"I found this photograph... tender face of black and white"

I don't head back to my hometown very often these days, but when I do, and I'm in the bedroom where I spent far too much of my childhood, I have had the same ritual over the last six years.

When my paternal grandfather died, we found a cache of old photos in his flat, maybe 100 or so black and white pics. I go through all of these when I'm back. There a lot of him when he was a kid, and it's strange to see the stern old man, made so by experiences of war and personal loss, as a smiling young boy alongside his kid sisters.

There's also a few documents, one of which is my great-great-grandparents' wedding certificate, from 1907. Perhaps appropriately for this time of year (just about!), they were called Joseph and Mary and it feels strange to hold something that symbolises the beginning of their lives together. As I recall, he lived just about long enough to see Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

There's also their youngest daughter's wedding certificate. Her name was Jane, born in 1911, and her death in 1989 was my first experience with loss. From the photos, there are plenty of her, as she was close to just about everyone in my family. When my dad lost his mother, she kept him and grandpop from totally falling apart by making sure they actually ate - men of the time being totally unable to cook.

Again, it's a surprise to see the sweet old lady I knew in her younger days, wearing shades and smoking cigarillos. There's a pic of her wedding day too, in 1937.

Cool lady

Getting married in a black dress - fantastic. Maybe it was common back then for all I know, but it seems pretty damn hip to me. She still lived in the house in that pic by the time I came around, and I spent many a happy weekend there and playing in the ruins of nearby Penrith castle with her watching and warning me and my brother not to climb too high up the medieval walls.

What always frustrates me is all the pictures is those with people in whom my father and I have no idea about. Are they relations? Friends? What's the story? I can only wish my granddad had shared when he was alive and filled in the gaps.

I am directly related to somebody in this picture. 

Take this one, for example. Where is it? What's the occasion? Loath as I am to reduce to cliché, but it is tremendously evocative of a world that no longer exists, especially when I consider the people inside are somehow connected to me. Though I go back maybe twice a year tops, Cumbria remains a huge part of me and I think always will. Grandpop's pics remain a reminder of why this is so.

Take a Rocket Ship to Mars

Tags are so often misleading. I love a lot of the Shoegazing bands of the early 1990s: Ride, Slowdive, Lush, Pale Saints... but one band is often lumped in with them, with no real reason beyond journalistic laziness.

Sure, on a casual listen, Catherine Wheel's first album Ferment almost fit in with that. It had loud guitars that droned at moments and Rob Dickinson's vocals could at times be a little dreamy. Yet, there was plenty to separate them from that whole scene, which may explain why they outlived many of their contemporaries and also the relative success they enjoyed in the States that others didn't.

For starters, the band were from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk - hardly rock and roll heartland, and miles away from London or the then-hip Manchester or Thames Valley heartlands. Dickinson at least was well into his mid 20s by the time their debut came out in 1992, having spent time working designing for Lotus prior. Perhaps this prior experience came out in the song Black Metallic, the video for which got some play on MTV and was lyrically written about the love of a car. 

Where the quartet, Dickinson alongside Brian Futter (lead guitar), Dave Hawes (bass) and Neil Sims (bass), had was the ability to properly rock out from the dream status of their contemporaries. It also helped that in their quieter moments, they were guided by Tim Friese-Green, who had helped Talk Talk make some of the most amazing music of recent history. 

The band were huge fans of Talk Talk, and under his guiding hand made a wondrous entrance to the world. I Want to Touch You showed the band could do sexy and the title track put down their abilities to create quiet/loud dynamics. I've long been keen on putting that song on compilation albums for people, chuckling to myself that the innocent receiver will crank up the volume, only to kill their ears at the moment the sonic assault cuts in. 

As they would frequently do, the band toured North America extensively, and perhaps toughened up their musical muscles as 1993's Chrome shoved the band as far away from any perceived roots - though those paying attention to their b-sides including covers of Husker Du might not have been surprised. Producer Gil Norton wiped away a lot of the density of their earlier work in favour of a more, well, metallic sound, though Show Me Mary was a great hit single that never was. 

With the double hit of Ursa Major Space Station and Fripp, the band hit heights that surely blew any competition out of the water - Dickinson sighing that "I'll follow you through time, 'till it's not worth living" over a crescendo of guitars and drums that demand to be heard loud is a frankly sublime moment . That it never crossed over to a bigger audience seems unjust beyond words. 

1995's Happy Days had a very American Alt-Rock edge to it, much more in kilter with bands like the Smashing Pumpkins. Opener God Inside My Head featured some very heavy playing and some uncharacteristic metal-eseque grunting from Dickinson.

At it's best, it was magnificent, as with the quietly fuming Eat My Dust You Insensitive Fuck, the funny Shocking and the hook-filled Judy Staring at the Sun, which featured Belly singer Tanya Donnelly on vocals, and might have done better as a single not for the fact it was about a drug addict. Another single, Waydown got some MTV notice with a somewhat literal air-crash themed video, but mainstream acceptance remained out of reach.

A tendency to place as many "new" songs as b-sides had created a fair old amount of non-album material over the years, and the compilation Like Cats and Dogs was released to warmer reviews than Happy Days. Featuring most pastoral material, it set the tone for the next album, which would turn out to be their masterpiece. They even made Pink Floyd sound good, with a version of Wish You Were Here.

Adam and Eve, out in 1997, should have been "the" album. As usual, it didn't work out that way. Not that they were getting much help - legend says Rolling Stone were all set to give them a high score in the review, only for it to get marked down in the edit. Quite why remains a mystery, as in terms of music in 1997, for me, only Mansun's Six comes close. OK Computer looks like a bunch of teenage angst in comparison, as while both have a hint of prog, Adam and Eve manages to keep things interesting, even when all but two of the 13 songs clock in at over five minutes.

I simply cannot emphasise how essential the album is. If you have an interest in rock music, alternative or mainstream, seek out Adam and Eve now. It is perhaps a complete a piece of work as can be imagined. The entire band is on top form and I can't write anymore than to suggest you go listen to it in one sitting and wonder how you did without it beforehand.

But, when all came down perhaps they knew the chance had gone. It wasn't until 2000 before they reappeared. When the band took up things again, they had dispensed with bassist Hawes and got Friese-Green back in the producer's chair to make Wishville. Sadly, it was a lax effort and not long after, the band went on a hiatus from which they have not yet returned. 

Subsequently, Dickinson released a solo album (Fresh Wine for the Horses) in 2005 but more recently spends his time with his Porsche 911 renovation business in Los Angeles, going back to his original trade. Video footage suggests he looks annoyingly good for his age and takes great pride in his work. On a more musical tint, he appeared on two tracks of the 2011 album These Hopeful Machines by US electro artist BT. 

Wintertime Blues

There’s several reasons I haven’t written anything on here, none of them actually any good.

Or maybe one is, in that I've just been too tired. This seems to happen every year, that I get to December and simply gas out and then head off home for Christmas week, where a few days of being fed by my mother replenishes my energy levels for another ten months or so. It’s pathetic, really, that I still need this at the age of 32.

There was also a fun few hours in hospital a bit ago, where I had a lump of plastic and metal shoved into my chest with no little force. The loop recorder (as they call it), is supposed to take a snap shot of my heart activity next time I have a black out, on the assumption someone I know is around to activate the thing with this little box thing I carry around with me. All I can say is that the process of putting it in may be the most painful experience of my life – but, hey, the girls love a scar. More importantly, a good friend of mine (who I hope reads this) is going through a hell of a lot worse at the moment, which puts my petty moaning into sharp relief.

