I’m an OFFSS Sufferer

Society loves a syndrome these days. It’s a great Get out Jail Free card to play. Why take ownership for your own shitty personality, when you can excuse it with claims of suffering from one syndrome or another? Self-diagnosed, but internet-endorsed, it affords you a pass to be a prick. I’m a very easily irritated prick. I spend every day muttering “Oh, for fuck’s sake” to myself in response to various human interactions, sharing the road with other vehicle users or just passively staring at something online or on the telly. I’d hate to live with someone like me. I hate listening to moany bastards.  If I had to live with myself, I’d spend all day muttering “Oh, for fuck’s sake”. But this self-realisation hasn’t helped me to make an effort to be less irritated, so I am going to claim diminished responsibility for my actions on account of being a sufferer of Oh For Fuck’s Sake Syndrome, also known as OFFSS.

Only a medical condition like the one I just made up can explain why some of my most hated things in life are totally irrational. Like people on the way to work carrying coffee drinks on public transport. Logically, absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t. But the fact that they do, that so many people do, manages to scratch at my calmness like a pair of pants made out of stinging nettles. Is it some kind of affectation, to be seen holding a paper cup full of boiling water with a gobfull of froth so flavourless you’ve had to ask them to add a dash of syrup for taste? Are you trying to look like you have a busy and important career that means you can’t stay at home for 15 minutes more in the morning to make your own fucking cup of coffee?

More broadly speaking, I can’t tolerate people eating in public either. I’ve always been a fan of the London Underground rule on not eating hot food on the tube, but a crime that should carry a heavier sentence (perhaps the electric chair) is the scoffing of crisps within ten metres of another person. Unless you do what I would do, out of good manners and some degree of self-awareness, which is to suck each crisp to a pulp and swallow it without chewing, so as to not to inflict an open mouthed crunching variation of Chinese water torture on other people.

But again, I can’t deny, eating in public is totally defensible. People are hungry, why not eat? Similarly, people who don’t use cars for a variety of perfectly understandable reasons - cost, accessibility, environmental, convenience - and therefore get from A to B on an electric scooter, well, who am I to judge? But I do. Adults on fucking scooters! On the fucking pavement! You inconsiderate bastards! Even on the road! You reckless shits! I watch in desperate anticipation of seeing them knocked off onto their arses. There’s something even irritating about the posture required to stand on an electric scooter, like a sanctimonious priest gliding past his congregation with buttocks clenched.

Another pet hate of mine (I have a menagerie of them) is what people post online. If you are a non-OFFSS sufferer, then you’ll be justifiably and deeply angered by the saturation of hatred on social media which is racially, sexually, politically or some other kind of discrimination based. But me… I hate those boring bastards who reply to adverts for concerts saying “Got my tickets”or “Saw them in 2012, what a great band”. I know that some of that is a set up to make an advertised event or product sound good, but I’m sure some comments are by genuine dullards, who really have nothing interesting to say about anything in life.

Finally, I wish to lay in to some of the things people say in the belief that they are making a profound statement, a sound bite of wisdom or some pithy truism for life. Here are my favourite targets for hatred:

“I don’t judge people / you shouldn’t judge others” - of course you fucking do, all the time, and of course you fucking should, because if you don’t judge others, how will they know when they’re being a cunt?

“I’m just being honest, I’m speaking my truth” and in response “I respect your opinion”. - for fuck’s sake, honesty doesn’t mean saying everything you think and expecting people to put up with your fucking rudeness.

“I don’t care what people think of me” - bollocks, even saying that shows you want people to admire you for not caring what people think of you.

“I don’t take any shit” - which means you look for trouble and could start a fight in cathedral over how much cream they put in the chocolate eclairs in the cafe.

“I’m a bit mad really” - the fact you’re telling me that suggests you’re the world’s most boring bastard.

Ok, ok, I’ll stop here, or my meds will stop working in keeping my heart rate down, especially as I’ve been trying to ignore the Strictly final on telly as I typed this. At one point, a male dancer started sobbing and my syndrome kicked in big time.

Oh for fuck’s sake.

My Grandad

My Grandad was born 100 years ago today. And I wanted to mark the occasion.  But not with a “Happy Heavenly Birthday” (that’s just not me) or “if he’d lived, he’d be a hundred today” (because he didn’t, so he won’t be). He died on a beautifully warm June day in 2003, aged 77, and I miss him. Everyone does. Because he was kind and funny and a gentleman and totally devoted to my Grandma and to his family and  he had strong values without being judgemental and he was helpful and selfless and caring and made you feel listened to when you were a kid. And he loved a fart.

One of many things he managed to bestow on me was a forehead you could use as a snooker table if you tilted it back, but which actually slopes at 45 degrees to the horizon, like a solar panel. And each Christmas, he’d take a hat from a cracker and pull it down over that forehead, and it’d tear a bit, because Christmas cracker hats weren’t designed for our family’s heads. And he would wear it all day. Even when he had to work up a sweat putting one of the Grandchildren’s toys together, or washing up after dinner, and the paper hat stuck to his forehead and slowly perished during the evening.

Now that I think of it, the Christmas hat probably started its journey towards sweat saturation during Christmas dinner. Because he loved a roast. Every time he had a roast, though especially my mum’s, his plate adeptly supported an absolute mountain of meat and potatoes and veg and gravy. I seem to remember a fondness for sprouts. I may be wrong, but it would explain a lot. Grandad used to do a great fart. Really healthy smelling too. Sometimes, I do a similar one and it smells exactly like his and it evokes a wonderful memory, real nostalgic and sentimental. That sounds like something a person would say just to get a laugh, but it’s absolutely true, I do these occasional Grandad farts and it’s lovely.

He wouldn’t make a big deal out of farting, he wasn’t ever crude, but he acknowledged a fart with a sense of humour.  There was something about Ronnie Barker that made me think of Grandad. How he’d raise his eyebrows and give you a look to say that was funny or that was a bit odd, or that was louder than expected.

Grandad loved Ireland, where my Grandma was from. In his Sussex accent, he’d pronounce it Are-land and the family over there absolutely loved him. A gentleman, they’d call him and still do. He gave me my first sip of Guinness, in E O’Gara’s in Kilcar, and it was great.  That pub still does the best Guinness I ever have.  One of my favourite songs, and this was Grandad’s absolute favourite, is “The Town I Loved so Well” sung by Paddy Reilly. If you don’t know it, it’s a very moving story about a man returning to his hometown of Derry after the Troubles have begun. Gets me every time, partly because Grandad loved it. And that’s despite having visited Derry for the first time only a few years ago and thinking it’s a bit of a shithole, even now the Troubles are over. 

So in some ways he influenced my taste in music. But not completely. When I bought my first “midi” hi-fi system, with record and tape decks, Grandad asked me to record all his Max Bygraves records to cassette. Bloody hell, that was a long listen. I know he fought briefly at the end of the war, in Burma, but I didn’t think he had been a POW.  Only the Japanese could have come up with such an imaginatively brutal bit of torture as having to listen to hours of Max Bygraves.

Grandad himself was from Eastbourne, not at all like Derry and thus a fun place to visit when we were kids. This meant that Grandad’s team was Brighton, who had very few seasons in the First Division in his lifetime. Nor did Fulham, which was the nearest club to where he and my Grandma raised their family in St John’s Wood. Fulham-Hull was my first ever match, thanks to Grandad who took me. He’d enjoy seeing both Brighton and Fulham doing so well in recent years.

That’s an example of how Grandad would give you his time. Time is always more valuable than money, but he would also secretly slip you a 10p or 50p coin in your hand every time he said goodbye after a visit.  When my Dad pointed this out, how it was done on the quiet, in contrast to people who gave me money and made sure everyone could see, I learned one of many life lessons from both he and Grandad.

I could go on. Or I could recount many other stories shared amongst the family. But no amount of tales can ever do enough justice to the life of someone like my Grandad. Hopefully, these snapshots give you a small idea of that kind and funny gentleman born a hundred years ago today, whose legacy I am fortunate to see in my own children. And the occasional Grandad fart.

A cocky and lucky bastard

No one has ever punched me and I’m not sure why. Because I can be a right, provocative bastard.

I say “no one” but I’m being a bit absolute here. I have had one physical fight in my life. There was a kid, maybe a year younger than me, from the most notorious family on the council estate behind our house in Southgate. You know, one mum, ten kids, ten missing dads, weekly visits from the Old Bill. We were about 8 or 9 and he started on my little brother; so, on the Green in front of our house, I fought him and beat him up. No repercussions from his dysfunctional, scary family. And as far as I recall, no opponent’s punches landed on my face.

The only punch to the face that I can recall was from a Spurs fan in about 1988, just after we beat them. Typically bitter, he spat at me, after demanding I take my “rag off” (scarf). He was the other side of a kerbside barrier, and as I tried to hurdle it to get back at him, he punched me on the nose. I have to say, that punch packed all the power of a Tottenham title challenge, so I count that even less than the aforementioned fight.

So, to all intents and purposes, no one HAS ever punched me in the face, and as a result, I suffer from a dangerous and deluded sense of over-confidence. Which makes me a cocky bastard.

Let’s face it. I’m 5’9 (in rubber soled boots), only just tall enough to be considered tall in south east Asia and I have never visited a gym in my whole life. And…although this is more recent (5 years now), I’ve had a heart attack. So, really, I should be leading a life in which I sensibly avoid all conflict with other males (or females who can hit the 10m line with a shot put), because I’d have as much durability in a physical fight as Mother Teresa up against Mike Tyson.

However, I don’t sensibly avoid it.

I need putting in my place, but no one’s done it yet, so I think, fuck it.

And this is what I think every time I get in the car.  I’m sure you’ll agree that all human faults are amplified tenfold when placed behind the wheel of a car. I deplore arrogant, selfish and bullying driving. And because no one’s punched me for reacting to it, I nearly always react to it. Out of some reckless sense of justice, irritation or pride. If some cunt tailgates me, I slow down and hit the brakes intermittently, aiming to piss the culprit off.  If some cunt tailgates someone else, I tailgate them. (But then realise that someone with my mentality might tailgate me for tailgating a tailgater, not knowing I’m only revenge tailgating a tailgater.)

If someone is constantly switching lanes on a motorway, like in that 90s video game Frogger, in an effort to get in front of everyone, I try and block them in. Strategic positioning, so they can’t get past.

If someone is speeding behind me and I can change lanes to let them pass, I use up about a quarter of a mile of road doing a painfully slow lane change, just to piss them off.

If someone does ANY road move designed to compensate for their low self-esteem, for being bullied at school for annoying everyone, for some form of social disenfranchisement or for simply having a dick the size of a cocktail sausage, then I open the window and give a sarcastic clap to applaud their pathetic display of peacock machoism.

