad told me about watching it with his great-grandfather, who was in his late 80s and would die not long after. Growing up just before the start of the 20th century, I doubt he saw a motor car till he was in his 30s, which gives you an idea of the huge steps made by humanity across such a short space of time.

As a child, anything to do with space and the galaxy out there fascinated me. Living away from the big cities, there was little light pollution and the stars would be visible on any clear night. I'd watch episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and feel jealous I had to get born in 1981 and not 2381.

Neil Armstrong, from what I gather, was always keen to emphasise all the hard working members of the team that put him up and the rest of the select few up there on the moon. Mission Control, engineers who designed the spaceships and the like - but, he was the one who had to have the testicular fortitude to actually do what nobody else had done before. Like Columbus sailing over the horizon when a lot of people thought there was an edge to fall off or a man-eating dragon, Armstrong personified that curiosity humanity has to do things for no better reason than to see what happens.

After all, by walking on the moon, it wasn't like the world was overcome by peace and love at the sight of this incredible feat. Indeed, you could suggest the whole thing was a PR coup for the US Government to stick two fingers up to their friends in Moscow and say "stick that, Ivan". But if nothing else, it satisfied the answer people have been asking since we first developed some kind of intelligence: "I wonder what's up there?"

A New Hope

And…. It’s back again. Those with no inclination towards the game will say “it’s never been away!” but the new English football season is now underway.

The days before kick off are truly the golden time for all fans. No matter that the previous season finished with relegation, getting knocked out of the cup by the local pub team and the entire back four being sold to your local rivals for a box of pies, there’s always a spark of optimism that new season equals new hope.

Because while the Olympics were great, it’s all a bit too nice, isn’t it? Media pundits may bleat on about how recent months have shown us such concepts as “honour” and “respect”, there’s not too much fun in that. When Jessica Ennis was working her socks off, the crowd weren’t questioning the parentage of her rivals, which is all good and well, but it doesn’t provide much in the way of cheap laughs . In a football ground, you can quite happily get away with singing about how you all hate an entire team's fanbase and it's kind of acceptable, nay encouraged.

Heading to the ground in the sun, buying the match programme to read the manager giving it the “if we all pull together in the same direction, put in the hard work and have the backing of the fans, there’s no reason we can’t succeed”. Perhaps a profile of the hot-shot new striker with the stupid haircut and shite tattoos stating his ambition of “becoming a legend”.

It’s good to feel the old routines again. Going to the pub beforehand, meeting with people you haven’t seen since May, speculating on who’ll get in the team. Make libellous comments about the club owners for not coughing up some money. Then there's the old familiar buzz of walking up the road and seeing the ground emerge from amongst the houses. Well, unless you have to go to one of those wretched lego-kit stadiums miles outside the town that the likes of Stoke play in. Yuck.

It doesn’t matter if you’re following Man United or Macclesfield, that sense of possibility is there. For a little while, at least, as all it takes is a dodgy back-pass in the first minute that’s cut out by the other team’s swarthy number nine to score for the sense of "here we go again" to sink in. Then again, there’s always next year, right?

Interest Levels

With a big NCIS shaped hole in my weekly schedule until the New Year, I need a new kick. With that in mind, I gave Person of Interest a try after watching England actually play quite well against Italy. I put that down to having a couple of United players running the midfield.

Person of Interest appears to have got a lot of buzz on the back of having Jonathan Nolan involved in the creative process. With The Dark Knight Rises - which he co-wrote - making huge piles of money, his star is on the up and a show with his name on it was at least going to merit some interest from me. But from the pilot episode, which was enjoyable enough, he seems to have resorted to some big book of cliché plays.

Take our hero, one John Reese. He's ex-CIA, doing some rather naughty stuff that now racks him with guilt. Chuck on that being unable to save the woman he loved. He's a badass loner who wants to be left alone to drink himself to death. That's he's played by Jim Caviezel doesn't exactly endear him to me, given his part in the absolute abomination that was the remake of The Prisoner.

In any case, our man is just some bum on the streets until some local gangster hoodlums on the tube try to steal his whiskey. This results in a one-on-five smackdown and a visit to the local cop shop, where a quick fingerprint search reveals some of his somewhat unsavoury past. Luckily, before he can get slapped in irons, he's got out by a brief hired by a certain Mr Finch.