What I have managed to do is a little bit of gaming, reading and listening to music.

The Last of Us
‘Citizen Kane of Gaming’, according to one review, which is a gross an overstatement as you’ll hear all year, for an experience that is essentially Resident Evil with a higher budget.

To it’s credit, the acting is excellent, especially Troy Baker as Joel, the male lead, and the storyline, although not exactly as amazing as Charlie Brooker makes out, is engaging to the degree that you keep playing through some somewhat atypical survival horror sections to see what happens next. That you spend the game playing as a man driven to amorality by virtue of just trying to survive in a world gone to shit is an interesting slant – especially as he makes no attempt to apologise or feel bad about his actions.

The Last of Us is about a linear a game I’ve played since Final Fantasy XIII (which also starred Troy Baker, funnily enough), which isn’t my cup o’tea most of the time, but it managed to look pretty enough to keep me interested and to it’s credit, the combat sections can provide some cool moments: blowing up a group of four armed-to-the-teeth soldiers with a well-placed nail bomb was a satisfying a game a moment as I’ve had all year.

Solid 8/10 experience for the whole package, but nowhere close to what the hype what have you believe – the game dynamics would get 6/10 from me on a good day.

Grand Theft Auto V
Call me shallow (because I am), but I bought right into the hype for this at the last moment. I had resolved to wait till the price come down a few months after release… but no, I ended up picking up on release and booking the following day off work to put in some serious time.

GTAV doesn’t give you much more leeway in the actual storyline than The Last of Us (bar one choice at the end which gives three different conclusions) but has a stronger perception of choice. Between missions, you’re free to explore a huge city, play games or just get up to the usual chaos you can in these games.

There’s issues with the storyline, in that Rockstar don’t seem to have got a handle on how to write good female characters. Like The Last of Us, there is a torture scene – but here, you have to take an active part rather than just watch. It made for an uncomfortable moment, but that’s the nature of the character you are playing at that time – he’s a complete psychopath with very little in the way of morals or grip on reality.

It hasn’t quite topped Vice City as my favourite GTA title, but it was a rewarding playthrough in any case, with plenty of laughs and moments of total awesomeness. More so than TLoU, it pushes games as a serious form of entertainment by sheer dint of how much it sold in the days after release – can only other medium compare with those figures?

Autobiography by Morrissey
Despite the likes of Private Eye getting all uptight about the sums being thrown around for the rights to this, Stretford Moz’s tome was among the most anticipated books of the year, surely?

As it was, we learn the guy sure can moan. It seems everyone in the world has at some point fucked him over, his mother excepted, or died young, though Elton John, of all people, leaves a positive impression in their single meeting. The details of his childhood are interesting, but there’s relatively little about the Smiths period – the man himself could justify this with the fact it made up only a small period of his life (five years), but it’s the part I would wager the majority of us are interested in. Apparently, he also remains in the dark as to why Johnny Marr quit.

What we do get is almost the same amount of space dedicated to the court case that pretty much put the mockers on the chance of there ever being a full Smiths reunion. Fair enough, it does appear Moz was done over by a vindictive judge, but he goes on, and on, and on. It sets a tone for a downhill slope, as his comeback ten years ago is described in a series of numbers of chart placings and attendance figures at gigs. The revelations of his romantic forays with men and women seem scant consolation for wading through the rest.

Catherine Wheel
I’ve actually made some inroads into writing a piece of this band, who are my favourite musical discovery of the year despite them not having released a note in over ten years. If I can sort my shit out, I'll try to finish my overview of their work.

Past Amusements

Finding myself in a nostalgic mood, I thought back to days spent in amusement arcades. My hometown only had one, and it was full of fruit machines, one-armed bandits and the like. I had no interest in them. I had to wait for our holidays to Butlins in Ayr for those kind of kicks.

Back in the 1980s, home computers were still rather basic. My faithful old Sinclair +2, with it's massive 128k of memory, brought me many hours of gaming joy, but an arcade offered kicks on a whole new level. In the days of HD gaming with a Playstation and a decent sized TV, it seems like a different world that we had to leave the home to get gaming with full colour and amazing sounds.

As an aside, one time we swapped the joys of Ayr for the Pontins, in Southport. While in the arcade, playing what I remember as a kind of Spy Hunter clone, I was pushed aside by a bigger boy (I was seven) who took my turn. I was found in tears by my cousin, who was nine years older than me and a bit more "handy". Within minutes, I had my turn back and a few extra 20p pieces for my trouble. So, for you, big man, my hero ever since, here are my choice arcade classics on which many a coin was spent.

Out Run

Bloody Sunday drivers!

You see, living in a small town in the back end of nowhere, we didn't have much in the way of glamour. Out Run offered a whole warehouse of it. Drive a Ferrari, with a girl beside you, racing across exotic locations at high speed. What more could I want?

The selling point, I think I can state with authority, was the soundtrack. Talk to someone (OK, a man) of my age and play Magical Sound Shower and you'll see them glaze over.

I remember the first time I played Out Run. It was in Blackpool, on a day trip, and you had to sit in a car shaped cabinet in which my feet just touched the pedals - lucky I was tall for my age. As it happened, I wiped out on the first corner and stormed off in a sulk before my dad told me that didn't mean it was game over. Alas, the wasted seconds did mean it soon was.

Rampage

High rise living ain't too bad. Unless this happens.

So, some bizarre accident turns you into a huge monster. The obvious response is to destroy just about every city in the USA. I'm sure we can all relate to the premise that Rampage brought us.

Playing either a giant ape, lizard or wolf, the mission was to just destroy as much as possible, while avoiding the unwanted attentions of the military, who don't take kindly to your attempts at town planning. 

I'm not sure how "new" it was that you could have three players going at the same time was, but it felt amazing at the time. It meant my moaning brother could join in, though my dad remained constantly useless and would generally skulk off back to the bar area after being defeated early doors. On the plus side, it meant random strangers could join in - nice way to make friends amongst the usual "entertainment" that a holiday at Butlins involved.

Operation Wolf

What this had, which I'd never seen before, was a copy of a Uzi submachine gun attached to the cabinet. You had to aim with this to kill all the mooks that were unfortunate enough to cross your sights, which seemed revolutionary at the time.

Another quiet trip to the shops ruined, then

Needless to say, there was a lot of killing to be done if you were to rescue the hostages that had been taken for a reason I can't remember, if there even was one. All that mattered was that they were there, and about 5000 soldiers needed to be slaughtered to get to them. Not that I ever got to the end. No, I saw this instead:

Shouldn't have had that kebab last night, eh?

At least they were polite about your death. 

City and Country

I recently watched, for what I think was the fourth time, BBC's excellent documentary Synth Britannia, part of which explored the feelings of alienation post-war British town planning could bring -underpasses, tower blocks and endless grey concrete - and how it influenced the music of people like Gary Numan, John Foxx and Cabaret Voltaire.

This brought to mind my recent trip to Preston - I met my bessie mate at their (in)famous bus station, to reach which requires you to walk through this underground walkway that was like stepping back into another world. I have expected we would get assaulted by a gang of droogs. 

Being brought up in a small town in the back end of nowhere, I wasn't aware of these strange pieces of architecture. It wasn't so much grey in Whitehaven - the colour that springs to mind when I think of my hometown in the 1980s would be brown. The largest building in town was the multi-story car park, and the brown bricks used in that were also used for all sorts of things in town.

The car park was a strange building. In my dad's car, we would go from broad daylight to almost total darkness in seconds as you climbed the ramp. To get out, you crossed the bridge and went down this odd narrow circular passageway which always stunk of piss. Thinking now, I've no idea if this part of the structure is still there.