I just can’t help it. It’s like driver Tourette’s. Any sense of fear is subsumed by the overwhelming impulse to react. It HAS nearly got me into trouble though. Sometimes, like today even, for example, calling some burly bloke in a van a “prick” can push an unstable, aggressive bastard into seeking retribution. Fortunately today, his anguished retort of “fuck you”, carrying with it an insane, over-reactive desperation to get back at me, was met with frustration, as I’d timed it so he couldn’t turn round and get past the roadworks’ lights in time. But on a few other occasions, I’ve had blokes speed up behind me, around me, slam their brakes in front of me… do all the posturing to try and intimidate me, and then the thought DOES go through my mind, that says, “Ah crap, he might get out and punch me.” And for a few days or even weeks, I’m more restrained. But like an addict, I can’t quit for long.

I blame my Dad. The older I have got, the easier I have found it to follow his adage of “Don’t get angry, get even!” And I don’t get angry anymore. I think my heart meds help with that. So, this isn’t road rage on my part these days. But it can bring out the Bruce Banner in the wankers I deliberately seek to ‘get a message across to.’ That message being, “Don’t be a wanker,”

You might think that perhaps I need to avoid using the car so much, cut down the potential for inciting these conflagrations, use public transport. But when I do, I have proved equally reactive and provocative, by sticking a foot out to trip up anyone (not women, of course, same as on the roads, never women or the elderly) who has barged their way through a crowd or onto a train ahead of others. Fortunately, no one has fallen on their face, and the fact that they have tripped can be blamed on their barging through, rather than on the deliberate outstretching of my leg as they do so. Consequently, I get away with that behaviour as well, and no one has punched me in the face yet.

So, there you go, that’s what I wanted to share with the group today. No judgement, remember?

Teenage Tales of the 29 Bus

It’s occurred to me just recently that the 29 bus has had a more profound impact on my life than any other non-organic object. In my own little world, to steal John Lennon’s point of comparison, the 29 was bigger than Jesus. It was the messiah of bus routes. It went absolutely EVERYWHERE I wanted to go when I was a teenager. (Except maybe Arnos Grove.  I had to get the 34 to Arnos Grove.)  It cut a straight line down North London, like a knife, though perhaps with the odd kink in it, like the right turn at Manor House. It separated glorious North West London from grim North East London, which is so grim it has never been afforded its own “NE” postcodes. And I won’t get started on its football club.

The northern end of the 29 bus route was Enfield Town terminal. This marked the changing point on my journey to school, a small square covered in the spittle of Enfield Town’s frequently-flobbing fellow students of mine, from where I swapped a proper London red bus for some green yokel tractor disguised as a bus, with a 3 digit number to highlight the fact that we had crossed the Rubicon between urban and rural environments. My mate Kevin Keady once said to me, “let’s go down the Terminal after school to meet some girls I know.” At that stage, being at an all boys school, I hadn’t spoken to a girl I wasn’t related to since primary school, about 3 years previously; so along I went and I must say, those girls that Kevin knew really did suit that phlegm-swept rendezvous point.  Despite that, Enfield Town was worth getting the 29 to for its HMV and Our Price shops, where I bought most of my Queen tapes and U2 records. It also had a great pub, The Kings Head, where we once spent a truant school afternoon planning an inter-rail trip I didn’t go on in the end, and drinking enough beer to chase a moving 29 along the main street in order to jump on it. Paul Duffy was the last to catch it, by which point it had reached 30mph so his desperate lunge for that safety pole in its open doorway led to him wearing out the toes of his trainers by the time we got to the Holy Family bus stop. 

Bush Hill Park was the next stop and after that Winchmore Hill, where the same Paul Duffy, on another occasion had fallen through the Oxfam window seconds before a police car arrived, having been alerted by a local Indian restaurant that dozens of drunken young men were causing a nuisance.  We had all just got back from a 6th form prefects’ outing and decided to get pissed, eat a curry and do a runner.  The waiters cottoned on and refused to serve us. Those of us not lying in a mess of broken glass and charity shop clothing, ran away to hide from the Old Bill in nearby hedges and gardens.

So, as you can see, the 29 bus journey could be a tragical mystery tour sometimes.

Next stop, Palmers Green. In my teens, I lived in the other end of Palmers Green, where all the shops were newsagents, Greek video shops, barbers and a massage parlour. The good shops were up by Palmers Green Triangle, between there and The Fox pub, which had nothing to recommend itself except the fact that it served us under 18. I’d get the 29 up to the Triangle for Christmas shopping, because my teenage legs would never have coped with the slight incline and two bus-stop distance walk from my house. In fact, my legs didn’t cope too well with the bus either, as I once decided it would be cool to jump off the 29  before it stopped at the Triangle bus stop, lost my footing, and went arse over tit, quite honestly, a pavement roly-poly, much to the mirth of observant passengers. I quickly took refuge in Woolworth and bought mum something for the kitchen as a present. I bought smellies in Superdrug. Old Spice for Dad.

Our end of Palmers Green was known by the name of the pub by the bus garage. The Cock. We loved asking the bus conductors for “the cock please” but then they changed it to The Manhatten. Much as I love Manhatten, NYC, the vicinity had nothing to suggest any similarity. Unless Manhatten has its own North Circular Road running through it.

Heading south on that North London Iron Curtain 29 bus route, the next stop on the way is Wood Green. When they first built the Shopping City there, it was amazing, space age, a cornucopia of consumerism, a high tech example of 70s architecture where you could walk from one part of the shopping city OVER the road on a BRIDGE to the other end. I’m not lying. It’s barely imaginable. And the clothes shops… wow! I got my cyan blue jumbo cords from Mr Byrite there. However, each summer my parents took me shopping for school trousers in Wood Green and it was the only time I believe they may have felt hatred towards me as I refused to let them buy the affordable regular fit sensible hard wearing trousers (“They’re flares!”) instead of my choice of sta-prest trousers with 12 inch hems or a nice pair of Farahs. Lucky for me that we crossed the road on that Shopping City bridge, otherwise Dad may have shoved me under a passing 29 bus for being a spoilt fucking brat.

Next stop Turnpike Lane. By this point, our nearest cinema was here, as they had converted Wood Green cinema (my first cinema, and my Star Wars cinema in 1977) into a Bingo Hall. I’m sure my memory is unreliable for parts of this post, but Turnpike Lane makes me think of being 14 years old trying to get into Ghostbusters and Gremlins when they were rated 15. I have just looked it up, thanks to AI, and it seems I am wrong, that both films are PG and so AI has in fact just pissed all over a long standing, fond memory, just because it happens to be untrue.  Fucking AI.

Next stop Harringay Ladder. For those of you living outside of London, Harringay is an area within the borough of Haringey. Suggestive of a dyslexic cartographer, I think. The Ladder part refers to two parallel roads (Wightman Rd and Green Lanes) with interconnected side roads at regular intervals, thus forming what looks like a ladder on a road map. There was an alleyway running through those rungs. Aged 15, we’d go to a snooker club on Green Lanes, the only establishment there that wasn’t a Greek grocery shop, and the only place you could get a pint of lager at that age; and afterwards my mates Nick Rose and Chris Watt would lead me along that alleyway to drink vodka. Bloody hell. That was beyond my capability. A few lagers over snooker in a plush (to us) club was lovely. Knocking back vodka in a pissy Haringey/Harringay alleyway was pretty unpleasant.

Next stop Manor House. Behind the pub of that name, was the Catacombs club. This was a regular haunt, because it wasn’t like your Ritzy or poncey sort of club, where nice looking girls dressed in skimpy dresses and expected you to buy them a drink in exchange for no more than two words of conversation, oh no. The girls here was less glam and more goth. You’d get NO conversation, but at least it cost you nothing for the privilege. And the music was so much better. You couldn’t dance to it. You’d drunkenly sway. This was where my little brother shit his pants, or more precisely shit my pants. Or more precisely, shit the expensive Rolling Stone Bermuda shorts I’d bought at the 1990 Wembley concert, which he happened to have stolen from me to wear one night.

Next stop Finsbury Park. All alight for the Arsenal! I was going to every game by the time I was 16, and although the 29 would have taken me there, I think I took the tube from Arnos Grove, because I went with Dalboy. That kind of ruins the narrative a bit, but I like to be be honest. I have just looked it up and AI tells me that Dalboy and I did in fact get the 29 to Arsenal. Isn’t modern technology amazing?

After Finsbury Park, you passed The Rainbow, closed in the 1980s,  but an iconic 70s venue for Queen and Bowie etc… Then past Michael Sobell sports centre, which I never took the 29 to, because in those days, no one went to a gym.  Not like today. The young generation all go to the gym, all the fucking time. You bunch of vain bastards. We drank beer, took buses to avoid ten minute walks and had no conceptual understanding of keeping fit or ripped or whatever, ffs.

Then along Camden Road, past the Irish centre, which was a great (ok, a not so shit) venue for a 16th or 18th birthday party, and then into Camden Town. The 29 took you round the one-way system, along Bayham Street instead of the High Street and here I would visit Stiff Records, the record company of the most loved band of my early teens, Madness. I’d buy new singles straight from the record company office, because the blokes there also gave me badges and posters for free. Once, heading along Camden Road, the bass player from Madness, Bedders, plus two Belle Stars (his girlfriend and the one I fancied, the sax player) got on the 29 and we chatted and got autographs. That was me and Kevin Keady again. This was before he got into Duran Duran and started chatting to unsavoury girls at Enfield town terminal.

From Camden Town the 29 went towards Euston, past the UCH (University College Hospital) where I was born and down Gower St, close to Tottenham Court Road station. One end of Oxford Street. From here we’d walk to the other end of Oxford Street, visiting the 3 record megastores of HMV, Virgin and Tower (not sure if the last two co-existed at that time, not even AI knows), before finishing up at Hyde Park for a jolly jaunt on the Serpentine rowing boats, hopelessly hoping to meet girls on other rowing boats. The fact that this never happened, didn’t deter us.

Sometimes we’d stay on the 29 past Leicester Square to Trafalgar Square, just because it felt like an exciting landmark. But all we did there was visit the tourist shops and buy those fake turds, which we were convinced were made of real turds that had been dried out and glazed. We never went beyond there, because the next stop was Victoria and there was no reason to visit Victoria.

Finally, to complete these tedious tales, I will mention how we would get the night 29 (the N29) home late from one of three night clubs for people like us who would only dance to music not made to be danced to. I’ve mentioned Cats in Manor House, and additionally there was the Electric Ballroom in Camden and the Borderline, just off Charing Cross Road. Staying awake on the N29 for a long journey back from central London was a bit tricky, but on one occasion I was helped out by a friendly bloke. I was upstairs on the back seat (not to be cool, just because I don’t like people sitting behind me) and I was lying with my head on the seat asleep. Friendly bloke sat next to my head and dropped an enormous fart that vibrated through my skull. Such a kind gesture. I might have missed my stop otherwise and ended up at Enfield Town terminal. Eww.

Bastard "Celebrity" this and "Celebrity" that.

I've come to the conclusion that adding the prefix "Celebrity" to the name of a TV show is tantamount to attaching the word "turd" to a dish on a restaurant menu.

I don't have a problem with celebrities per se.  After all, most TV shows and films are heavily populated with celebrities.  But most of the time, celebrities are in the right place.  Like items in the home.  Kitchen utensils are in the kitchen.  Bathroom utensils are in the bathroom.  And so on.  But should I find the toilet brush in the cutlery drawer, then the balance of my universe becomes upset.