Finch is cliché fest number two. He's a computer genius, therefore a tad geeky. He's also a bit crippled and a billionaire looking, like Reese, to atone for past mistakes.

So, two characters with nothing too new to bring us. However... the angle is that Finch designed a computer in the wake of 9/11 that would monitor all communication systems and all CCTV to find potential terrorists to prevent the same happening again. Amongst the information considered irrelevant to this is the potential to prevent murders and other nasty crimes. Finch feels guilty about ignoring this all the while and ropes in Reese to be his partner: a backdoor Finch uses to get into his system presents them with a Social Security number of a "Person of Interest". From there, they have to work out their involvement in whatever crime is being planned and stop it. It's not wholly original, but it's a nice enough angle.

While it's not gripped me as much as NCIS - for one thing, Reese may be a badass, but he's still nowhere near the level of Leroy Jethro Gibbs - I'm willing to give it a few episodes to impress me. That it's been given a second season in the States would suggest someone likes it, but I can't help but feel I wish they'd given Human Target another chance instead.

Fanning the Flames

That was the Olympics, then. It all seemed to go rather well, despite some of the press initially thinking it would bring chaos, famine and pestilence to the capital of the UK. But once it was clear everyone was having a lovely time and, more importantly, the British team were actually doing very well, even the likes of the Mail and Express were getting giddy.

It took a little time, mind. The opening ceremony brought somewhat tedious moans of it being some kind of Marxist propaganda vehicle and/or a love-letter to New Labour values. Such idiocy was quickly laughed away, as the media realised we all actually quite like the NHS, especially those of us without the spare wedge to put aside for BUPA premiums.

I have to admit watching the Olympic torch being lit even brought a bit of warmth to this cold, black heart. It helped that the actual flame was burning away in a rather spectacular fashion and that the coverage was on the good old BBC - no three-times-an-hour ad breaks for us.

What also helped was having top athletes like Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis winning gold. Despite myself, I was cheering away when they were tearing across the tracks. I don't know, they just seem so likeable. But then it was also thrilling to see the guy from Kenya break the world record at the 800m - I was clapping away at the guy deciding to just dispense with the whole idea of having someone else set the pace and just tear away from the off.

After the event, there's a lot of talk of "legacy", whatever that means. Not being a London resident, it's hard to see what long-term effects it has on me per se. There's been some talk of the whole event bringing raising self-esteem across the nation, which strikes me as a load of crap: this country in the main is too divisive for any true national identity to grasp us and for one thing, the English especially love to be told what worthless pieces of shite we all are.

What I hope is that we see through any attempts by the government to claim false credit for how everything went off. The success is down to huge amounts of funding, which is always the key to sporting success. It's no good having talented athletes if they don't have top-notch facilities and coaches to make sure they fulfill their potential. The whole "Big Society" would see these costs cut and enthusiastic volunteers step into the void.

I'm also pissed off to a stupid degree by Cameron's dismissal of "Indian Dance" as part of PE lessons and the over-emphasising of competitive sports. Here's the reality: not every child likes sports, because a lot of us are crap at things like football, hockey, rugby etc. Having extra options to make sure a kid gets exercise can only be a good thing, with emphasis on getting a bit of a sweat on being fun being the prime point. Much better than some skinny kid being pummelled on a patch of mud doubling as a rugby pitch, right? Not that I'm talking from personal experience, of course. (cough)

Outside the Top

When pundits and hacks bemoan "spoilt, overpaid footballers", it's easy to forget that most of the lads out there playing the game for a living aren't like Wayne Rooney, earning £100,000+ a week, living in a mansion and shagging call girls at any opportunity.

One of these was Chris Hargreaves, a man whose career over 20 years never made the top flight. Instead, he went from his hometown club Grimsby Town to Torquay United via Hull City, Hereford United, Plymouth   Argyle, Northampton Town, Brentford and Oxford United. Never staying at one club for too long, his story is that of the perennial journeyman footballer.

A tale of which we can read about, as Chris has put his story down in Where's Your Caravan?, an entertaining tale of life in the lower rungs of English pro football. In an interesting approach, he tells his tale inbetween descriptions of his life at the time of writing: recently retired, he's worried about providing for his family, like any other Joe on the street.