In 2013, the place has changed, for the better. There has been huge amounts of money put into making the harbour look pleasant. 25 years ago, it was a dump, with derelict cranes and two huge silos dominating the area. Tram lines that ran from North to South sides were a sad reminder of the then-recent demise of the last coal mine in town. When the tide was out, you would see shabby little boats sat on the mud and it looked tragic, so to go back today and see a shiny marina that holds a festival every summer... well, it makes going home that little bit nicer.

I live in a city now, but Manchester has also changed a lot in the last 30 years. The horrid Hulme Crescents are long gone and the city centre always seems to have some glass tower being thrown up to replace some old piece of crap from the 1960s - the city that inspired Ian Curtis to write lyrics such as Shadowplay is pretty much gone, bar the odd signifier like the the Mancunian Way.

Despite my love of electro music dealing with the horror of living in the concrete jungle (my current favourite is Underpass by John Foxx), I'm fairly sure having a childhood where 40 odd miles of mountains and lakes just at the end of the road means I couldn't hack the real thing. In the last couple of years, I came to realise that despite nine years living here, I'll never be a city lad: my heart belongs to Cumbria, though I do hope they knock down that bloody car park sometime soon.

Power Games

If, like me, you live in the United Kingdom, you'll be aware that we currently have a bunch of tossers in charge. A load of inept arseholes who couldn't tell you time of day without a full committee investigation first.

Yes, the opposition are doubtless no better. But they're irrelevant for the moment. David Cameron, George Osborne, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Gove and the rest of the mob are essentially about as welcome as a nasty rash on your penis that develops just before you're set to go on a date you're certain you're going to get a result on (female readers may wish to alter this analogy to fit).

Despite that, it is good to have a bit of a laugh at them now and again. With that, I had a fair old of a chuckle at this short game.

Tally-ho, chaps! Smash the oiks!

Made in the best traditions of Super Mario Bros and Wonderboy, Super Tory Boy allows you to play as either our glorious leader, his financial whiz-kid chum Gideon or the blonde bombshell that the people of London somehow saw fit to elect Mayor, Boris Johnson.

Give it a go - you only use one button, so anyone can have a decent shot. Shut down public services and be sure to crush those unemployed layabouts, all in the name of Britannia! I managed a score of £10,416,087 - anyone do better?

On The North Lancs Streets

Preston is a strange place. I couldn't think of any reason why you'd want to visit unless you were a student there (as I nearly was) or your football team were playing North End. Nothing wrong with the place, I guess, just nothing of interest to be found.

Except, perhaps, a gig by Go-Kart Mozart, one of the very few to support their recent album On The Hot Dog Streets. A chance to see their leader Lawrence in action on stage was not to be sniffed at. 

In somewhat typical fashion, the gig had a last-day venue change. Which I didn't know about until arrival and required a somewhat desperate series of asking total strangers where we had to be. Initially it looked like we'd be late, but in a further misadventure, it was all running late anyways.

Support bands, then. Hot Vestry are a bunch of late teens types from Macclesfield who dress like they want to be in the Paisley Underground and have hair that makes mine look good. They also sounded fairly anonymous to these ears, despite some decent work from the drummer. Not that it matters, as they've already got foots on the ladder of the Manchester music scene via endorsement from Tim Burgess and a support slot with New Order. How did they get the latter? Well, it's always nice to have the right connections.

Next up were the Oreoh!s, which is a name that really needs to go. There's a difficulty in trying to be objective here, as the three of them look like they have a combined age of 40 and you don't want to be too mean to a band who are all young enough to be my children, which is in itself a depressing thought. Their set trundled along harmlessly enough, with nothing of any note to stick in the mind bar the fact the guitarist held his instrument like Bernard Sumner, and even looked like a younger version of the man. Like Hot Vestry, I'd imagine a lot of work has to be done down the line before they'll be headlining any decent sized venues on their own steam. Time is on their side, at least. My own suggestion would be that the singer ditches the bass playing and focuses more on fronting the band.

There are enough words written about Lawrence out there already - some of it due to me. On the night, he isn't happy about the venue change, states the stage lights are too bright and he has a bad cold. Despite the sparse audience, the band put on a great show. It helps to have a guy with a huge assortment of keyboards to produce all manner of sounds, and major kudos has to go out to the man behind them to some top-notch playing. The rhythm section (this version of Go-Kart Mozart is minus guitar) also do their job in solid fashion.

What Lawrence has that very few others have too is that all the songs he has written since 1980 are clearly identifiable as his, whether it be in the style of jangly indie (Felt), stomping glam rock (Denim) or novelty electro-pop (now). It's easy to say the guy deserves a hit, but he's always made even his most "mainstream" music just slightly off-kilter enough so that you won't hear it on radio. West Brom Blues from his most recent album On The Hot Dog Streets is a perfect example.

It can't be said enough that the guy is a total one-off, and worth even a night in Preston and a train journey home surrounded by Man City fans. The "tour" as it is (four gigs in four months) continues in a hometown gig in Birmingham next month, then Oxford in December and Hebden Bridge (work that one out) in January.

Means Test

Cliché is the new black, or something like that. It certainly is with By Any Means, the BBCs newest Sunday night effort, which appears to try to break through the line of parody so hard that it comes back on itself in the realms of sheer tedium.

To whit, Jack Quinn (they should have give him a more macho name, like Jim Steel or John Ripper) operates his own team that does ‘off the books’ police work, given to them by Da Chief, portrayed in a dignified cameo by Gina McKee.

In this first episode, the mission is to take down a nasty gangster type who has managed to keep his hands clean of all the nasty deeds done on his orders. Thus, Jack works on getting a result with his colleagues: attractive Jessica Jones and tech geek Thomas Tomkins, who is nicknamed Tom Tom (do you SEE?). Naturally, the best way to ensnare our criminal friend, played with true scenery chewing style by Keith Allen, to make him lose his cool and fall into making a mistake. Because he’s a gangster and therefore prone to bouts of psychotic rage, especially when it comes to the wife who is half his age. Who would have thought?

It is all essentially like Hustle except with the intention of banging a villain up rather than scamming a few million, and like that other show, suffers from huge spades of style over substance. There’s rarely any real peril or reasons to care about any of the characters. Throw in a scene when Jack drives up to a council estate and is instantly met with a bunch of young scallies giving it the “fiver to mind your car” and I’m staggered I made it to the end, where the reveal is less twists and more “here’s some conversation we didn’t show you before”. A key piece of the, ahem, puzzle turns out to be the presence of John Henshaw, making a dignified cameo as a man with a heavy cold.

If I had to nail it down, it’s the sheer lack of conviction that did it for me. In a scene where Quinn bursts into the bad guy’s office and whips out a pistol to force the heavies to back off, you feel that Allen should have laughed and said ‘oh, do fuck off’. It’s not helped by the main actor being barely out of his mid 30s and thus seems a bit young to be leading a crack team of specialists in the quasi-legal fight against crime.

Still, by the end, the team gains another member and the quartet is complete for a series, one which if it carries on like this, will soon find itself set later and later in the schedules.

Mind Your Own Business

A few weeks ago, I posted how I noticed a series of small posters around my neck of the woods, stating how scientology was behind all kinds of mischief.

Well, now whoever was behind this startling expose has returned to the dark streets of Didsbury.

Scoop of the Century!

Wow! You don't hear this kind of news everyday. Psychic powers can be yours for $300,000 and zero cents. Or should that be $30,000,000? Clearly, our amateur journalist could do with clearing this up, as the former seems a pretty cheap price for such an ability. You could make that back in a night in Vegas. Probably.

