Wednesday, 29 December 2010

The New Year's Eve Bastard

At a very young adult age I found myself disillusioned with the whole concept of New Year’s Eve. At 19, I spent the night in The Fox in Palmers Green, drinking lager, bumping into current and past friends, chatting shit, enjoying the atmosphere. But at about a quarter to midnight, I decided that I’d had enough. You could sense that everyone was gearing up to kisses and hugs and a Woodstock-style exchange of love in a euphoric celebration of the New Year.

And the point? Absolutely none at all. The date changes and people indulge in a sham festival of pointlessness, exposing themselves to a plague of bullshit pleasantries, swapping trite remarks about their hopes for the New Year. I escaped The Fox that night, ate a pizza on a garden wall in Green Lanes and vowed to avoid such falseness and bollocks every December 31st to come.

Which brings me to the subject of this post. The personification of everything that is diseased and rotten about New Year’s Eve, the embodiment of all that falseness and vacuity in one short, dumpy, smug, greasy-haired package…

Jools Holland. The New Year’s Eve Bastard.

Now the whole concept of a “Hootenanny” is perfect for New Year’s Eve if you buy into the idea of actually celebrating it. The meaning of the word (having evolved from Appalachian slang meaning a “thingy-me-jig”) is a party at which various members of the gathering perform music. Even if you don’t celebrate New Year’s Eve, it ‘s still the perfect choice of entertainment on TV as you and a couple of friends - who are equally ill-disposed towards going out for the aforementioned bullshit – spend the night carving arse-shapes into a sofa and consuming some leftover Xmas booze.

So, when the BBC hit on the perfect night-in for December 31st, why did they insist on polluting the entertainment with the Wank in Black, Jools “Sarky-voice” Holland?

There appears to be some illusion that Jools is the champion of eclecticism in music, that his mission is to introduce the public to a wide range of popular genres and styles, disparate artists united by their creativity and artistry. Fuck off Holland! The producers choose the guests. You just turn up, introduce them with an insincere claim that you like all of them (impossible in music) in a manner indicative of how you’d describe someone else’s turd and then occasionally play piano with the ones you do like.

Holland’s hypocrisy is evident in his own musical taste. Rhythm and Blues, particularly Boogie Woogie, is not only a narrow genre to stick slavishly to over decades of outdoor-concerts to the picnicking-classes, but it is a style of music totally lacking in emotion, depth or humanity. It is jaunty and dance-a-long, admittedly, but it is technical and shallow and as vacuous as the very idea of swapping hugs at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Doesn’t it just piss you off every time Jools accompanies a singer or band on his programme with the same style of plonky-plonky boogie-fucking-woogie piano-playing?

Elevating the sham-ness of the Hootenanny show beyond reasonable limits is the well-known fact that it is filmed in November. Therefore, the whole audience conspire with Jools to indulge in a disgusting display of deception when they countdown to midnight and wank each other off in mock-celebration of the future date-change. Particularly shmultzy and showbizzy about the whole escapade is the fallacy that these people are all Jools’s friends. With the exception of his one sole friend, the ubiquitous Rowland Rivron - famous for fuck-all and devoid of talent except for sounding as smug and as much of an arsewipe as Jools – the celebrities in the audience are very unlikely to be mates with him. They are mere decoration; some recognisable faces enticed by the offer of a free drink, the music and an opportunity to enhance their profile by answering one ridiculously spurious question posed by Jools with an annoyingly fatuous answer of their own. In the case of a pissed Al Murray, that answer is always just the word “Hootenanny” in a Scottish accent, because the pillock must confuse it with “Hogmanay” after all that free Bolly.

Of course, all the associated bollocks of Jools, his fake-mates, his insincerity and the sham celebrations is bearable when the line-up is good. Three years ago, he had McCartney, Madness, Seasick Steve, Kylie, Duffy, Kate Nash and half-a-dozen other well-known acts. Fair enough, this won’t tick everyone’s boxes, but it does the business for many of us. By the standards of “Later…” knowing what you might expect, this is a good show.

This year’s Hootenanny has the following bill: Roger Daltry, Cee Lo Green, Plan B, Rumer, Toots Hibbert, Wanda Jackson, Bellowhead and Vampire Weekend. Oh and Jools will be accompanying Kylie on a Blossom Dearie tune.

I think I shall be seeking out the nearest take-away pizza outlet and greeting the chimes of Big Ben with that most honest and reliable of friends, my own garden wall.

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