It appears that Hargreaves didn't employ a ghost writer for this, doing it totally on his own steam. It's an admirable approach, and to his credit, he's not too shabby. Though there's plenty of "to be fair to him" and "credit to him" peppering the pages, as well as plenty of periods where it seems every other paragraph ends with a "!", the prose flows very well.

However, I do have gripes that could have been avoided with a decent editor. Some basic errors such as confusing Oxford United and City and the years Manchester United won the Champions League should have been spotted, and the bits where Chris turns a little bit "Sun Reader" don't fit well with this reader. I also wonder if Mrs Hargreaves was given a copy of the manuscript before it went to press.

But all is made up with his honesty of life as a footballer, and Hargreaves is nothing but upfront with his own failings, admitting he may have partied a bit too hard in his younger days, and that some bad decisions effectively ended his chances of making the top flight.

Where the book works best is the periods where our narrator is uncertain of his future - especially once he gets past 30 - and there's the constant worry of getting a new contract - it's a life shared by many others and it's not surprising to read of many of Hargreaves' teammates who are absolutely disillusioned with the game. One, Paul McGregor, gives up football in the belief he'd have a better time being in a band.

As a footballer's autobiography, Hargreaves deserves praise for making a much better read than the likes of Rooney or Gerrard would ever knock together. He's a bit of a lad too much a times, but also has a nice line in self-deprecation. Best of all, he doesn't hold back on slagging off those he feels wronged him in the past: as a youngster on trial with Everton in the mid 1980s, he gets revenge on Adrian Heath and Pat van den Hauwe for acting up.

Certainly, he manages to give an insight into being a footballer that is just earning a living. For that, it's a decent read for anyone with an interest in the game.

Knighty Knight

Seven years from its start, The Dark Knight Returns completes the only trilogy that I've ever got myself out of the house to go and see at the cinema every time. Star Wars? Nah. Lord of the Rings? Fuck right off. Round my way, Batman beats them all to a bloody pulp.

Such a big occasion, then, demands going an extra mile so it was a case of trooping up to Manc city centre to the IMAX. Having never been to one before, I made the fatal error of sitting a tad too close to the screen. Not being a Hammerhead Shark, the screen was wider than my field of vision. Still, a minor quibble as the visuals did look that much better.

However, the sound at times was a bit muddy, something which I've since come to the conclusion (having read online of other people having similar complaints) is down to duff mixing.

The film itself: eight years after punching the Joker through a vortex into the Twilight Zone, which caused everyone to forget he ever existed for some reason, Bruce Wayne is a shadow of his former self. Crime is at an all-time low in Gotham City and our hero is physically knackered out from his nocturnal exploits, reduced to being the Howard Hughes of his town. To make matters worse, some cat burglar nicks a bunch of pearls that belonged to his mother.

Luckily, motivation to sort his shit out is coming in the form of Bane, a slab of muscle in a mask. When Commissioner Gordon cops for a smackdown, Brucie Boy finally stops moping and gets the costume out of the cupboard. Hi-jinx, plot twists and drama follow, of which you'll have to go and see to find out about.

How did I feel coming out, over two-and-a-half hours later? Initially, very impressed. As you'd expect from the series, it looks great and it seems Christopher Nolan was given an open budget judging by the cast he put together. Alongside the usual candidates (Bale, Caine, Freeman, Oldman), Matthew Modine, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and, oddly, Tom Conti crop up and all get their fair share of scenes to themselves. Michael Caine especially gets a couple of high emotion moments, but I've found it a little hard to take him seriously since this.

Then, of course, there's Tom Hardy as Bane and Ann Hathaway as Selina Kyle/Catwoman. When they first announced Bane would be the bad guy, I was a bit doubtful: in the comics, he's a seven foot tall, 400lb mountain of muscle constantly being pumped full of drugs to keep him so. With Nolan's more realistic take, such an approach was never going to happen. However, Hardy still comes across as pretty menacing and looks the part, stomping around the scene, executing mooks who fail him. My only complaint is that his odd accent is very hard to understand at points and at other times verges on camp. A good villain in any case. Hathaway is fine - helped by there being no difference in Selina Kyle and her costumed other side. But yes, let's get the confession done here - I did think her arse looked good when she was riding the Bat-Bike.