But a sinister thought occurs. That I took this poster down to bring home and photograph means I have denied my fellow denizens of Didsbury the chance to learn this world-shattering truth. I now have a bad feeling that I am under the direct control of Tom Cruise and/or John Travolta. Ye Gods!

Reminders of the Meaning of It All, Or Otherwise Unknown

You know it's a bad day when you try to send an email and the internet refuses, giving this as a reason:

Honestly, I wanted to have a bit of a lie down after that. I mean, I know a lot of us believe that existence itself is an eternal meaningless slog towards the void, but when you have that hammered home by your email provider, you have to question the point of getting out of bed in the morning. I was only trying to send a link. 

Shoot That Green Arrow Through My Heart

If DC Comics have learnt one thing from The Dark Knight trilogy, it's that "dark" works. As they struggle to keep up arch rivals Marvel's rate of knocking out hit movies, it seems they have learned to follow the trend.

Therefore, Arrow, a new take on one of their more peripheral characters, the Green Arrow. In comic book lore, he's always been something of a Batman expy: a rich kid forged by circumstance into a crime fighter while maintaining an illusion of a playboy billionaire by day. His defining characteristics where his choice of weapons (bow and arrow, natch) and his somewhat left-wing (by American standards) politics. When written by Denny O'Neil in a series alongside Green Lantern, the character was superb, and it was good to see him make a brilliant cameo in O'Neil's essential run with the Question in the late 80s.

Green Arrow was also one of the strongest (for me) characters in the excellent Justice League Unlimited cartoon series, delivering a nice smackdown to his super-powered colleagues when needed. He also played a role in Smallville. I'm not sure if these played a part in the character getting a TV series of his own, but happened it did, and ten episodes in (I'm watching repeats) I have to admit I'm somewhat drawn in.

As stated at the top, he's been made more "dark" to fit in with the current mood. Oliver Queen, like his comic book counterpart, is indeed a carefree playboy with a tendency to shag any willing young lady before an accident sees him marooned on a desert island. This happens around the same time as his lady-of-choice drowns and his dear pop shoots himself (and some other poor sod) in order to conserve life-boat supplies for dear Ollie.

Five years on, our man is rescued and, naturally, he's a changed man. In short, he's become a huge fucking badarse who can kebab you from 500 yards, covered in scars and with a new found desire to clean up his hometown of Starling City.

A lot of Arrow is cliché city, but it remains enjoyable for reasons a little bit beyond my ken. Oliver has loved ones to keep his secret from (at least, unlike Batman, his mother is still alive, and he has a sister) and his own "Alfred" figure in Diggle, employed as a bodyguard for "Oliver" who becomes a close ally of his alter-ego. In a nice little touch, when the vigilante figure is nicknamed "The Hood" Oliver discusses that he needs a better name at a dinner party. When someone suggests "Green Arrow", it is meet with a "lame!" response. The man who suggests that? None other than John Barrowman, who manages to be pretty sinister in his role as (as far as I've seen) the Big Bad.

There's plenty of tickle the comic book geeks (characters with surnames with 'Lance' are enough to make me chuckle knowingly) and from the first episode they try to distinguish the Arrow from the Batman when he snaps some poor mook's neck in half to protect his "secret". None of this "no killing" stance that the Bat takes up for our man.

Arrow isn't another original or mega-exciting, but it does somehow manage to capture my imagination. The cast are nothing special, but then all do their jobs well - Barrowman is the exception and he comes across as both ultra-charming and outright threatening. So far, they've managed to throw in characters such as the Huntress and Deadshot, with hints at others from the DC canon, and I look forward to more.

Not Quite Iron Man

Hardly anybody likes going to a hospital. That is about a clear a fact as you can make. The only exceptions are those who work there who take something from helping others, and sickos who get off on the pain of others and themselves.

Not being in that latter camp, it wasn't a thrill that I spent a couple of hours in the out patients clinic this afternoon. The reason being related to something that happened a couple of years ago, when I collapsed at work, had a seizure and wound up in hospital. Some tests later, the verdict seemed to be that it was a one-off. Great. Only it happened again last month.

A lot of people would have us believe that the government want the National Health Service sold off. It seems numerous politicians have connections to private health providers and with the media stating that entering a British hospital gives you a survival rate equal to a British solider on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the future isn't looking too rosy right now.

The issue for me is, you don't appreciate it until you use it. I wonder how many MPs have had cause to use our NHS hospitals in recent years? Having done so, I'm glad they're there. When I keeled over in the street and some random stranger rang 999, an ambulance arrived, from which two lovely paramedics checked me out and lugged me off to hospital. Here, tests were ran and once it was established my brain wasn't leaking from my nose, I was sent home. All this for the cost of my monthly National Insurance contributions, which won't rise because I had to use the services.

To today, where I was informed that this second fit was a bit of a head-scratcher. As part of solution-seeking, it was proposed that a small monitor be fitted under the skin of my chest - a procedure that takes ten minutes. Initially, this sounded a little bit scary, I admit. I mean, cutting me open, even just a little? Urgh.

But then I thought about it some more. A piece of machinery inside my body - hey, that makes me a cyborg. Kind of. Alright, not much of one, but you've got to make the best of the situation, haven't you? Maybe I'll tell people I'm having an arc reactor fitted. While on the topic, I'd like to tell Stan Lee and Joss Whedon, if they are reading, that I'm more than happy to help out on the next Avengers flick if Downey Jnr becomes too much of a dick to handle.

Listless Age

No Ripcord has recently published their writers poll of the top 100 albums of the 1990s.I took part and was surprised that a fair number of my picks got in. I won't bore you all with the top 40 I was asked to send away, but the ten highest choices here:

10. The House of Love - Babe Rainbow
9. XTC - Nonsuch
8. Sugar - Copper Blue
7. My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
6. Ride - Nowhere
5. Teenage Fanclub - Bandwagonesque
4. World Party - Goodbye Jumbo
3. Talk Talk - Laughing Stock
2. Mansun - Six
1. Slowdive - Soulvaki

A totally unsurprising list, I'm sure the people who know me will agree. The truth is, I found it tough to think of 40 albums. There was no Radiohead, because they ceased to be relevant to me when I hit my 19th birthday, I found.

Oasis appear, naturally, though they didn't crop up in my list, because I blame them for my complete ambivalence at the time to Britpop. A lot of people here will respond here "Ah, but Definitely Maybe..." to which I can say that I listened back to the whole album recently and bar Live Forever and Slide Away remained fairly unmoved throughout.

The issue, now if probably not back then, is the total lack of groove in the band. Frankly, the rhythm section must be amongst the worst to ever grace the top of the charts. A rhythm guitarist who studied well at Johnny Ramone school of technique, a bassist who rarely strayed beyond the safety of root notes and a drummer... well, this says it best.

Yet all the same, I guess Noel Gallagher and Alan McGee deserve a wedge of credit for taking a bunch of pub players from Burnage and getting the music press to piss themselves bigging them up as the future of rock and roll. Image is everything, of course, and it is amusing in hindsight to think that they were bigged up as a bunch of lads from the hard streets of Manchester. Presumably, any journalist who bought that line had never took a walk around the pleasant (no sarcasm) streets of Burnage. Still, to a lot of London types, the second you head North of Watford, you may as well be in Bandit Country.

Manchester, I fear, has yet to recover from the shadow of Oasis. It's become a city too keen to attach labels of the past to new bands. Everyone has to be the "next Smiths" or next New Order, Joy Division, Stone Roses or Oasis. Like Liverpool, the shackles of history seem to grip tighter as we go along.