In the case of celebrities, it's when they appear on quiz shows.

Very few celebrities have become celebrities on account of their general knowledge.  Fred Housego was a rare exception.  A few more are endowed with a well-stocked bank of important and trivial facts, but generally speaking, celebrities have a different skills set to people who have heard of at least two authors, three capital cities and four 'historical figures' outside of Marcus Rashford and Jamie Oliver.  

So, when I turn on "Celebrity Mastermind", I know that the show title is going to be as oxymoronic as a dish of "delicious dogshit".  It will often host one or two celebrities who won't embarrass themselves.  A TV presenter with a background in journalism perhaps.  It may also include a sports person, which is usually a bit awkward, because as much as we can admire them for their single-minded dedication and countless years of 24/7 focused effort in excelling enough in their chosen sport to attain celebrity status, it is exactly that single-minded dedication and 24/7 focused effort which has prevented them from investing time in learning any general knowledge.  At all. 

And then you might get a "Celebrity Mastermind" contestant who is a soap actor, a radio DJ or a reality TV show participant.  The Only Way is Chelsea or Made in Essex or some such crap involving culturally void half-wits.  These types of celebrities make a living out of showing off, so when they appear on quiz shows they show off in a way that the usual ordinary contestants don't.   I don't just mean on Mastermind, where its usual contestants are directed to demonstrate a level of robotic, emotionless decorum that you'd find cold even from a Victorian undertaker, but even on the quiz shows with normal behaving contestants, like "The Chase" or "Tipping Point".  These celebrities absolutely revel in the attention they can glean from their ignorance of the basic knowledge required to get above a grade U at GCSE.  And they really do revel in it.  Their excitable self-deprecating laughter at thinking the capital of France is Belgium, is not shame, it's a form of arrogance against everyone who is a sad and boring bookworm for knowing the answer's Paris.  How is it entertaining to watch the delirious showing off of a misplaced celebrity who is getting payment and media exposure just for being as thick as a fucking brick?

The other example of misplaced celebrity casting is their use in those shows that act as a compendium of nostalgic entertainment from the 70s or 80s, or those "50 best/worst" types of shows that we might gravitate to Channel 5 to watch on a weekend evening.  Typically, you get clips of whatever the show's focus might be... old adverts, songs, sitcom extracts... and these clips are punctuated by a "talking head" (who explains the context and slightly ruins the enjoyment as a result). Each one talks about the subject matter as if they remember it well, along with all the details, from their own experience.  When that "talking head" is someone who was a teenager in the 70s talking about a 70s pop song, or an actor who did loads of adverts in the 80s talking about adverts in the 80s, then that has some credibility.  But if I'm watching a 22 year old You Tuber whose 'funny' content gets them a million views each post, and whose own parents were born in 1981, telling me about the 1970s as if they remember them well and haven't just regurgitated what the researcher told them to say with their own 'funny' twist on it, then, really, mate, do us a favour and pretty please, kindly just fuck off.  And of course, film yourself fucking off so you have something else to post tomorrow, you fucking attention seeker,

Right that's the end of my rant.  I'll give this post a careful review now to ensure a sprinkling of vocabulary that only a genuine Mastermind contestant will know and then I'll upload it and share it online in the hope of gaining some attention.

Bastard School Dinners

Rice pudding. 

I was looking at the menu for the posh and wallet-traumatising restaurant Clos Maggiore in Covent Garden today. Mrs B and I have booked it as a birthday treat for me. We love a meal that makes you go WOW. And in an effort to decide in advance what to eat, I was drawn away from my obsessively ubiquitous choice of chocolate for dessert towards rice pudding of all things. Obviously not just rice pudding, but vanilla rice pudding mousse with amaretto and malt ice cream. And it has made me think about school dinners.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who ate something highly objectionable as a child that caused me to avoid that food for decades thereafter as you might avoid a trigger happy maniac with a paint ball gun that fires dog turd pellets.  This is because of school dinners.

Who came up with the idea of rice pudding? Savoury dessert is a rather disgusting oxymoron. Apart from when it’s cheese and crackers that is. Was it some traditional society that was dependent for survival on a single crop, which meant that they had to use it for desserts as well? Is potato cake a dessert? Whatever. Rice pudding served in schools, which was a daily occurrence, was just wrong. It tasted wrong. Like French kissing your cousin. No, thank you. 

So, steered clear for decades, then tasted some recently and thought, oh! When it’s not being boiled to buggery in a school canteen vat, it actually tastes nice. So, Clos Maggiore may well knock me sideways with what would be rice pudding at its very best.

Am I getting rice pudding muddled up with semolina? They both had the consistency of baby sick and one had a dollop of jam on top as if someone had just bled into your bowl.

At primary school, school dinners were so disgusting, you’d prefer to chew on one of the disinfectant blocks from the urinal. And dinner ladies (not mentioning any names, Mrs Adams) tended to be testosterone-imbalanced, gruff dictators who were too masculine for the army or truck driving, and who demanded that you “EAT  ALL YOUR DINNER,” or they would bark at you like the Doberman dogs in the graveyard in The Omen until you fully shit your pants.

Therefore, I took packed lunch to school. Not necessarily healthier, as I loved a crisp sandwich, so my mum indulged me with two slices of unbuttered Mother’s Pride and a packet of Prawn Cocktail.

But when I got to secondary school, St Ignatius lower school against all odds turned out a decent array of lunch fare. Especially the chocolate and syrup cornflake cake, which you could manipulate into a sphere, put in your blazer pocket and eat like an apple in the playground as you watched that day’s main event fight.

Finally, just to say, that I would not drink milk (unless mixed with a healthy sized tablespoon of Nestle milk shake powder) for many, many years on account of free school milk at primary school. A classic example of impracticable altruism. It was free, but without enough refrigerator space, it was warm and topped with a thick layer of cream. Fucking horrible. Thatcher was right to snatch it away in the early 70s.

Bastard Foreign Holidays

 At the risk of putting something on the internet with an anachronistic title like "Bastard Foreign Holidays", which might well get me cancelled for 70's-style parochial xenophobia and labelled a UKIP-voting gammon, can I just say from the outset that I don't give a toss.  I'm not about to pour scorn on foreigners, foreign countries or foreign cultures.  And there, I used the word 'foreign' so many times in one short sentence that I've probably triggered the sort of awkward discomfort that might send the easily offended to seek solace in their safe space or send a protest tweet  So, please rest assured, that all I am about to write are a few amusing things that went wrong on holidays that just happened to be in a different country to the one in which I reside and which were otherwise hugely enjoyable experiences.

Sicily

One of the most appealing aspects of holidaying in Sicily was the opportunity to visit the villages where 'The Godfather' was filmed - Savorca and Forza d'Agro.  Having looked at photos of these unspoilt  tourist attractions, I agreed with my wife to go ahead and book us a week in a beautifully remote area, with a plan to hire a car and visit the Godfather villages on the journey from the airport.

Soon after booking, I became aware that Sicily is somewhat hilly.  To call it mountainous might be an exaggeration, but it's certainly far from flat.  Let's call them 'big hills'.  There isn't anywhere flat in Sicily.  Now, I have a real trouser-soiling fear of driving (or being driven) up steep, winding roads, especially those with a bit of a drop.  Not just sheer drops, that any logically minded person can sense some risk with.  But even slightly steep drops, which send my brain into panic mode, as I expect to hit a car coming too fast down a blind bend, or to find myself forced to reverse around such a hellishly designed chicane and end up careering to a horrendous death below.  I thought I should best check the location of the Godfather villages to make sure the car journey to reach them wasn't going to involve any such teasing with mortality.  

It was difficult to be sure from the maps that I looked at.  The villages were each perched high on a hill.  So, I searched on You Tube to see if anyone had ever filmed a car journey up or down the routes.  They had.  "Driving down from Forza d'Agro, Sicily".  It's a horror show.  The hills were so steep, they seemed unnatural, like giant mounds of rock plonked on the island, as if large meteors had fallen to earth and the locals in their madness had decided to climb them and build houses and a church on top.  I watched the filmed view from a car as it drove down and down and down and round and round and round from the summit of this ludicrously high village, and the temperature in my toes fell below zero, leaving them frozen in a tightly curled position and at risk of dropping off from frostbite.

Needless to say, despite my wife's huge disappointment, we did not visit either Godfather village.  The chance to do so was an offer I COULD refuse.  When we got to Sicily, the winding, steep route over a hill to the vineyard-located B&B that we'd booked was relatively bearable compared to Forza d'Agro.  A more moderate level of fear, but one that I was keen to avoid for most of the week.  Therefore, on the first day, we went for a walk rather than a drive.  Just to check out the local area.

We followed a track heading north towards the coast and part of this ran alongside a field of goats, guarded by 3 aggressive dogs.  They stalked us from behind a fence, barking like those Rottweiler devil dogs that guard the grave to Damien's jackal mother in 'The Omen'.  The fence was the only thing preventing the fear that had built up inside me from flowing out of my back end.  Just as I remarked that it was lucky the dogs couldn't get out, the fucking dogs got out.  There was a hole in the fence.  They came towards us, in my mind ready for the kill.  My wife's ability to contain her fear whilst mine disabled me, led to her assertively shouting to the dogs to go 'AWAY' and this unnerved them long enough for us to get past them.

The problem then was how to get back.  My wife failed to reassure me that the dogs wouldn't attack, should we return that way, so I suggested we keep walking and visit the 'Sanctuary of the Black Madonna' in Tindari and the Roman remains next to it.  Roughly a 90 minute walk.  And from there we expected to get a cab back.  The long walk in the hot Sicilian sun was definitely worth it, as the church and the Roman site and the view from the coastal hill on which they were both perched was amazing.  However, this was a remote part of Sicily on a religious feast day, as we found out, and there was no taxi, no bus, no way to get back to the B&B except to walk.  Either 90 minutes back past the dogs or a longer route by road that would follow the way we'd driven in on the previous day.  I estimated 2 hours of walking along the dog-free (and death-free) road route.  It turned out to be 3 and a half hours.  In the heat.  Up and down hills.  Like a fucking death march.  My wife cursed my fear of dogs and incompetence in calculating time from speed and distance.

Cyprus

Because the first villa holiday we'd had in Cyprus was the most perfect of weeks, we booked a fortnight a few years later.  In many ways, this was just as wonderful.  Many, but not all ways.  There was a spell halfway through the holiday, when the pool went green and was out of action for several days until that problem was sorted, the filters cleaned, something like that.  This problem may have been the cause of my daughter getting an ear infection.  This led to visit number one to the local village doctor's surgery.  She was prescribed anti-biotics and told not to swim for a number of days.  Visit number two to the doctor was for my son, whose wisdom teeth decided to give him hell, so he was on painkillers.

But these challenges proved surmountable, because I have very resilient children.  Which means I feel ashamed to admit that my own experience on the holiday highlighted my relative lack of resilience.  On one of the first nights, as I crossed a rooftop terrace from the main part of the house to our bedroom, I caught site of something alive on the inside of the door.  Without showing any curiosity to examine what it was, it was too dark to properly see anyway, I dashed inside to grab the thickest book I could swiftly find and I returned to throw it at the moving shape on the door.

