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.