In conclusion: musically, I found the 1990s a crappy time to grow up. Thank fuck for Eric Cantona, who has more rock and roll in his small finger than Liam Gallagher every could.

Attack of the Killer Celebrity Cult Clan

You know, I can dig me a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone. Get talking to me about how John F and Bobby Kennedy were shot by the Illumianti under orders from the Grand Lizard Overlords and I'll sat in rapt attention. I mean, I'll think you're completely hatstand, but I'll listen all the same.

On a similar tint, I was more than amused to read some handwritten notes dotted on Didsbury bus stops stating that Scientology was some kind of genocidal cult. Now, I don't have much time for Travolta and Cruise's personal club anyways, but it did seem a tad extreme. It slipped my mind until yesterday, while waiting for the 84 to Heaton Chapel (obscure reference, non-Manchester readers!) I noticed a new batch of bills have been stuck to the shelter - this time typed up!

I honestly didn't type this up.

I don't know if you can read the text, but it's brilliant in it's total insanity. Giving psychic powers 37,000 people is pretty impressive in itself - but then going and committing genocide against SEVEN BILLION people??! I mean - Pol Pot? Lightweight! Hitler? Amateur! Stalin? Get the fuck out of here! L. Ron Hubbard created a cult that managed to slaughter the equivalent of the ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE WORLD! Brilliant! I guess none of us noticed while that happened.

Mind you, if you want to sign up alongside Beck, you best be prepared for the long game - as our correspondent reckons once you're in, you're committed to a ten billion year contract. Personally, I'm not sure terms of such length would stand up to much scrutiny in court.

On a (slightly) more serious note, you have to be concerned by the standard of grammar in this note, and the others that have sprung up around the area. If this is the work of someone with English as a first language, then you have to wonder about standards in education.

I don't even have a printer

That said, I'm glad I'm not a religious man, if apparently Heaven is supposed to be "tardy". What is that supposed to mean? You die and get held in a queue for a millennium of two while they process your request?

There's a certain line in the sand where a conspiracy theory goes from having a certain amount of plausibility (such as, Hitler escaped from Germany and lived it up in South America... well, no body, no proof of death, right?) to being the work of someone who perhaps shouldn't be allowed to walk the streets without correct supervision. I'm assuming you can guess which category this whole gig falls into. I mean, ten out of ten for effort in actually putting this things up around the place, but it never hurts to have an extra sets of eyes to act as a proof reader.

All that said, a tiny part of me (probably the part that thinks I'll still get a game for Manchester United if I finally get into shape) thinks I should take these words to heart, and to keep an eye out for Jason Lee (the actor, not the footballer) to go on some rampage down the high street against all us on non-Hubbard believer  heathen scum. Stranger things have happened. Apparently.

Summertime in a Stadium

Point One
I hate stadium rock gigs. I hate the idea of them. Tens of thousands of people crammed into somewhere not designed for music, and therein lies the problem. Too many people, which isn't a great environment for a misanthropic miser like me.

Yet there I was, last night, in Hampden Park, Glasgow, surrounded by people, some of whom had quite clearly been on the piss all day and were refreshed to a great degree. A lot of them weren't happy with their position in the crowd and tried to force their way past others. Naturally, this created tension and security were needed on several occasions.

Point Two
All of the above becomes irrelevant when you're at a Bruce Springsteen concert, because he is The Boss and that negates any bad vibes.

Point Three
30 songs over three and a half hour is a lot of work for everyone. But the man himself states that we, as the audience, will leave with our feet and backs sore, our throats hoarse. He's not wrong.

What you find is the day after, when you weigh up the whole experience and look for negatives, is that he didn't play a few of your favourites. Where was Hungry Heart, Bruce? Where was The River and Born in the USA? He can't please everyone though, can he? What he did do was provide a strong mix of his life's work, sticking with what he'd recorded with the E Street Band (I don't recall anything from Human Touch or Lucky Town, for instance) except for two tracks from his wonderful acoustic album Nebraska - but even Atlantic City and Johnny 99 were re-imagined as rockers, the latter revved up into the kind of thing you'd expect from Jerry Lee Lewis.

There were no encores of any of that shit. The band - now including a four piece horn section, backing singers and a percussionist - come on at half seven and don't stop till eleven, when they all leave the stage so that the man we're here to see can do a "rock and roll lullaby" that is Thunder Road acoustic, with the crowd singing the sax solo at the end.

Point Four
Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici are gone, but their band leader keeps their memories living on. Clemons' nephew Jake now plays in the band, which is a cool touch and at one point, during Dancing in the Dark, Springsteen grabs a girl who had a sign saying "I want to dance with Jake" and lets her do so. In the spirit of Courtney Cox, naturally.

What this does show is that the man seems to, at least, give a fuck about us punters. You hear nightmare stories of Dylan, for example, being a surly sod all through his gigs, never playing the hits. Springsteen appears to demand of himself that he has to guarantee everyone who bought a ticket a classic night out. The man does not stop throughout. When he does Twist and Shout and you think his voice is about to give way, he steps it up for one last time and blasts out Shout. If rock and roll needed a single representative to explain it to an alien race, this is the man.

Point Five
There's a story that when Elvis Costello was asked about whether he'd ever had a religious experience, he answered that he hadn't, but he had heard Al Green sing. In the same way, Don Draper once stated that Jesus is "either lives in your heart, or he doesn't". Jesus has never lived in my heart, but when I see Bruce Springsteen do his thing, giving it all he's got like it's his last gig ever, then I think that's I'd take the Boss over JC anytime.

Break From The Idle

I've written the best part of nowt recently, and health reasons mean I'm not likely to do much for a little while yet. However, I did manage to put together a review of the Teardrop Explodes' superb second album Wilder a few weeks ago and No Ripcord have just published it.

Take a read, if you want.

The White Noise Revisited

It's entirely my own fault. When possible, I try to stand right at the front at a gig - in the main part, this is because I like having the barrier to lean on, so I don't get a bad back from being stood in one place too long.   I also like feeling close to the music, and the people involved, observing their playing techniques and the like. Tragic as this sounds, this habit also allowed me to shake hands with Morrissey once, a moment that rakes in my all time Personal Top Ten.

Attending a gig last night, I did the same. But I wasn't watching Joan Baez or the Durutti Column here. No, I was stood right in front of Bob Fucking Mould! And that means noise. A lot of beautiful, fast noise. As a result, my ears are still ringing.

Nevermind. Bob has long been a strong proponent of the power trio, starting with Husker Du, then with Sugar and now teaming with up bassist Jason Narducy and drummer Jon Wurster to record Silver Age and embark on this current tour. The album is a return to Mould's vein of fast rock music with power-pop references thrown in. My advice would be to go listen to it if you liked the last few Husker Du albums and most of what he did with Sugar.

Prior to the main attraction, support act North Atlantic Oscillation did their 30 minute set. From Scotland (a clue being one member having the St Andrews cross on his forearm), their music is interesting enough, with enough electronic effects that you feel it must take hours to set up all the wires, their main issue is that they lack any kind of on-stage personality. I can imagine they come across a lot better on CD.

Then the main attraction. Yes, so Mould is 52 years old and looks like Alexi Sayle's skinnier brother, but that doesn't mean he still can't rock like a bastard. The band jump right in by playing the entire first half of Sugar's Copper Blue album. Another album you really, really need to hear if you haven't done already.