It turned out to be a spider, the size of a child's hand, thick and hairy and bloody scary.  Fortunately it was now dead.  I made sure with a few more whacks with the book.  And yes, I know, you shouldn't kill animals, but there is a statute of limitations on that rule, to do with size, situation and how much you're shitting yourself with terror.  The next morning, I investigated the rest of the rooftop terrace to see if there were any more spiders.  I found two others.  Both dead, but clearly, this suggested an infestation.  I could better examine the spider corpses in the daylight and looked them up on the internet.  They were European tarantulas.  European tarantulas like to come inside houses, the internet told me.  And so every day for rest of the fortnight, without sharing any information of the tarantula attack with my family, I restlessly and nervously stayed circumspect, especially at night, expecting more spiders everywhere I looked.  Fortunately, none arrived, so gradually my fears subsided, until the very last day when I spotted one inside the house.  I have never been so pleased to leave such a beautiful villa in such a beautiful part of such a beautiful country.  From that point onwards, holidays have been in cold countries, tarantula-free.

Other minor mishaps

I never went on a foreign holiday whilst growing up, not unless you count Ireland.  And at 17 and 18, I visited New York, which isn't exactly culturally alien.  So, I became an adult without the necessary experience of wild dogs or wild spiders to prepare me for the dangers of hot environments abroad.  For that reason, I was ill-prepared for our first villa holiday as a family.  This was Portugal.  By this point, we had (before having children) holidayed in both Tunisia and Turkey and got lucky in terms of insects, dysentery or other potential disasters.  So, I didn't think to prepare for a mosquito raid on my first night in Portugal.  I counted over 40 bites by the morning, most of them on my face, many of them so large and disfiguring that I looked like the Elephant Man.

Another year, we booked late and had less money, so we opted for a cheap house rental in northern France.  This was the only time that I wanted to turn back and head home immediately on arrival.  We'd been spoiled by villa holidays to Portugal and Majorca.  Now we were in a rain-sodden copse off a main road, in a damp and uncomfortable house that looked like an old couple had just died in it.  And to cap it all, there was a hornet's nest right outside our bedroom window.  On balance, I would take killer dogs or hand-sized tarantulas over hornets any day.  In the end we stayed, but it turned out to be the only holiday we've had where there just weren't enough positives to outweigh the crap aspects.

So, there you go.  Not exactly 'bastard foreign holidays', more like 'bastard bits of foreign holidays', because outside of these experiences, we have been very lucky indeed.  But you know me, why would I write about the good times, when the bad times are so much funnier?

Gigs that didn't go as expected

I don't particularly like going to gigs.  For many people, music is a shared experience, something to sing along with, dance to, lose yourself in.  They talk about how great the atmosphere is and they revel in being part of a crowd, everyone loving the music.  Bollocks to all that.  Give me a record player and an empty room in my own house over a gig any day.

However, my admiration for certain musical artists has led me to attend a great many gigs since my first one in 1987, most of which I have thoroughly loved.  But that's because the opportunity to see in person a performer that I love listening to in my lounge usually outweighs the trauma of having to do so alongside other human beings.  So much so, that as time goes on and bands split up and people die, I am able to reflect on who I've been able to see in concert and I feel hugely privileged.  Years after they've all gone, I'll revel in the memories of seeing Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, Madness, Jethro Tull, Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Blondie, REM, The Stone Roses, Oasis, Morrissey, Ian Dury and Prince, to name the most iconic.

But obviously, from time to time, things don't turn out as expected.  Here are five times:

1. Bob's curls

My long-time adoration of Bob Dylan has led me to see him at his worst and at his relatively better than worst.  The first time I saw him was at Wembley Arena in 1987.  I had a seat next to the first exit on stage right.  During the support act, his backing band of Tom Petty and Heartbreakers, I looked over the ledge to that exit to see, within arm's reach, Dylan himself.  Clearly he wanted to catch a view from the stands.  And with hood up, iconic sunglasses on and everyone focussed on the stage, he was managing to retain enough anonymity to get away with this for a while.  Given the fact that the curls of his hair, which fell out over his forehead from below the hood, were close enough for me to ruffle, for a while, only I knew he was there.  I pointlessly wasted that precious time by asking the couple next to me if they had a pen, so I could get him to sign my programme (which in retrospect, I surmised, he was never going to do).  By the time the dozy sods found a pen, someone on the way to the loo had passed Bob and recognised him, prompting a swift retreat backstage.  The chase proved futile and undignified.  I've seen him 5 times since, but never again able to pose a molestation risk.

Four years later, I saw him for the second time, persuading my future wife (in only our second month of going out together) to come along.  That month, he played, according to what I have since read in a book, his worse series of gigs ever. I made my wife pay for her own ticket.  She hates Bob Dylan.

2. Mick'sd Emotions

The only times I've ever given a crap about the fortunes of the England football team were at Italia '90 and Euro '96. In 1990, I was at university, out drinking too much whilst watching every England and Ireland game, supporting both, caring too much.  But when it transpired that England's semi-final showdown with West Germany would be played on the same night that I had a ticket for The Rolling Stones in concert, a dilemma emerged.  Do I forego the drunken atmosphere of watching England in a pub as they potentially secure a place in their first World Cup Final since their sole appearance in '66?  Or do I go to the Stones gig?  I decided that I had to be at Wembley Stadium that night.  Of course, England were playing West Germany in Italy - it was The Rolling Stones who were playing Wembley.  With the Stones far too old in 1990 to seem likely to ever play live again (!), I couldn't waste this opportunity.

In the days before mobile phones, I relied on a transistor radio to keep me updated on the score-line.  The game went to penalties during 'Paint it Black', somewhat prophetically.  At this point, I tuned out of the Stones' performance, as did a small crowd around me, eager for updates.  Soon after I broke the bad news about Pearce's and Waddle's penalty misses, someone must have told Mick Jagger.  "We've all got mixed emotions tonight" he said by way of an introduction to their song 'Mixed Emotions'.

England weren't the only ones to crap (only ever so slightly though) on my experience of the gig.  I bought some Rolling Stones Bermuda shorts that night as a momento.  £25 they cost,  a small fortune in 1990.  Some time later, my brother nicked them to wear below his jeans on a night out, to make himself look less skinny.  He shit himself on the dancefloor of a club that evening and disposed of the heavily soiled shorts in the toilet.

£25.  Twenty.  Five. My fucking shorts.  Still, despite that and the England result, it was a great gig.

3. Prince - a few years too late

I saw Prince at Wembley Arena in 1990.  There were two things wrong with this concert experience.  Firstly, I went with a mate from university called Ziggy.  A close mate, until his erratic, attention-seeking and aggressive behaviour evolved from being infrequent, moderate and annoying to frequent, extreme and unacceptable.  At this point in his journey towards becoming a complete arsehole, he brought along his 16 year old girlfriend.  He was 21 and I was 20.  The baby-sitting didn't enhance the experience.

Secondly, my wish to see Prince live was based on liking his output from several years prior to this gig - 'Purple Rain', 'Around the World in a Day' and to a extent 'Parade'.  By 1990, he had undergone his own journey, one from rock/psychedelic/arty pop to dance music.  Let me make this clear.  I like music you can dance to, but I really fucking hate 'dance music'.  Prince kept punctuating his songs with calls to the crowd to dance and wave our hands in the air and "say yeah".  I drew the line after the compromise of standing up from my seat, I wasn't going to do what Prince told me, Prince wasn't the boss of me.  I spent the night mostly irritated with the dance music, the fun fascism and my mate's girlfriend looking like she needed to go home early on a school night.

4. Too old for a new scene

Another occasion on which 16 year olds made me feel generationally removed, despite being only a few years older, was at the 1989 Stone Roses Alexandra Palace gig.  We turned up with ageist complacency and a presumption that the crowd would be our own peers, university students excited by this new music that was cleverly marrying melodic 60s pop with 80s Indie sensibilities.  It turned out that The Stone Roses were also appealing to school kids, as much for the fashion as the music.  We were witnessing a 'scene' for the first time.  Youths in flares and baggy t-shirts.  We'd spent the last ten years taking the piss out of the whole concept of flared trousers, laughing at kids at school whose trousers were a centimetre or more wider than drainpipes, shouting 'ding dong' at them as the wind caused the superfluous material around their ankles to flap with unfashionable absurdity.  And now, here we were, the potential objects of ridicule for being adults with bootcut jeans, gate-crashing into this alien world.

We were undeterred though.  The Stone Roses' debut album was the coolest thing to happen to music since The Smiths.  Once they came on stage, it wouldn't matter what we were wearing or how old we were.  As it turned it, Ian Brown's voice outside of the studio was weaker than a mouse's fart and Ally Pally's sound system was so rubbish, it sounded like someone was just playing the CD over a Tannoy.  A depressingly bad gig.

5. Leave you to fall asleep

I'd been a fan of Natalie Merchant during her 10,000 Maniacs and solo careers, and convinced my brother-in-law and sister-in-law to come and see her in concert in 2010.  I'd seen her live before and the venue (Hammersmith) was a good one, so what could go wrong?

What can go wrong, musical history teaches us, is when a performer completely disassociates themselves from their audience and disappears up their own backside in a self-indulgent artistic 'project'.  Unfortunately for her audience, Natalie Merchant's 'project' had been to put to music a double album's worth of 19th and 20th century poetry about childhood.  Slightly boring.  And she'd spent 5 years on this album, entitled "Leave Your Sleep", so was determined to fully focus on it, prefacing every song with a commentary about the poet and a power point slide to illustrate.  It was like watching the world's most boring English teacher.

Having zealously ignored all calls from the crowd to "play some of your old stuff" until she had reached the end of the double album and 20 slide power point, she apologetically claimed that they had not rehearsed anything other than this new tediously soul-sapping new material, but would "give a few old numbers a go".  At last!  And of course it would be rehearsed and of course it would be amazing!  But it WAS unrehearsed.  So much so, that she forgot the lyrics or gave up trying mid-song.   Sometimes something very beautiful can be both boring and bollocks. 

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 14: The 2010s

In 2017, Willie Nelson released "God's Problem Child" (7/10) on which he sang, "I woke up still not dead again today."  He was one of several artists who still hadn't died by the end of this decade, artists who had been making great music since the 60s or 70s, defying expectations.  Willie was still paying off the taxman by giving us an album a year, and quality was in no way compromised by quantity, as validated by "Last Man Standing" (7/10 2018) and "Ride me Back Home" (7/10 2019).  Dylan was still not dead and started his 70s with "Tempest"  (8/10 2012), then did a lot of painting and Frank Sinatra covers and just when you thought he'd given up writing his own songs, he snuck up and put out "Rough and Rowdy Ways" (8/10) in 2020.  Similarly, Springsteen, Neil Young and Richard Thompson farted in the face of death with a good few decent albums between them.

This wasn't enough to make this a good decade for music though.