Having such a wide cast does have its costs, though. Morgan Freeman essentially sleepwalks his part in, which isn't that significant anyways and Batman himself seems to barely star in his own franchise at points. Gordon-Levitt, on the other hand, may make himself a Hollywood career after doing an excellent job as Blake, an idealistic young cop. The fact he's a handsome devil will probably help too.

In general, the storyline does a decent enough job tying everything together as a finale. More attentive comic fans may well see a big twist coming, but will also love some of the little references (a joke  about a "killer croc" in the sewers is one). However... waking up the day after viewing, my brain was full of "hold on, how did...?" type questions. There are some fairly huge plot holes to be found throughout and for my money, Batman doesn't quite do enough detecting.

All the various plot holes and things that don't make sense would be valid except for one thing: this is a film about a man in a bat suit up against a slab of muscle in a metal mask. Yes, yes, Nolan has tried to import a whole wedge of realism into proceedings but the bottom line is that we're talking about characters from comic books. Suspension of disbelief is pretty much a prerequisite, I would have thought.

Without doubt, the studios will start up a new Batman - we can only hope they spare us yet another origin tale - and I don't envy who gets the job helming it. I'd imagine they may get it started soon if rumours of a Justice League film are to be believed. Flaws and all, Nolan created an excellent trilogy of films and Christian Bale deserves credit too for making a great Batman and Bruce Wayne, even if the voice is still too easy to mock.

State of the Independents

C86 was a keystone moment in whatever British "indie" music was, even if brought about a huge backlash against many of the bands involved. Listened to today, a lot of it doesn't hold up, as the ease of home recording today makes some of the rough-and-ready numbers look stone age.

Only a handful of 22 bands on it crossed over to the mainstream. Most prominent was Primal Scream, who only hit the charts after an extreme makeover that saw them shift from jangling guitars to dance beats. The Soup Dragons did the same and scored a big hit with a cover of an old Stones song, and the Wedding Present enjoyed some success in the 1990s without really changing their approach. Best of all, Half Man Half Biscuit have kept bringing us sublime observations on modern life after stating on C86 that they hated Nerys Hughes.

As an aside, it's a shame Glossop's finest, the Bodines, never got their rewards. Therese is a cracking little single which suggests they could have made it, but instead they were condemned to cult status.

One of the key bands of the London scene at that time, the June Brides, didn't appear on C86, perhaps wisely given the stigma attached to many of the bands who did. But it didn't help them much in the long run and by 1987 they were gone.  Singer/songwriter Phil Wilson went on to record on Creation but never seemed to top the fab pop rush of In The Rain, one of his old band's earliest songs. It sounded like it was made on a budget of £10, but it's frantic violin and so-obvious-it-works-brilliantly "ba ba ba" section means it still gets played at chez Harrison.

Over a quarter of a century after that one sublime moment, the band is back together and they've made a rather brilliant single. A January Moon is guitar pop in the vein of it's best exponents, the Go-Betweens. Wilson uses his voice's limitations as a strength (weakness = vulnerability) and it's an actual delight to listen to.

A single worth your time, then. Even more so if you order from the label (www.occultation.co.uk), because then you get a ten track CD for your cash, featuring the single and songs including Phil Wilson solo work.

On top of that, the band are playing with the also newly-reformed Distractions up in sunny Salford on August 31st and September 1st. As part of the "End of the Pier Shows" at the Kings Arms, they'll both be joined by Factory Star, led by ex-Blue Orchids and Fall man Martin Bramah. I'll be making an effort to be there.

In the Navy

I was never much of a fan of the now-deceased Word magazine, whose last issue recently came out. It always seemed a slight read, didn't offer much that Uncut and Mojo didn't already feature and the covers were usually wretched.

However, its final breath did bring up an important point: why does NCIS not get the credit it deserves? Its had nine series, has high ratings but is rarely mentioned by the mainstream press. I, for one, am a huge fan. Yes, its plots aren't anything new and at the heart, it's just another crime drama. So what makes it work?

Well, 90% of that for me is Mark Harmon and how he plays Leroy Jethro Gibbs, a former Marine sniper turned investigator for the Navy. Along with Shawn Spencer from Psych and Abed from Community, he's my favourite character on the box right now. He takes no shite from anyone, kicks arse when  needed but also knows the right words to say when one of his team has a moment of crisis.