As stated at the start, they were loud, with pretty much no let up throughout. Mould has made albums with an acoustic or electronic slant, but this is pure power trio rock, with no slowing down throughout. If it at times the volume seems hard work for the audience, the sheer hard work the three put in up there on stage puts it in context. I don't think I've ever seen a band sweat so much - it was dripping from the guitars, the drummer's shirt was drenched by the end and Mould's glasses actually had perspiration congealing on them by the end, so that it looked like they were covered in milk.

Alongside the Sugar material, there's a fair chunk of the new album and a healthy amount of Husker Du classics. So, so what if the ringing in my ears might keep me up for a few nights? I saw Bob Mould do what he does best.

Frank Talking

As I pointed out not long after I decided (why?) to write this blog, Frank Castle aka The Punisher is one of my favourite comic book creations.

As any geek knows, attempts to get Frank on film have been mixed. The 2004 one with Thomas Jane wasn't too shabby, suffering perhaps by changing the location from New York to Florida (due to being cheaper to film there), but Jane did a fine job. He was better still when he voiced the character in a video game the following year.

To his dues, he backed out of a sequel due to feeling the script wasn't any cop. Judging by Punisher: War Zone, he was right. As a fan of the character, it must have been a bit of a downer. Still, he got to play a guy with a massive penis for a few years in Hung, so at least the work was still rolling in. Until last year, where he  decided to revisit the terror of criminals everywhere in a short film.

Dirty Laundry was apparently made for very little, with Jane and Ron Perlman putting their time in for free. It's a sign of how out of the loop I am that I only got round to watching it. My verdict? It's pretty damn good, with a level of violence straight from the comic books. There's rumours of a Punisher TV series in development - if Marvel or whoever has any sense, they'd get Jane involved. The man looks the part to a tee. The issue comes with whether any TV network has the balls to not shackle Frank down with PG standards. We want to see him cutting the guts out of sex traffickers, throwing people from the top of skyscrapers. Stuff like that.

You can Dirty Laundry it on youtube. Be warned though, there's some pretty extreme punishment to be seen.

Mud, Sweat and Beers

Because I'm a pathetic specimen of a human being, I really enjoy watching The Big Match Revisited on ITV4 (or, given the normally show it about 9am on Saturday, I record it first). Currently, they're working through the 1978/79 season and it's never less than amusing to spot the vast changes we've seen in English football over the last 30 years.

For one thing, they show plenty of games from outside the top flight, which I believe was part of the contract fromt he Football League - Match of the Day on the BBC used to do the same. This means you get to see clashes like Brentford against Watford in the Third Division, where the young Luther Blissett, in the days before he was inspiring Italian anarchists, maintaining dignity (and scoring a goal) while taking sickening abuse from the crowd. Top man.

Of which reminds us of the old cliché about black players - that they were soft and couldn't handle the rough stuff. To which you can only wonder if they ever saw Cyrille Regis play? The man was built like a tank and was capable of battering his way past the overweight carthorse centre halves that most teams employed back then.

"Overweight" is certainly a theme you get from watching players back then, as plenty of the lads showing off their stuff may have wished the shirts had a little more "give", judging by the ample bellies on display. If you think Sam Alladyce has only looked that chunky since he packed in playing, think again. After all, a victory celebration of about ten pints of beer was the norm back then. Though for the losing team, commiseration could come in the form of ten pints of beer.

Luckily, the pitches of the time pretty much prohibited any kind of quick movement, with that vital ingredient of "grass" often being left out of the mix, leaving the surface looking either like Ypres 1917 or Southport beach. Though running fast wasn't an option, neither was standing still, lest you be sucked into the quagmire like in some dodgy horror film - and nobody was going to be able to pull the likes of Larry Lloyd and Mickey Droy back out, that's for sure. It makes you watch in awe that the likes of Steve Coppell and Laurie Cunningham could glide on the mud like it was a bowling green.

Viv Anderson runs with the ball, probably to prevent the onset of trenchfoot

Watching old football games can also provide a nice little sociological insight in normal life at the time. The pitchside adverts are for the likes of Visionhire - the idea of people renting a TV may seem a bit alien to people these days, but it was the norm back then. I can remember my mother paying the subs for her parents in town back in the day. Eh ba gum.

And of course, through it all, there's the magnificent Brian Moore, whose head did indeed look uncannily like the London Planetarium. The only downside is watching it in the knowledge Liverpool end up as champions! Bah!

Every Single One Of Us...

If anything was going to shift me out of my blogging apathy, it would be the retirement of the one man outside my family who has been responsible for a great deal of joy in my life.

I was five years old when Alex Ferguson jaunted down from Aberdeen to take the job of returning Manchester United to the top of English football. Anyone who knows their football history knows it wasn't easy, and there were times most of us would have happily seen him booted back to Glasgow, but in 1993 he delivered what we all wanted, and the prize of being Champions of England was ours again. Sir Matt Busby went to his grave a few months later knowing his legacy was safe.

From then on, there have been few seasons that hasn't seen some silverware brought back to Manchester, and we've even got our hands on the top European prize a couple of times. It's been one hell of a ride, with a huge cast of players passing through. He once said his greatest achievement was "knocking Liverpool off their fucking perch" - you can argue how much of that they did themselves, but the simple fact is that Ferguson nearly tripled our number of English titles. In the early 90s, such a statistic seemed the stuff of a madman's dreams. Yet here we here, from constant underachievers to the most successful team in England over the course of one man's spell in a job.

His replacement? I remain to be convinced if David Moyes is the man for the job. I hope he is, for obvious reasons, but it's going to be beyond weird at the start of next season when another man is sitting in Fergie's seat on the bench.

Tying Up The Trilogy

Having had, as already mentioned, a week off recently, I made the reluctant option to spunk around £30 on all the last three bits of Downloadable Content for Mass Effect 3. I didn't really want to do this, but the option of some extra time with characters I'd grown to love was too much.

This is what I think of all of them. Being spoiler-free on the DLC, but not on the ME3 in general.

Leviathan

So, call comes through, our man Shepard is told some science bod may have found a whole new grade-A weapon against the Reapers. Well, we gotta have that, right? So begins an only-vaguely interested series of jobs, too many of which involve hanging around the scientist's gaff. There's precious little new content in terms of your crew outside EDI, Cortez and a little bit with Vega.

I think it took me around three hours to complete it. For the money I paid, that is frankly pathetic. It does provide some interesting background on the Reapers and their origins, but you can see all that on youtube if you so wish.

Omega

Of course, Aria L'Toak was one of the best characters in Mass Effect 2, a totally amoral bitch who didn't give one about anything bar her own status and power. By the time of ME3, we all know Cerberus booted her off her own kingdom and she wasn't happy about it. Thus, we now get to help her get what she lost back.

This is obviously a good thing, as is that you get to scrap against Aria and someone left behind on Omega, a female Turian (the first we get to meet) named Nyreen. Having read the comic book chucked in with the special edition off the original ME3, I had some idea of what was going on here. Others won't be so lucky, as it doesn't offer much in the way of explanation. The basic gist is to kick Cerberus arse, essentially. You can't bring any of your team - Aria doesn't trust them, apparently - which is a wee bit of let down.

It's a fun little diversion, but still not enough to justify paying a tenner for, given the length of play. One particularly annoying trait was the bigging up of a new kind of enemy as being some unstoppable killing machine, only for them to not be much tougher than yer average Reaper forces.

Citadel
This is more like it. Admiral Anderson orders the ship and crew to dock in and enjoy some R&R. It all goes guns akimbo in no time, natch, as Shep finds a plot to have him knocked off by a mysterious new enemy. All part of a normal day, really.