There were some highlights.  I discovered 'Hurray for the Riff Raff' on Jools Holland's "Later..." TV show, on which he consistently manages to showcase a great band every so often in between all the tedious world music, musically competent but unappealing dross and inane interviews with 'legends' whom he blackmails into letting him play boogie woogie piano alongside.  Hurray for the Riff Raff are my band of the decade, although in effect they is a she, not in a pronoun fluid sort of way, but in terms of the fact that Alynda Lee Segarra is the singer-songwriter and the rest of the band are a rotation of session musicians. Hurray for the Riff Raff help to provide the bulk of the 8/10 and 9/10 albums of the era - the eponymous debut in 2011 (8/10), "Look out Mama" in 2012 (9/10), a covers album "My Dearest, Darkest Neighbour" in 2013 (8/10) with amazingly beautiful versions of My Sweet Lord and Jealous Guy, "Small Town Heroes" in 2014 (9/10) and "The Navigator" in 2017 (9/10).

The few other top albums of the decade come from the previous decade's favourites, I am Kloot ("Let it all In" 10/10 2013) and  The Decemberists ("The King is Dead" 9/10 2011, "What a terrible world, what a beautiful world" 8/10 2015 and "I'll be your Girl" 9/10 2018).  My other discovery of the decade, albeit with a back catalogue to the early 80s, was Robyn Hitchcock.  My first gig after this discovery was the intimate Betsy Trotwood pub near Farringdon, where I bought "Tromso, Kaptein" (8/10 2011) from the merch stand and asked the man himself to sign it "about bloody time" when I admitted it had taken me nearly 40 years to get into his music.  His current LP at this time was as good as any he'd done in a prolific, but slightly obscure career, a self-titled record (8/10 2017).  Who waits nearly 40 years to release a self-titled album?  Did he just run out of ideas for titles? And in between he gave us "The Man Upstairs" (8/10 2014).

Finally, a special mention to the last few remaining albums to score 8+.  David Bowie's hugely tragic death in 2017 coincided with a pretty intriguing and enjoyable album "Black Star" (7/10) and followed his unexpectedly brilliant comeback album in 2013, "The Next Day" (8/10).  Noel Gallagher proved that he could reach the same heights as Oasis without Oasis on "Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds" (8/10 2011).  Neil Young, relentlessly creative, was closest to his best on "Peace Trail" (8/10 2016) and "Hitch Hiker" (8/10 2017).  And Belly's 20 year hiatus ended with a superb comeback album "Dove" (8/10 2018).

Below these are albums by country stars Jason and Margo Price - two consistently good artists on my list of who to see in concert.

But overall, I've struggled to fill the top ten lists in this decade.  Sometimes, I have to drop down to the 5/10 level LPs and occasionally I can't even fill ten spaces.  Music has very definitely been on a downward trajectory over the decades.  But gradually.  And I still discover old stuff that I'd previously overlooked.  And I have enough in my collection to keep me happy anyway (not that I ever go a month without buying a few more records.)

If you've been reading these blog posts, then thank you for indulging my nerdy need to write about something that I care passionately about.  Hopefully, it's made you consider checking out something I have praised and sometimes prompted some interest in my rating of an album  that you may love.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 13: The Noughties

You know how, when you ask someone who their favourite bands are, and they reel off names that you've never heard of, and you think to yourself, "Music wanker"...?

That's probably me now.  It wasn't me until the mid-noughties.  Up until that point, as you've maybe noticed from previous posts, nearly all of my favourite albums are from well-known artists, names familiar to people who aren't even that much into music.  But the new millennium brought with it a fundamental change in popular music: the most popular mainstream bands were not longer the best bands around, the obscure ones were. I mean just look at the barrel-load of dog shit that has been picking up Brit awards in the last 20 years and compare your Coldplays, Ed Sheerans, Killers and Arctic Monkeys to The Police, Madness, Blondie, The Jam, etc... etc...

Heading this list of obscurities are my favourite band, more so even than The Beatles and Madness, and they go by the name of 'I am Kloot'.  Easily the most incomprehensible name you couldn't imagine.  There's no explanation for its origins, but one theory is linked to the fact that 'kloot' is Dutch for 'bollock'.  Their first album, "Natural History", is one of 3 I have rated 10/10 in 2001 - the first year since 1978 that can boast that many with a perfect score.  Their second, self-titled, from 2003, breezes to a 10/10 and rivals Bob's "Highway 61 Revisited" for my favourite album of all time.  I'm equally and obsessively generous in awarding top scores to their third album, "Gods and Monsters" (2005), their 4th, "Play Moolah Rouge" (2007), their 5th, "Sky at Night" (2010) and, guess what, their 6th and final studio album, "Let it All In" (2013).  I am Kloot's incomprehensible avoidance of commercial success was a blessing for the cult of Kloot followers like myself, who consequently got to see them in small intimate venues, as I did on 8 out of 10 occasions, and more often than not, also got a chance to meet their lead singer and songwriter at the merch stand afterwards.  John Bramwell is self-deprecating, a hilarious raconteur and instantly likeable.  So you can imagine how awestruck, gobsmacked and privileged I felt, when, at a recent solo gig of his, I was chatting with him afterwards, and this happened:  He spotted and admired the screen saver on my phone, which was of a painting I had recently done of Coronation Street's Elsie Tanner, played by actress Pat Phoenix.  (He's a Mancunian, that must have been the reason for his interest.)  He said, "What's that?  That's great!" and when I told him he asked me to send it to him and gave me his mobile number.  We've even had a couple of text exchanges since. Non-stalkery too.  A surreal experience.

The problem with lesser known bands is that you don't always know about them.  I didn't know about The Decemberists until after that decade had finished.  Here was a folk-rock band with the ability to tread a path between Nick Drake and Led Zeppelin with Beatles style melodies, spinning wry tales of rogues, murderers, queens, cranes and infanticidal fathers from unspecific historical times.  Their discography from the Noughties consists of "Castaways and Cut-outs" (8/10 2002), "Her Majesty, the Decemberists"  (8/10 2003), "Picaresque" (10/10 2005), "The Crane Wife" (9/10 2006) and "The Hazards of Love" (8/10 2009).

The Decemberists, like I am Kloot, have the added benefit of a very likeable and witty songwriter and lead singer, Colin Meloy.  I don't feel a need to really like the people I listen to, or to get a sense that they harbour personality traits and values that I look for in friends.  It's just nice when they do.  In stark contrast to Bramwell and Meloy, is Ryan Adams.  Again, he's not well known.  When I mention him to anyone, I feel the need to say, "Ryan Adams, not Bryan Adams, Ryan not Bryan, very different."  But Ryan has turned out to be a bit of a ****.  In 2019, it came out that he had been using manipulative behaviour against younger female artists, promising them help in their careers and then sexually harassing them in texts and via social media.  This included an under-age girl.  Adams made a public apology, but undermined it with a disclaimer, suggesting it was unintentional, denied the allegations and confessed that he had made mistakes in life.  Wanker.  Now this put me in a difficult position in regard to enjoying his music.  He had a hugely prolific decade, releasing ten studio LPs in that time, including one of my absolute favourites, "Gold" (10/10 2001) and also "Heartbreaker" (8/10 2000) and "Cold Roses" (9/10 2005).  I certainly didn't feel like listening to him after that news broke.  And the first album he (eventually) released afterwards, I just couldn't stomach listening to, especially as he sounded mawkishly and self-indulgently apologetic, with the pathetic whine of the sort of self-obsessed, malignant little bastard that he obviously is.  But, I came to realise that if we allowed our moral evaluation of the personal lives of artists whose work we admire to lead us into a refusal to experience it, then we'd end up listening to very little music, reading very few books and watching very few films.  That moral evaluation may well colour my enjoyment, but I find myself able to disassociate the person from their art.  If I can do that for Chuck Berry, then I can for Ryan not Bryan Adams.  (But definitely NOT Gary Glitter!  You have to draw a line somewhere)

Listening to songs which are so explicitly about the singer's depression is nearly always pretty depressive.  The song-writing tends to be either too earnestly confessional or resignedly woeful.  But Malcolm Middleton is a Scottish folk singer who sugars his tales of depression with a gentle upbeat, an almost jaunty wistfulness.  Lacing his self-deprecation with just enough wit to make it palatable, songs like "Fuck it, I love You" and "Blue Plastic Bags" (in reference to bringing bottles home from the off licence for a Friday night in), make him another favourite obscure artist of the decade.  His debut is graced by the impossible to accurately recall, stream of consciousness title of "5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine" (7/10 2002).  Later in the decade he had a string of 3 great albums in 3 years: "A Brighter Beat" (9/10 2007), "Sleight of Heart" (8/10 2008) which includes a heartstring-pulling cover of Madonna's 'Stay', and "Waxing Gibbous" (7/10 2009).

And my final music wanker mention of a lesser known act, is eels.  Not Eels.  Not The Eels. And in fact not even a band, but instead a band name for an individual called Mark Oliver Everett.  Following a strong start in the 90s, eels score highly in the Noughties with the LPs "Daisies of the Galaxy" (8/10 2000), "Souljacker" (7/10 2001), "Shootenanny" (8/10 2003) and "Hombre Lobo" (6/10 2009)

Returning now to those more well-known artists who have appeared on my lists in previous decades - with generally less unsavoury reputations than Ryan Adams, albeit perhaps not as warm and cuddly as Bramwell and Meloy - the Noughties proved an unexpectedly fertile period for many of these old favourites.  

Bob Dylan had his most consistent series of albums since the 70s, starting with "Love and Theft" (10/10 2001) which grew on me slowly over about 15 years before I decided it was one of his best, followed 5 years later by "Modern Times" (9/10) and "Together Through Life" (9/10) in 2009.  He never fails to surprise.  

Neil Young had a similarly consistent spell, though with far fewer gaps between albums.  Young released "Are you Passionate?" (8/10 2002), "Greendale" (7/10 2003), "Prairie Wind" (7/10 2005), "Living with War" (8/10 2006) and "Chrome Dreams II" (7/10 2007).  Five great albums in five years?  Bloody hell, you'd think it was the 70s again.  

Madness, who took 14 years after their first split to release one new studio album, then waited another ten to make a stunning return to form with "The Liberty of Norton Folgate" (10/10 2009).  

Robert Plant's solo career reached a higher level in the Noughties, but his best effort was actually in collaboration with Alison Klauss - "Raising Sand" (8/10 2007).  

Bruce Springsteen had a much better decade than the previous one.  He makes the lists with "The Rising" (8/10 2002), "Magic" (7/10 2007) and "Working on a Dream" (6/10 2009).  

Johnny Cash, in his final days, continued his "American Recordings" series, which covered a plethora of wonderful songs from the likes of Springsteen, U2, Tom Petty, Neil Diamond, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave and most famously Nine Inch Nails ('Hurt'), in such a way as to make many of them his own, but with so much emotional poignancy that the originals occasionally became instantly diminished.  "American III: Solitary Man" (9/10 2000) is his best, with "American IV: The Man Comes Around" (9/10 2002) not far behind and "American V: A Hundred Highways" (8/10 2006) a worthy posthumous addition to the series.  