Let's be frank, Agent Gibbs is fuckin' awesome. I'd love to have a boss like him. Yeah, so OK, he might give you a slap on the back of the head when you do something dumb, but on the other hand, when you've been kidnapped by international terrorists, he can snipe them from half a mile away. I'd also like to point out I don't have any kind of affinity with him based on our mutual admiration of female redheads. No way.

However, NCIS has more than just that. A show like this lives and dies on the strength of the chemistry between the team: luckily, it's strong here. A major highlight is David McCallum as Ducky, the pathologist, who is possibly the only character who isn't somewhat of a cliché: you have the computer geek (McGee), the  action girl (Ziva, who also has daddy issues) and the smooth lothario (DiNozzo). I guess Abby is a tad unusual in being a very upbeat goth. And, of course, there's the usual unresolved sexual tension between various characters, as is always going to be part of such shows.

Yet, I cannot help but watch it. There's something oddly compelling that I can't quite put my finger on, and I suspect this is why it never gets much coverage in the media. Plenty of people are probably in the same boat as me: avid watchers without quite knowing why. I can only think it's the absolute charisma of that silver-haired fox Gibbs - it's the only explanation I have that I am very annoyed that the series finished and I have to wait till the new year for my next NCIS fix.

Non-Hit Parade

The singles charts of today are of absolutely no interest to me whatsoever. This is almost natural: after all, I'm 31 years old and pop music (in the main part) is for people a lot younger than I.

That doesn't mean I'm not interested in stuff that happened in the past. How did Laurie Anderson get something as weird as O Superman to nearly top the charts in the UK? Were Frankie Goes to Hollywood all a matter of hype, or are the songs any good? (Not really, to my ears)

Then there's the songs that sound like they were born to boom out of a million radios but went absolutely nowhere. Here's a few songs that, to me, should have been hits but never were. And by hit, I mean reached the top 40 of the singles charts in either the UK or the US.


The Comsat Angels - Will You Stay Tonight?
The Comsats started out as a great moody post-punk outfit who peaked with the brilliantly bleak Sleep No More album in 1981. However, they moved from the darkness (perhaps understandably so) and by 1983, were pushing for a chart breakthrough.

This song should have been it, given it's got all the right ingredients: hooks galore, great chorus, tight pop structure. Instead, it didn't even make the UK top 75, the latest in a series of disappointments that began when their first record label failed to send out enough copies of an album to satisfy demand that would have put them into the charts.

Not long after Will You Stay Tonight? failed to set the world on fire, they came the closest they ever would to a hit when a re-recording of early single Independence Day made the dizzy heights of #71.

Nowadays, they've gained some level of recognition, with film critic Mark Kermode hailing them as his favourite band.

Psychedelic Furs - All That Money Wants
In a way, the Furs have only themselves to blame for this. At the start of the 80s, they were a post-punk six piece with a cult following. As the decade wore on, they shed members as they got more popular. Fourth album Mirror Moves just about managed to keep on the right side of the line, but by 1987 and the Midnight to Midnight album, it was all daft haircuts and bad production values. All the same, it became their biggest hit album and provided their only US top 40 hit with Heartbreak Beat.

Lead singer Richard Butler gave himself a mild case of heart trouble due to feeling so stressed by this straying from what the band used to mean and soon got rid of the bad clothes as well as the bad songs from the setlist. Naturally, this pissed off all the new fans on top of all the old fans who'd long moved onto bands like the Cure, Depeche Mode and U2 - all less perceived to have "sold out". So, when they brought out this single to support the All Of This and Nothing compilation in 1988, it's failure to hit made some kind of sense.

On the other hand, it was their best song in years, as well as being produced by Stephen Street, then hot from working with the Smiths and on Morrissey's solo stuff. It's the sound of a band really giving it everything  again, with Butler's old angry croak returning to form after a few years signing more vapid poptones - indeed, the title alone may reflect his views on the band's chasing of commercial success at the cost of their souls. "I don't believe that I believed in you" could be a line to the band from an old fan.