There's a hell of lot more than just that, though. For starters, you can get Wrex back in your squad if he's alive, which is very cool. You also get use of Anderson's somewhat swanky flat, to which your crew will pay visits. Bizarrely, if you've romanced Tali, she'll sing some weird musical number to you. On top of that, you get a arcade, casino and combat simulator to play in.

The central plot of the DLC is solid enough, with plenty of chuckles. If you've managed to avoid everyone alive to the end of ME3 (just prior to the attack on the Cerberus base) then you'll get the full worth of the content - don't play through it before you've resolved everyone's issues. As a reward, you'll get to enjoy the sights of pretty much all your friends from over the series having a bit of a party and getting a tad wasted.

Citadel is the only piece of ME3 DLC that I would put down as a "vital". The other two are fine, but only worth getting if you have plenty of cash spare. Citadel, however, is a nice little "see ya" to the series, and a wee bit of compo for the lousy ending. 

Forty From Ten

Recently, I was asked to compile a list of my top 40 albums of the 1990s for NoRipcord.com. An easy task, you might think, given that decade saw me go through just about all of my teenage years.

Alas, not, but I finally managed the task to find one band conspicuous by their absence. Want to guess? Oasis? Nah - they had two good songs (Live Forever and Slide Away), plenty of average rockers and a load of shite. No, it was Radiohead that failed to make my own Pick of the Pops (1990s edition).

Strange, in a way, as I love me a bit of what I will call "miserable bastard music": Joy Division, the Smiths, Depeche Mode and the Cure all provided a soundtrack that made my mother worry that I was bound to hurtle myself off St Bees Head one day. Radiohead were in there too - after all, isn't Creep the perfect adolescent boy song? At least, those of us who scored no luck whatsoever with whoever we fancied. Tough times. But Pablo Honey was an average album at best and somehow its famous song hasn't aged very well, especially when compared to something like Boys Don't Cry, which works perhaps due to a charming simplicity. The line "you're so fucking special" merely sounds derisory 17 years on from the first time I heard it.

The Bends was better and got a fair few playings, then there was OK Computer, which is widely praised to this day. Yet, something must have happened as I've not listened to either album in a decade. The latter has too much I find too self-indulgent, the latter I just seem to have grown out of.

Seems strange that I would do so, given all the other bands I mentioned still get a good blast on the MP3 player on a weekly basis.

Going back to my top 40, I expect very few of them to make the NoRipcord total, bar a few obvious exceptions. After that goes up, I may well print up my list for the sake of completion.

My Old Man Said Follow That Van

Using up my last days of leave to take a well earned week of slobbing around was interrupted by helping a friend move home. For this task, suitable transport was required and a van was procured for the afternoon.

Now, when visualising myself behind the wheel of such a vehicle, I imagined myself thus:

You're humming the theme tune right now, yes?

Tearing around the streets of, umm, Southport, chomping on a cigar alongside a short-tempered slab of muscle, a man with serious mental issues and a man obsessed with getting his end away. We'd have moved all the plates and books using some kind of cannon constructed from farm equipment. What larks!

However, the reality is that I looked more like this chap:

The terror of the Greendale highways

Oh well. Mind, Pat was rock and roll in his own way, wasn't he? The amount of tea he knocked back of the course of every episode, I bet he would stay up for days on end, bouncing off the walls. No wonder he drove in that erratic manner, taking tight turns at breakneck speed. Look at him! Even in that picture, we can see he needs to carry his own stash, lest he go "dry" between stopping off at Ted's and the Vicar's.

What I did work out is that van driving isn't for me. Despite the paintwork being mainly white, I didn't honk the horn at one woman in a short skirt or low-cut top all day, nor buy a copy of the Sun to keep on the dash. I'm best leaving it to the professionals in future.  

Next Time, Keep Your Mouth Shut

So William Roache, who has played "Sad" Ken Barlow in TV soap Coronation Street since the Roman Invasion, seems to have finally cracked and declared victims of abuse are being punished for sins in previous lives. For obvious reasons, this has pissed a lot of people off. 

All we can do is label him a complete idiot and wonder if spending most your life pretending to be somebody else has finally snapped a twig keeping vital parts of his brain in some semblance of decent working order. Or perhaps some acid he took in 1967 has a pretty time-delayed second hit? Not too long ago, he was stating he used a "pet psychic" to try to find out why his dogs were always fighting. 

It reminded me that a friend and I sketched an idea for a comic strip based on one "Len Farlow", who after years living on the same street, feeling that he has wasted his unrecognised genius, cracks and transforms into "Ubu Len", a hulk of a man who goes on a rampage of murder, cannibalism and insanity that ended up him fighting a breed of mutants unleashed by a mad scientist from underneath the sewer farm at Urmston. 

As I remember, eventually the government sealed off Manchester from around the M60 and Ubu Len had to team up with nemesis (Inspector Colin Partridge, who was naturally days from retirement and "too old for this shit") to save the city before the nukes landed.

Compared to Bill Roache's inane ramblings, I don't think we were being that silly.

Battle of the Bulge

I've not written in this here blog for some long time now. Mainly because I'd always said I would only do this gig as long as it entertaining for me to do so.

Recent months have meant it wasn't, because of the rather worrying spectre of the ax falling over my employment prospects. I've been unemployed before, and the idea of doing so again put a somewhat black cloud over my mental state of mind.

Yet, somehow, fate has rolled in my favour and it seems the pull of the dole queue has been avoided once again. In a bigger farce of events, I've somehow managed to get put forward for a promotion, making me somehow who could well benefit from the global recession. Figure that one out.

To take a further self-pitying stance, I recently turned 32 and realised I was horrendously unfit and in great danger of becoming a fat bastard unless I changed my ways. I've long suspected our bodies have a kind of warranty that lasts till you're about 25. To that point, you can eat, drink, take whatever you like and you should be fine, as long as you're not too stupid. Beyond that, it's payback. The scales show in the last ten years, I'd managed to put on the best part of three stone in weight (say 18kg for you metric dudes), most of it onto my belly.

This is a crisis, at least in my pathetic life. Thus, I've had to take up more walking as part of my daily routine, starting with 30 minutes after work. It's not too much in the way of fun, but I recognise it's a necessary evil if I'm to avoid the pitfall of becoming a fat bastard.

Anyways, I'll try to sort my sorry arse out to return to regular blogging soon (if anyone cares), with the usual brand of pointless bollocks, banal musings and crap excuses for wasting my life away. Yay!

Put Your Head Back In The Clouds

In a rare spout of doing some actual writing, I was asked and agreed to write a review of the reissue of Julian Cope's 1987 album Saint Julian. Read it here.

Southern Discomfort

Quentin Tarantino first came to my attention, I suspect like many, when I saw Pulp Fiction at some point in the 1990s. It was on TV, I caught it by accident (being a very culturally unaware teenager, I had little idea what I was sitting down to) and thought it was brilliant. Not long after, Reservoir Dogs was on, and that too struck me as a fine piece of film making. I didn't pick up on a lot of the references I might have done now, just let myself be entertained.

Subsequently, I've not found myself too taken with his output. Some friends and I rented Jackie Brown and were so bored, we stopped the video to instead watch National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1, only going back to our hire with some reluctance. Since then, I've maintained his career was a case of someone shooting their load on their early work, albeit in spectacular style in a manner the vast majority of us could never manage. Kill Bill was fine, though I have no wish to sit through them again, and Inglorious Basterds I have yet to see, mainly due to the presence of Brad Pitt.

No matter, Django Unchained seemed interesting enough to warrant attention. Also, I had a free ticket to the Cornerhouse cinema in Manchester that I won in a pub quiz - result.