And finally, David Bowie rose to his greatest heights since 1980 with "Heathen" (7/10 2002) and "Reality" (8/10 2003) before having ten years off as well.  These old boys were clearly on some kind of musical equivalent of Viagra.

Not a decade that has anything strong to characterise it in the wider music loving public's consciousness, but for me it was a time of new people making old man music, while old men made new music.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 12: Side B of the 90s

Side B of the 90s (the second half of the decade, that is) is not very different to side A .  Much like an album.  More of the same, only not quite as good. 

I blame Britpop.  As much as it was probably the last great movement in British pop music culture, it spawned a glut of bands who struggled to extend their cheeky lad and ladette guitar-based indie sing-alongs across a whole album.  Blur are the epitome of this flattering to deceive summation.  Had downloads and then streaming usurped CDs before "Parklife" was released, then far fewer people would have bought the whole album.  As it was, everyone who "loved a bit" of it, had to put up with all of it, fairground jingles and irritating moments of musical dicking about included.  

Blur, then, were not one of the Britpop lot to trouble my geeky top ten lists of albums from each year of the mid to late 90s.  Nor were Sleeper, despite my efforts to love them more - efforts prompted partly by their propensity for a catchy single and mostly by my infatuation with lead singer, Louise Wener.

The best albums by bands who could be said to at least loosely fall under this same umbrella would include the following:

"The Sound of McAlmont and Butler" (8/10 1995), which was purchased not just out of loyalty, but because it turned out to be a great album assembled from a series of original EPs; and because it might just kick off with the most explosively celebratory expression of joy ever unleashed in a pop song - "Yes".

Pulp's "Different Class" (8/10 1995) pre-dated the TV series 'Shameless' by a few years, but it managed to put the essence of that show to (extraordinarily catchy) music in its endearing portrayal of council estate romance, dry wit and perversion.

Demonstrating a far more middle-class, culturally intellectual obsession for sex - a classical music and literary tinged Beatlesesque pop version of the 'Carry On...' films - was Neil Hammond, aka The Divine Comedy. "Casanova" (7/10 1996) introduced us to 'Something for the Weekend' with its references to Stella Gibbons' 'Cold Comfort Farm' (something in the woodshed); "A Short Album about Love" (8/10 1997) contained the ultimate declaration of love with 'If you were a horse, I'd clean the crap out of your stable'; and "Fin de Siecle" (7/10 1998) painted images of journeys on National Express coaches with huge bottomed women.

Not quite fitting the sunny side of the Britpop template was Radiohead.  Before sinking into an abyss of experimental, morose dirge, they weren't quite too pretentious enough to forego a memorable guitar hook or ten within the bars of "The Bends" (8/10 1995) and "OK Computer" (8/10 1997).  And Oasis and Supergrass squeeze themselves onto the lists as well, to complete what on reflection is actually a fairly healthy representation for Britpop.

Not Britpop, but sitting comfortably alongside them are these CDs from indie/alternative artists: "Bring it On" (9/10 1998) by Gomez, "Beautiful Freak" (9/10 1996) by eels, "White Ladder" (8/10 1998) by David Gray,  "I'm with Stupid" (6/10 1995) by Aimee Mann and "Big Calm" (6/10 1998) by Morcheeba.  James also continued to plough a furrow through the 90s of half decent albums sprinkled with some great songs, the best being "Millionaires" (7/10) in 1999.

Less likely to find themselves featured in between topless photo-shoots on the pages of 90s lads' magazine, "Loaded" or invited to be interviewed on "The Word" by one of the decade's most iconic arseholes, Terry Christian, would be the inevitable folk and country rock performers sitting on my CD and record racks.  This includes Natalie Merchant, who moved on from 10,000 Maniacs, to produce several beautiful solo albums.  Beautiful AND interesting that is.  I stress that, because people often use that ubiquitous adjective to describe soft, gentle and VERY dull and bland ballads, which is not what Natalie Merchant did, not at first anyway. She did, later on, spend a few years on a self-indulgent project to put a double album's worth of Edwardian poetry for children to music, which I also witnessed in performance in probably the most tediously fucking boring concert I have ever attended.  At her best she can be heard on "Tigerlily" (8/10 1995), "Ophelia" (7/10 1998) and "Motherland" (8/10 2001).

Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, Robyn Hitchcock, Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch get on the scoreboards, but standing out is another folky favourite of mine, bearded this time, as you'd expect,  Richard Thompson.  "You? Me? Us?" (7/10 1996) pulls off the experiment of one disc of acoustic tracks and one disc of electric versions without it seeming like a gimmick.  In 1999, he unleashed a classic in my mind, one of only two perfect scores in this half of the decade, "Mock Tudor" (10/10).  The other ten is "Time Out of Mind" (1997), Dylan's resurrection #3, that proved to be a turning point rather than a blip, a return to form that he continued to build on for the next 14 years.

An even more unexpected comeback at this time (1999), given that their last studio album was 14 years previously, was Madness.  The LP title "Wonderful" (6/10) described some of the tracks on that album, not all, but its the odd song that stacks up against their classics that showed they could still write great pop tunes; and they went on to do this again, irregularly, over the time since.

Finally, also proving that they weren't washed up either, were David Bowie ("Earthling" 6/10 1997 and "Hours" 5/10 1999) and Paul McCartney ("Flaming Pie" 7/10 1997).

So, lots of great albums, but a downward trajectory.  You'd expect this would continue in the 2000s, as clearly I was getting older, more set in my ways, more narrow minded and rose tinted in my view of the good old days.  But you'd be wrong.  Strangely.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 11: Side A of the 90s

"Side A" of the 90s will focus on the years in the first half of a decade in which CDs fully replaced vinyl records, thus making the concept of a side A or B completely redundant, and adding just enough irony to my blog post title to compensate for the lacklustre humour hereafter.

Unfulfilled Promise

The best album of the decade came from The Sundays - 1990's "Reading, Writing and Arithmetic" (10/10).  Imagine The Smiths, but with a lead singer that you want to snog and marry rather than kill, because she sings about her finest hour "finding a pound on the underground" and elsewhere confesses to getting sick on her cardigan.  Although it happens quite regularly in music, it always seems implausible that an artist capable of creating one amazing album should be incapable of doing it again.  I love Harriet Wheeler's voice and the distinctiveness of the band's sound, so I enjoy their two follow-ups, but neither 1992's "Blind" (6/10) nor 1997's "Static and Silence" (7/10) contains a song you'd swap for anything on their faultless debut LP.

Much more notable in their fall from precocious perfection was The Stone Roses, who spent the early 90s not following up their iconic debut due to a record contract dispute and thus building up an unassuaged level of expectation and suspense over their 1994 sophomore LP, named with suitable irony, "The Second Coming" (7/10).

The House of Love were a third band from this era, who teasingly released an LP (9/10) that (to steal one of their own lyrics) "sucked the marrow out of bones" and then failed to follow it up.  Like The Stone Roses and The Sundays, they are emblematic of halcyon university days, when I constantly listened to them, saw each in concert and anticipated subsequent albums with all the relish of a fox who'd snuck into a battery farm full of hens.  Unlike The Stone Roses and The Sundays, the House of Love's follow up was more than just relatively disappointing, it was as shockingly stark a contrast as being served a dog poo for dessert in a Michelin star restaurant.  It remained the worst CD in my collection until I finally recovered from the shock, gained closure on the death of any vain hopes of being eventually persuaded of its worth and threw the bloody thing in the bin.

Bob Dylan's inclusion in this 'unfulfilled promise' section might seem crazy, 30 years into his career, but he's here on the back of ending an artistic and commercial slump in the 80s with a promising return to top form, only to follow it with slump number 2.  This starts with 1990's "Under the Red Sky" (6/10), an over-produced LP packed with average tracks and star names like George Harrison, Elton John, Slash and Stevie Ray Vaughan sitting in as musicians, all responding to Bob's genius as you might the Emperor's new clothes, while he sings "Wiggle wiggle wiggle like a swarm of bees, wiggle on your hands and knees."  Bob learned from this experience never again to allow a producer (Don Was in this case) to roll his songs in glitter, but he then forgot how to write songs at all.  His next albums are stripped back, solo acoustic, containing only covers of traditional folk blues songs.  "Good as I been to You" (1992 6/10) is the harder listen.  "World Gone Wrong" (1993 7/10) is better, but neither did anything to suggest that Dylan's song-writing days weren't well behind him.  Or so I thought in the mid-90s.

One band managed to do a similar trick halfway through their album.  Crash Test Dummies frontloaded "God shuffled his feet" (1993 7/10) with enough great songs to earn a 10/10; but what would have been side 2 if it wasn't the CD age pulled the average down and yet again the follow up album was a million miles off that early promise.

The early 90s were awash with bands destined not to sustain their early promise.  The Cranberries' first two albums (both 7/10) are a case in point.  Suede, whose self-titled debut (9/10) in 1993 proved difficult to match on LP #2 and even harder after co-song-writer and guitarist Bernard Butler left the band. Portishead's "Dummy" (1994 8/10) led to nothing of interest thereafter.  And "Mama Said" (8/10) saw Lenny Kravitz reach a creative peak that proved an anomaly.

Meanwhile, U2 turned a corner in their career.  They followed their last good album, 1993's "Achtung, Baby!" with the average "Zooropa" and then transformed themselves into a blueprint for tediously self-satisfying, terminally dull purveyors of smug, over-earnest elevator music, like fucking Coldplay.  Paul Weller pulled off a similar trick, but without stirring up such passionate hatred as Bono and co.  He seemed to have found his groove as a solo artist on "Wild Wood" (7/10 1993) and "Stanley Road" (7/10 1995), but thereafter he's manged to stir up nothing passionate or emotion-inducing at all, just charmlessly competent Ocean Colour Scene copies.

So, did anyone maintain any momentum in the early 90's like bands used to years before?

Yes.  Fulfilling their promise, one album after another, was The Beautiful South.  No band has pulled off such an ironic juxtaposition  (there's that poncey word again) between upbeat melodies and dark, twisted lyrics, as if they'd based their whole career on Maxwell's Silver Hammer by The Beatles.  Songs with titles like "I Love You but you're boring" that take a wry look at relationships and romance for some reason appeal very much to the cynic in me.  From 1990's "Choke"(9/10) to "0898 Beautiful South" (7/10) in '92 and "Miaow" (7/10) in '94, Paul Heaton and co proved possibly the most consistently great pop band of the decade.  

Fulfilling their promise from the late 80s, at least commercially (as I prefer those earlier albums) are REM.  "Out of Time" (8/10 1991), "Automatic for the People" (8/10 1992) and "Monster" (7/10 1994) are perhaps only flawed or inconsistent, because they contain some classic songs that shine a bit too brightly for anything else to keep with. Reaching their commercial AND artistic zenith were Crowded House, who released "Woodface" (9/10 1991) and "Together Alone" (10/10 1993) and then disbanded for a decade rather than inevitably let us all down trying to follow such inimitable work.