No matter that it sounded amazing, had a brilliant b-side in Birland and saw them back using guitars properly, it went nowhere and the band's career in terms of a popular act was over, which was a shame as their next two albums were also excellent.

New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle 
New Order's first chart peak had been in the wake of Blue Monday selling by the shedload. Both Confusion and Thieves Like Us had hit the top 20 at home, but by 1986, they couldn't buy a decent hit. Perhaps Factory was going through one of their 'slump' periods.

But all the same, BLT was born for radio play, was superbly produced and featured an atypical straightforward lyric from Bernard Sumner. I can't find any fault with this perfect pop song, and yet it only made #56 in the UK charts in September 1986. Perhaps if it had come out two years later, when the band were scoring big hits everywhere and topping the album charts, it might have got the contemporary recognition it deserved.

Time, however, has been kind to the song and it's gained status as one of the New Order's classics.

XTC - Great Fire
What a difference a year makes. In 1982, XTC seemed to have finally made the big time. Their fifth album, English Settlement, and it's lead single, Senses Working Overtime, had cracked the UK top 10 and their well-deserved success seemed assured.

But then years of non-stop work caught with with singer/songwriter Andy Partridge. Add to that a harsh withdrawal from Valium, and a nervous breakdown was no surprise. He decided playing live was just too much, and the band retreated into a studio-based existence they never really came back from. Naturally, record company and related sales plummeted and XTC wouldn't get a sniff of a hit for a decade.

Of course, the whole fire/love metaphor is as old as time itself, but Partridge still makes it sound fresh, in particular during an absolutely glorious middle eight where he sings "I've been in love before, but it's never been as hot as this", his feelings for a new beau seeing "memories of loves crack and blister". Perhaps it was bad timing: 1983 was a period of synths and big hair, and some guy from Swindon playing a simple guitar riff perhaps didn't find what was happening on Top of the Pops...

The Go-Betweens - Pretty much everything
I mean, really, how the fuck did the Go-Betweens not get a hit? People say Morrissey/Marr were the Lennon/McCartney of the 80s, but it doesn't really hold up as a comparison. No - Robert Forster and Grant McLennan were the true heirs to the "genius songwriting partnership" throne. They looked the part too, and had strong musicians in the band

Yet somehow, they spent years struggling along, bringing out albums of sublime pop songs. OK, so their early stuff could be rough around the edges, but come on: Bachelor Kisses, Spring Rain, Bye Bye Pride and just about everything on 16 Lovers Lane scream "hit". And what was the best they got? Streets of Your Town made it to #80. I can't really explain that one at all.

And you Australians aren't off the hook. You gave birth to this amazing band, with the best songwriters your fair isle has ever produced and they couldn't buy even a minor hit down there either? People are idiots!

Predictive Text

Sunday afternoon and it's certainly summer in Manchester. There's not a cloud in the sky, people are wandering round Didsbury in shorts and shades, determined to make the most of it, judging by the numbers enjoying a cold beer in the bars and cafes.

All of which would come as no surprise if you read a certain UK tabloid newspaper. Let's call it the Maily Sexpress, a paper of good standing which reported that hot weather was indeed on the way. "Forget the rain" was the headline, and it seems their Cassandra-like powers have worked for today at least.

But what's this? A front page from the same paper, from only two weeks ago? "It will rain till September"? Well, who'd thunk it? I often think weather reporting in the mass media is often a case of the journalist sticking his head of the window, seeing it's a bit drizzly and writes that the next few weeks will bring rainfall so hard that the biblical floods produced a puddle in comparison.

Mind you, the bod on weather is a journalism king compared to whatever clown they have covering football. Mediawatch noted that a story on Southampton signing a player from Crystal Palace managed to:

a) Get the player's name wrong.
b) The name of Southampton's manager wrong.
c) Stated that this will be Southampton's "maiden" season in the Premiership, ignoring the fact they spent all of the 1990s in the top flight and were only relegated in 2005.

Superb! Can anyone beat the record for most basic facts wrong in such a short story? Perhaps all the senior hacks have taken off on holiday, leaving the work experience kid to cover. Or maybe not. After all, football writing has often seemingly been a case of making any old shit up and printing it as "a source says". I know if my team had signed all the players that were said to be doing so in the newspapers, we'd probably have won about ten Champions Leagues by now.