First: this flick has gotten a lot of attention based on the constant use of a certain word beginning with "n". As some white dickhead brought up in Cumbria, I've little idea of the impacts of slavery, racism and the like from any personal background, so it's hard for me to gauge on the grand social impacts of this, as seems to be the focus of many reviews. What I can say is that it didn't get in the way. It doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to think that that was how people talked in the South of the USA in 1858.

Not that historical accuracy is the name of the game here. If you're bored, you can check out websites that list the numerous anachronisms to be found. Yet as always with young Quentin, everything is about the characters and their dialogue.

Of which we mainly focus on two: slave Django (Jamie Foxx) has recently been bought and is being marched across Texas. Whatever fate was in store is changed by Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German dentist-turned-Bounty Hunter who needs our hero to identify three marks. From there, the two go on to form  an effective partnership in collecting rewards placed on the heads of various neer-do-wells.

As a story goes, it's nothing that special and it seemed odd to me that the whole "revenge" angle in the posters and suchlike doesn't really exist for the vast majority of the movie. Indeed, it's more a "rescue" story as the two leads plot to find and free Django's wife, Broomhilda, who only seems to exist in the story as an atypical Damsel in Distress.

This being Tarantino, it all looks and sounds wonderful and Waltz is a top-level enough actor to carry off his character's love of drama in style. Without doubt, he's the best thing here, especially as Foxx is too much of a blank slate to really root for to any degree. Having not seen him in Basterds, I can understand the fuss about his acting chops and imagine I'll be seeing him doing a lot more English-language work in the near future.

On the other side of the good/bad guy divide , Leonardo di Caprio is great as the plantation owner with questionable theories on white supremacy. I've never really been a fan of the fella's work before, perhaps because I think he has an odd-shaped head, but he does the job well here, aided by Samuel L. Jackson as a fiercely loyal slave.

In all, a decent movie, entertaining if nothing else and fans of its creator will find lots of love. Personally, I just liked a few of the cameos. Seeing Tom Wopat (Luke Duke to my childhood self) appear as a Marshall was strangely one of the highlights of the whole show. Shame he didn't give out a "yee-haw".

Fast Forward Failure

There's been a fair bit of hoo-ha in the media in recent days about "the death of the High Street", what with big names like HMV, Jessops and Blockbusters trying to duck the financial vultures. The Internet is being blamed and all the pundits are offering their opinions.

To me, the main point is that a load of poor saps are going to be losing their jobs, and in this age, you know they are going to be down the creek without a boat, let alone a paddle. As someone whose job seems to under threat, they have my utmost sympathy.

On the other hand, the likes of HMV and Blockbusters themselves are suffering the same fates as the small independent stores they played a part in putting out of business back in the 1980s and 90s. An example would be the one in my hometown of Whitehaven - Flix was a video rental place that I imagine sprung up when technology got to the point where the masses could have their own VHS players and enjoy a whole new world of entertainment. Or it could have started up in the Betamax boom and quickly readjusted.

In any case, to a young lad, it was a treasure trove of stuff you wanted to watch. As I recall, you paid for overnight rentals - yet my mother always insisted my got something out on Saturday, as the place was closed on Sunday and it meant you got to keep it an extra day. As the lad next door was only a year older than me, we would combine forces to get stuff like Transformers: The Movie and watch in baffled silence. It's a film I found for 50p in Oxfam a few years ago, and it still failed to make too much sense, the likes of Orson Wells, Eric Idle and Leonard Nimoy offering their talents being no help at all.

An abiding childhood memory I have thanks to this shop is when my brother, who was in the Cub Scouts, was away on some camping weekend. My mother was chosen to go with, leaving the house to Pop and I. As he often worked weekends, this was a rare chance for us to spend time together. He took us down to the shop and we picked a video each - which were Rocky V (me) and Die Hard 2.

Though I would later come to look the Rocky franchise, my choice was dire. To compensate, my dad let me stay up late to watch Bruce Willis do his thing. I loved the swearing, the violence and the humour and my dad swore me to secrecy about me seeing it. Some 20 years later, I accidentally let slip about this night at a family event, and my mother still managed to kick off about it.

To their credit, whoever ran Flix tried to keep up with the changing times. They began renting out video games on a weekly basis, which was superb. Later, they began selling as well, and several of my favourite early gaming choices came from there: Mercenary, Transport Tycoon and Frontier: Elite 2 spring to mind, and anyone who knows games will recall how they had a bad habit of eating up the hours. My brother and I even had rare moments of bonding after we put our money together to buy Pizza Tycoon. It was a bizarre little game that even allowed you to design your own pizzas, as well as engaging with gangsters and breaking into the competition after hours to smash the place up.

Sadly, once Blockbusters moved into town, the game was up and before I knew it, Flix had become a Top Shop. Today, it's not surprising the same shops are on their arse - shopping online is way easier, especially since it has become possible to stream movies onto your TV or download your albums. Times move on, but I'd like to add that I always did rewind the videos we rented. Me ma made me.

Man's Crisis of Identity in the First Half of the 21st Century

And with that, another year passes, 2012 becoming another set of digits confined to the past as we continue our march through time, that ends only when we feel the icy finger of the Reaper on our shoulders as he prepares to guide us into the cold comfort of the endless void.

Yes, Manchester City winning the league really hurt.

On the plus side, we had the following...

Footballer of the Year
Bit worried on who I pick, as last year I chose Phil Jones - who subsequently spent 2012 either injured or struggling for form.

But I can't help but say Robin van Persie. If you'd asked me before last summer about him playing for United, I might have scoffed. Yet here he is, and scoring goals for fun and pulling the team out of the shite on a regular basis. He's got everything you want in a striker, and if we're to have any chance of winning anything this season, it rests in large part on him staying fit.

Album of the Year
I haven't bought any "new" album from 2012. Hearing the new big thing, the XX, on TV left me feeling baffled, unmoved and very old. So, this has to go to World Party's Arkology five CD set. Karl Wallinger has long been a master of the pop hook and after some years out due to illness, it's great to see him putting something out there. A mix of live numbers, unused songs and newbies, there was more than enough to keep you going for ages, and the presentation was ace too!

Game of the Year
Tough call, this. Both Max Payne 3 and Mass Effect 3 featured great storylines, superb graphics and acting to match, making for top experiences. The original Mass Effect finally coming out on Playstation 3 was also very welcome. Re-establishing my love affair with the Football Manager franchise has brought about many late nights looking at a glorified spreadsheet.

Though a fair few people have excused ME3 for its ending, I'm not one of them. This wasn't helped by when I finally got the "Extended Cut" ending download, it bloody crashed right before the end scenes. Bah!

With that in mind, my choice instead goes to X-COM: Enemy Unknown. Basic in idea, but superbly executed and creating enough tension to keep me nervous for hours on end. Not a game for everyone, but those of us around for the original UFO game in the 1990s will have lots to love.

Raging Knobrash of the Year
So many to choose from! Pretty much the entire government has shown themselves to be a bunch of uncaring, quasi-sociopathic tossers in recent history. It's a tragic state of affairs when that fuckwit Boris Johnson is seen gurning on the cover of GQ magazine.

Indeed, it was a narrow call between him and the winner. However, Michael Gove gets my nod on the basis that he's screwing over a generation of children for his own political gains. Appealing as a return to "traditional" Conservative values to the likes of the Daily Mail, about the only vaguely amusing thing about this complete penile sore is that there's a chance him and Johnson will squabble with each other about who gets to put the knife into David Cameron's back first in their own personal lust for glory. Here's hoping for a total meltdown of all related parties in 2013!