Neil Young has spent decades alternating between between sumptuousness folk or country LPs and heavy grunge outings, and he pairs two of his best since the early 70s here.  1990's "Ragged Glory" (7/10) and 1992's "Harvest Moon" (10/10).  At the time of writing and at the age of 75, he's about to release his 20th studio album in the 29 years since then, most of which score even better than "Ragged Glory" in my mind. Having released 40 studio albums in total (of which I have 30 and rate them on average 7.5), it's fair to say that he HAS fulfilled his promise.

Hellos and Goodbyes

1994 gave us the start of Oasis's career, which was to deliver many, many fine songs, but no LP as consistently great as their debut, "Definitely Maybe" (9/10).  It gave us a new 2nd career for Johnny Cash, whose first in the "American Recordings" (8/10) series was released this year.  It gave us the complete career (until a recent equally accomplished comeback) of Belly, with the superb "Star" (7/10) in '93 and easily loveable "King" (9/10) two years later.

And it was goodbye to Jethro Tull, after 91's "Catfish Rising" (7/10) and '95's "Roots to Branches" (6/10) - a strong finish to a consistently great 30 year career, which they then spoilt with one album too many, their worst of all time, "J-Tull dot com" (which doesn't make the top ten, even in a year as bad as 1999, given its rating of 2/10).  It has a shit title and album cover too, so Tull's ship had well and truly sailed by this point.

And the saddest of goodbyes, of course, was to Freddie Mercury in 1991, marked fittingly with a final Queen album, "Innuendo" (7/10), which along with "The Works" in '83 was their best since the 70's.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 10: The mid to late 80s

Up until this point in musical history, the best rock/pop songs and albums being produced were also in the mainstream and consequently the artists responsible would appear ubiquitously on shows like 'Top of the Pops'. But the mid-80s proved a turning point, and 'Top of the Pops' went the same way that 'Doctor Who' did at that time (in the era of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy), and that's straight down the shitter.  Nonetheless, there were plenty of great albums in the second half of the decade.

10/10 albums from 1984-9

The best LP of the decade comes from Kate Bush.  I'm sure I wasn't the only 15 year old in love with her when she released "Hounds of Love" in 1985.  My obsession was such that my mum, in an effort to help me find a girlfriend, once claimed that her friend's daughter looked like Kate Bush.  She didn't.  She was much more like Alison Moyet.  No disrespect to Alison Moyet, but she wasn't really competing with Kate Bush for a turn on my turntable or a space on my wall.

'Dawn escapes from moon-washed college halls' was still 3 years off for me when Marillion's Fish sang this favourite lyric of mine on "Misplaced Childhood's" 'Kayleigh' (1985).  There is no better album for songs that segue into each other and it's easy to be forgiving of his heart-on-sleeve self-pity, because his use of language is unique:  He somehow manages to sound like an English Literature post-grad with a thesaurus fixation without coming across as a right bleeding ponce.

On the subject of lyrical masterpieces with complementary melodic dressing, I'll add to this list of near-perfect albums, The Smiths' 1986 classic, "The Queen is Dead".  Another light that never goes out.  And I'll throw in REM's "Green" and The Waterboys' "Fisherman's Blues", my soundtracks to the summer of '88 and a first year at university, where I strived to become as equally poetic, tragic and Cinderella-obsessed as Marillion's Fish.

Bob Dylan's mid-to-late 80s period is his most maligned and appeared to have finally signalled the death throes of his career, but he pulled off yet another resurrection, probably the most incredible for ...oh, about, the best part of 2,000 years.... when he allowed Daniel Lanois to soundscape a collection of great songs that became the beautifully atmospheric "Oh Mercy".  And as Bob ended the decade having a resurrection, The Stone Roses were born, claiming to actually be the resurrection and sounding like the lovechildren of the 60s and the 90s on their self-titled, lemon and paint-splat adorned debut LP.

9/10 albums from 1984-89

Lanois (alongside Brian Eno) can also take credit for a similar sound on U2's "The Unforgettable Fire" (1984), adding timeless sophistication to the more raw sound of their early LPs.  So much so, that you can even forgive Bono's gurning smugness and ridiculous attire of a ten-gallon Teletubby hat, sex worker boots and Kentucky trailer park mullet as he gave himself a hernia singing about Martin Luther King.  He refined this look when U2 pulled off pretending to be an American country-blues rock band on "The Joshua Tree" in 1987.  I found myself easily able to overlook their affectations while the music was so great - but once they started to wade through a mire of tedious mundanity from the late '90s onwards, those affectations made me want to punch Bono every time he flicked his fingers and caused a child to die of poverty.

Two 9/10 albums of the time really challenged me.  Springsteen's "Born in the USA" and Dire Straits's "Brothers in Arms" proved to be my gateway LPs into their older, less 80s sounding-music; and consequently these albums then became, for a long time, disregarded in my mind as weaker, overly commercialised, too-radio-friendly, digital, hyped CD flagships.  Recently, they've grown on me again, enormously so, as the songs are all strong on each and the 80's production has dated better than much from that that era.

REM were riding an artistic wave in the late 80s as a run up towards becoming A-listers in the early 90s.  The prequels to "Green" were "Life's Rich Pageant" (1986) and "Document" (1987) and together this forms a trilogy of their best and most consistent LPs throughout a long career.  Anything else might come close and might include classic songs, but always had a couple of weaker tracks to detract.

Other 9/10 LPs from this era are:  Marillion "Fugazi" (1984) and "Clutching at Straws" (1987), Madness "Keep Moving" (1984), Sting "The Dream of the Blue Turtles" (1985), The Smiths "Meat is Murder" (1985) and "Strangeways, Here we Come" (1987), 10,000 Maniacs "In My Tribe" (1987) and "Element of Light" (1986) by Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians.  A real mix of fashionable and unfashionable and all of which, except the latter, I had procured and started to love by the end of that decade.

The rest, year by year

1984 was marginally weaker and the remaining ranks of my top ten are taken up with 7/10 scoring LPs from Prince, Madonna and even Frankie Goes to Hollywood.  Much more typical 80s pop than the choices above.

1985 was - coincidentally, much like 1975 - a mid-decade peak year, helped by many 8/10 albums, from Suzanne Vega, Madness, Richard Thompson and The Pogues.

1986 has a range with some great albums by The Bangles, The Fall, Crowded House and Peter Gabriel, towering above some very average efforts from Queen and Dylan.

1987 was similar in that respect, with the top ten ranks scrapping the barrel a bit, courtesy of a 5/10 from Springsteen and some good but unexciting records by John Mellencamp and Aztec Camera.

1988 proved to be better and full of 7/10 LPs from The Fall, The Pogues, Crowded House, The Travelling Wilburys.

1989 scores even better with Kate Bush, 10,000 Maniacs, Tom Petty and Neil Young.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 9: The early 80s

 The early 80s except 1981

What do nuclear energy, synthesisers and social media have in common?  Like many inventions they have been usefully used and atrociously abused; but more than most inventions the results have been at polar extremes.  Synthesisers epitomise the 80s as much as men with hairstyles like their mums', the only difference being that synths weren't always quite as shit. Successful bands who embraced the synth as a primary instrument were capable of knocking out a few great singles, but never enough to rescue an LP from the concrete shoes of its more average album tracks.  Thus, you won't find any Tears for Fears or Depeche Mode or Eurythmics albums on my 80s lists of top tens.  What you will find are albums by my usual favourites who either (a) mastered the benefits of the synth as a primary instrument, (b) used it as secondary instrument to complement their music or (c) avoided it as you might well cross the road to ensure you don't step in a dog turd.

Category (a) includes Bowie's "Scary Monsters... and Super Creeps" (7/10) in 1980.  Top track 'Ashes to Ashes' pretty much invents the 80s, as a song and video.  It's not just that Bowie changed his entire image as often as I change my pants (once a year), it's the fact that whatever new style he immersed himself in, he pulled it off better than anyone else.  Almost.  Roxy Music can also take some credit for blueprinting the 80s sound in the first year of the decade with "Flesh and Blood" (8/10), an even better LP than Bowie's.  Bowie lacked the consistency on "Scary Monsters...", as he did on 1983's "Let's Dance" (5/10), despite the title track being damn near perfect.  Roxy Music again score better with 1982's "Avalon" (7/10).  In each case, the tone of these albums was very much in keeping with the sunny side of the 80s: Upbeat, glossy and optimistic.  In contrast, Joy Division's second and final album "Closer" (8/10) reflected the darker, industrial northern gloom that also characterised the decade, like 'Boys from the Blackstuff' did.  Sadly and poignantly it proved an appropriate epitaph to Ian Curtis who took his own life 2 months before the LP's release.

Category (b) is a strange mix.  Kate Bush was too much of a restless artistic genius to ignore the benefits of a synth (and a fairlight) and embraced both on 1980's commercially accessible "Never for Ever" (9/10) and '82's more interesting, but less poppy "The Dreaming" (9/10).  The latter featured Rolf Harris on didgeridoo.  Yes, I know.  But it could've been worse.  Gary Glitter on backing vocals for instance.  Saville on synth.  OK, I'll stop there.

Jethro Tull, whose response to punk had been to release albums you could Morris Dance to, shocked many by adding synths to their usual folk-rock-band-with-flute approach and did so to tremendous effect on "The Broadsword and the Beast" (8/10) in 1982.

The Police were initially well known for play-fighting on camera and using French phrases for album titles in the late 70s, whilst musically they relied on their 3 instruments of bass, drums and guitar, played with extraordinary skill.  In 1980, they were still playfighting, but they started to use synths; and what sounded like another French LP title - "Zenyatta Mondatta" (9/10) - was actually just made-up words meaning absolutely nothing at all.  In 1983, they signed off with an even better LP, with even more synths and a synthy 80s sounding not-French-at-all title, "Synchronicity" (10/10).

I'll sub-divide Category (c).  (If that's not the nerdiest sentence that I've used so far across 9 super geeky blog posts, then I don't what is.)  Firstly, there are those bands who used a lot of electronic keyboards, but not synths.  The Cure's 1982 "Pornography" (7/10) features, as does Marillion's debut "Script for a Jester's Tear" (8/10) the following year.  I might even lump Dire Straits in there for company, simply for increasing keyboard use on 1980's "Making Movies"(7/10) and '82's "Love over Gold" (8/10). 

Then there is a whole host of artists who stuck with traditional instruments, ducking modern means of performing music, even if the production methods or their choice of personal attire was unmistakably '80s.  In some order of preference:

There was always more to Madness than jaunty dance-along singles with obvious comic panache, but their development from "Absolutely" (10/10) in 1980 to "The Rise and Fall" (10/10) in 1982 did represent a long journey to a more serious place, even if the album covers travelled a mere half mile from Chalk Farm tube station to the top of Primrose Hill.

Fun Boy Three might not have had the cultural impact of the band they spawned from, but I've always enjoyed them FAR more than The Specials ('Ghost Town' notwithstanding) and they proved to be another band with a two-(classic)-album career: their eponymous debut LP (8/10) in '82 and the remarkable "Waiting" (10/10) in '83, on which every single song could have charted in the top ten had they all been released as singles.

U2 in the '80s hadn't yet evolved into unbearable wankers.  They were merely bearable wankers, and I've retained enough residual teenage adulation for them to still really enjoy "Boy" (8/10) and "War" (9/10) from 1980 and '83.  Dylan slowly toned down the Christian fundamentalism from "Saved" (8/10) to "Infidels" (9/10) in the same years, even though he was still singing about Jesus without necessarily sounding like he'd collaborated on the lyrics with St John the Evangelist.  And retaining a devotion to good old fashioned ways of doing things with minimal decoration from the age were Richard and Linda Thompson ("Shoot out the Lights" 7/10 1982), Bruce Springsteen ("The River" 9/10 1980), The Waterboys' self-titled debut (6/10 1983), Dexy's Midnight Runners ("Too Rye Ay" 7/10 1982) and the first of many LPs from R.E.M, ("Murmur" 6/10 1983).

That leaves a few LPs that don't fit into categories with any others, so I'll stick ZZ Top's "Eliminator" (5/10 1983) into its own group of bands with long-bearded guitarists not called Beard and unbearded drummers called Beard; I'll put "The Gift" (7/10 1982) by The Jam into the category of albums with 'A Town Called Malice' on them; and Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut" (7/10 1983) in with all the other albums of off-cuts from a previous album by bands who were collapsing in a mire of hatred towards each other.

1981

This year proved to be a bogey in the trifle.  On average, I own 14 albums from each year of the 80's, but only 8 from 1981 and absolutely no classics in there.  The best of a relatively not-too-bad bunch is Madness's "7" (9/10), the very first album I bought for myself, but distinctly the weakest of their first five.  Dylan's "Shot of Love" (8/10) is a close second alongside the first solo outing for someone I discovered much later in life, who took his inspiration from Dylan, The Beatles and early Pink Floyd - so I'm not sure why I overlooked him for so long - and that is Robyn Hitchcock.  Incidentally, I am writing this just days after he played a very small intimate venue local to me, where my daughter worked for several years.  To be stood at the front just a metre from a musical hero in such familiar surroundings is quite surreal. (His lyrics are equally surreal.) His debut, incidentally is called "Black Snake Diamond Role" (8/10), and no, I don't understand why either.  

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 8: The late-70s

 1977

1977 was a fork in the road.  The rock music world became partitioned between those who bought and loved the crude, spit-in-your-face brashness of "Never Mind the Bollocks" by The Sex Pistols and those who fell in love with the polished beauty of Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours".  It was a simple choice between nasty and nice.  Nice Fleetwood Mac spent 1976 in California, wasting 6 months of expensive recording studio time blowing a bottomless budget on excessive feasting, singing about the self-destruction of their relationships/marriages to each other as they simultaneously self-destructed, being served drugs like canapes at a wedding reception and snorting cocaine out of each other's bum holes.  Nasty Sex Pistols were touring clubs and colleges of the UK and swearing on TV.  On that basis, you'd take nasty over nice, but it's "Rumours" (10/10) that has always taken pride of place in my record rack.  I don't own and have never even listed to "Never Mind the Bollocks".  I imagine it's bollocks and so I'm not minding it.

The Sex Pistols and punk in its purest form have always been too raw and unimaginative for me.  It's like road rage on record. But undeniably, the whole punk movement - and by that I don't mean just the Pistols, I mean its influences as well, The Stooges in the US and elements of the UK pub-rock culture, like Dr Feelgood - influenced so many great bands in the late '70s and beyond, that we should take our hats off to it.  Not that they ever wore hats.  Except perhaps my favourite punk, whose individual style out-punked the punks.  Poly Styrene's band, X-Ray Spex, had something more than other punk bands of the era, partly down to her image (for example, the middle-aged woman's tweed jacket and skirt), partly down to her quirky lyrics and song subject matter ('Warrior in Woolworth'), partly down to her distinctive voice and partly down to their unusual inclusion of a sax player.  Their sole album, "Germ-Free Adolescents" just misses out on my 1977 top ten, but is well worthy of an honourable mention.  There are two albums on that list for 1977, which can claim a close affinity with the movement.  Ian Dury and the Blockheads released "New Boots and Panties" (8/10).  I haven't been able to test this claim, because my turntable doesn't work in this way, but if you set it to 45rpm and your needle arm automatically rises and lowers itself onto the record, then it will land on side 2 track 4 at the start of 'Plaistow Patricia'.  This song commences with Dury sing-shouting the opening words, "Arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks".  Not something you'd hear on a Fleetwood Mac record.  The second punk-related album is Talking Heads' debut "Talking Heads:77" (7/10), which is pure CBGB, pure 'psycho killer', pure not-Fleetwood Mac.

Even the dinosaurs found themselves taking notice of - and even demonstrating a thin slither of influence from - punk in 1977.  Queen attempted to get a bit punky on "News of the World" (7/10), about as punky as parents who are trying to use young people's slang.  Pink Floyd's "Animals" (9/10) certainly contained their first attempt to move from the melodic hippy (Gilmour voiced) lyrics to the unmelodic angst-ridden (Waters voiced) lyrics.  The songs 'Sheep', 'Dogs' and 'Pigs' on the LP are all angrily aimed at society's squares, including city bankers and Mary Whitehouse.  This was dinosaur rock doing a Sex Pistols on the Bill Grundy show.

Jethro Tull, however, easily managed to swat away any flies from the punk dung pile as they picnicked in the tranquil and antiquated idylls of pre-industrial English folk.  "Songs from the Wood" (7/10) sits resolutely in my list alongside Waylon Jenning's "Ol Waylon" (7/10) in eschewing urban modernity; unlike David Bowie, who existed on a plane above everybody else.  Much as he was a self-proclaimed magpie of artistic ideas from others, Bowie did this in order to create new styles, not to reflect current ones, like punk.  On "Low" (8/10) and "Heroes" (7/10), he helped create an early blueprint for 80's electronic pop music, albeit with significant help from Roxy Music's dodgy-haircut-afflicted former keyboardist, Brian Eno.  And completing 1977's top ten is Peter Gabriel, whose debut solo effort, affectionately named after himself (6/10), manages to hang off of Bowie's shirt-tails in his wise efforts to discard the prog rock self-indulgence that characterised his final record with Genesis (the overlong "Lamb lies down on Broadway") for something more akin to art rock.

1978

Talking of art rock, 1978 was the break-through year for the most unique female music artist of her time, Kate Bush.  She had grown up taking inspiration from Bowie and Roxy Music and probably even Genesis, but her remarkable originality, engrossing execution and popular appeal all warrant the use of that oft-misapplied term, 'genius'.  Her first two albums top my 1978 list - "The Kick Inside" (10/10) and "Lionheart" (10/10) - alongside Blondie's "Parallel Lines" (10/10) and "Plastic Letters (9/10).  Debbie Harry was the first woman to front (and write songs for) a chart-topping band and Kate Bush was the first female singer-songwriter in the UK to reach number one.  Another legendary debut in 1978 came from Dire Straits with their eponymous debut album (9/10) which spawned Knopfler-esque singing and guitar work on a plethora of rock songs for the next decade, from the likes of Dylan and Tull to that Geordie bloke who sang the theme tune to 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet'.

Tull, meanwhile, made no efforts to get down with the kids and remained ensconced in their namesake's historical era, the agricultural revolution, with "Heavy Horses" (8/10); while Dylan roped in some backing singers for a hastily recorded "Street Legal" (8/10) which sounds great despite them missing their cues and the band generally not knowing what  Bob wanted them to do, which is fairly typical.  The Rolling Stones managed to knock out the best album ever to contain both a bona fide disco song ('Miss You') and an authentic country song ('Faraway Eyes'), without it sounding like a jumble, on "Some Girls" (8/10).  And finally, The Jam, moved beyond being a post-punk band to embracing enough melody and variety to win popular appeal on their best LP, "All Mod Cons" (8/10).

1979

The decade ends with more debuts, more new wave and more tenacious plying of their trade from the dinosaurs of rock.  

Pink Floyd's "The Wall" (9/10) is, as my brother once described after I played it in its entirety on a car journey while he tried to sleep, "an hour and a half of a psychotic having a moan."  I fully understand people hating this album, it's the most egocentric, navel-gazing, gloomy example of adolescent wallowing in one's own self-styled victimhood, that it stands to reason that it appealed to university students for the next decade or more.  Made worse that Roger Waters was nearer his mid-30s than his adolescence as he indulged in a mire of unsubtle self-pity; but I still like a lot, thanks in part to Gilmour adding some unforgettable musicality and partly due to the nostalgia of being a self-pitying adolescent when I first listened to it.

While one rock dinosaur introspectively disappeared up his own arsehole, another disappeared off his own scale of reinvention and surprise.  Bob Dylan found Jesus!  A proper, full-on, genuine conversion to Christianity was so intense for Bob, that it turned him into an evangelical zealot.  "Slow Train Coming" (9/10) contains lyrics of such fundamentalist, intolerant preaching, such apocalyptic fire-and-brimstone damnation of mankind, that you'd assume the whole thing was some kind satirical parody.  It wasn't.  But musically, with Bob on top form and enhanced by Mark Knopfler's session guitar work and Jerry Wexler's production, it's one of his best.

Knopfler was much in demand in the late 70's and Dire Straits' second album, "Communique" (9/10) matched the crisp quality and unforgettable hooks of their debut. Meanwhile, Neil Young toured "Rust Never Sleeps" (7/10) with roadies dressed as jawas from Star Wars and the album's opening track providing Kurt Cobain's suicide note over a decade later, claiming that 'it's better to burn out than to fade away'.  Bands still burning in 1979 included more new wave/ post-punk groups, The Police ("Regatta de Blanc" 8/10), Blondie ("Eat to the Beat" 8/10) and Talking Heads ("Fear of Music 7/10).  And cheesy not-quite-prog-rock pop rockers, Supertramp, reached their artistic zenith on "Breakfast in America" (9/10).

But 1979's two best debuts burst from different directions from two of the most unique English bands of all time.  One tragically lasted only until the suicide of its lead singer after two albums, but created a cult legacy that has endured; the other has (with lengthy breaks in between) continued to record new material and tour in the 40+ years since, becoming generation-spanning musical icons, epitomising British popular culture and performing on the roof of Buckingham Palace and at the London Olympics.  This could never have happened the other way around.  The former is Joy Division, whose beautifully gloomy debut was "Unknown Pleasures" (9/10); the latter is Madness, who managed to squeeze onto their first album (10/10) the title track 'One Step Beyond', 'My Girl', 'Bed and Breakfast Man', 'The Prince' and 'Night Boat Cairo'.  That's like releasing a greatest hits volume 1 as your first LP.

Thus, after a mid-70s lull when the decade's early kings were sometimes struggling to maintain momentum, the late 70s saw their resurgence and the birth of a new generation of kings and queens who would cement their places in pop's most unforgettable history for decades to come.  I would never have guessed at that time or for many years afterwards that almost 20 years into the 21st century I would take my daughter to see Blondie and Madness at London's Roundhouse for what was to become two of our favourite concert experiences ever.