Wedding Songs Part 1

I’ve had enough of work for the day, so it’s definitely time to blog about the songs C and I chose to play during dinner for our wedding last month. For no good reason except she’s in Batticaloa complaining about the heat, and seems to think it would be fun if I did.

Fergus Sings The Blues – Deacon Blue

Just another great song from that rich genre of 80s Scottish pop/rock. It was a close call between this track and the magnificent Real Gone Kid. If I remember right, Deacon Blue were the first band in the UK to get a million-pound advance on their contract. I don’t think they ever made back the money in sales, Ricky Ross is probably still working double shifts in a petrol station in Strathclyde in order to pay it off.

Or maybe not, looks like they’re still at it…

New Partner – Palace Music

Now this is a beautiful little song off one of the all-time great albums – Viva Last Blues by Palace Music, the band that Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) formed with his brother and a couple of other guys.

The album was recorded in 1995 by Steve Albini, the king of ambient-noise recording (who had recently produced Nirvana’s In Utero). The songs are under-rehearsed, the band is out of tune in places, Oldham’s voice is reedy and weird as ever, there are bangs and clatters in the tapes and the drums bleed into everything but yet it still manages to retain a kind of drunken grace – and the songs are just immense. It’s simply a great work of art. Oldham’s lyrics are delirious, feverish trips through love, hate, fear and death, expressed through sometimes visceral metaphors of dumb beasts and the brutal beauty of nature. Got that?

New Partner is a slow-medium waltz where the darkness is peeled back for a while to reveal love and longing, and the uplifting, bittersweet revelation of the chorus – “I’ve got a new partner riding with me.”

I can’t find a youtube clip of the song except for some bad cover versions by bedroom guitarists. Here’s Bonnie Prince Billy doing the fantastic Cursed Sleep instead, a much more polished, lush 2006 track. In case you didn’t notice, he’s one crazy-lookin’ fella.

Love Will Tear Us Apart – Joy Division

Well, it was a wedding, you need a nice, happy love song.

Freddie Freeloader – Miles Davis

From the Kind Of Blue album, just a smooth, simple riff, much foot-tapping and head-nodding, and exquisitely tasteful, understated noodling from the master and his acolytes. C plays sax and I used to when I was at school. C is really rather talented, and has gigged in front of thousands. I never even passed grade two, and sounded like a duck farting in the fog. The last straw was spending about a year learning Take Five and still not being able to get the triplets right.

What’s Happening Brother? – Marvin Gaye

We had to have some Marvin, particularly we had to have a song from What’s Going On? I was all for the one where he starts crooning “save the babies!” but unfortunately that track’s too long. This is the one where he sings the part of someone coming home from Vietnam, trying to get back into his old life, asking his mates what’s new and how things have been. It’s got that impeccable groove and it’s charmingly naive.

Misty Mountain Hop – Led Zeppelin

C has been a Led Zep fan since she were a nipper, I’m more of a recent convert, having put a couple of her albums on my ipod last year and having personal rock-out sessions between North London and the South Coast. My absolute favourite is the monstrously overblown blues of Since I’ve Been Loving You, proof that sometimes too much can never be enough, but this one comes close and it was better for the wedding anyway. I love songs like this when the drums come in on the off-beat and suddenly the whole groove changes.

A guy I used to work with called George has a great Led Zep story. His dad was a folk musician in the sixties, back when folk music was sung by serious working-class country people or travellers who liked to drink and fight. At a festival somewhere, some fey hippie in a kaftan with a harmonica keeps trying to get up on stage with George’s dad and jam with the band, George’s dad ends up having to put down his violin and hit him in the mouth. Turns out the fey hippie was a young Robert Plant, whose God-sized ego doesn’t seem to have suffered too much from the incident. He clearly wasn’t paying much attention to the music either, as he went on believing that a “folk music influence” meant daft, pseudo-mystical lyrics about misty mountains, spirits, May Queens and hedgerows.

More gratuitous uses of the word “groove” in part 2, if and when I get around to it.

Drop The Hellboy

Bros arrived like a comet in the firmament in 1988, when I was 12 years old and had big front teeth. I hated them.

They made me angry. They made me angry because they were a symbol of all the things that I didn’t understand, like haircuts, clothes, dancing and certain new and ambivalent feelings towards girls.

I turned my back on this world of shame and terror, and gratefully embraced all that was reassuringly uncool; Queen, Dire Straits, geography lessons and fantasy role-playing games. As a result, I never had sex with anybody until after I left school.

You’d think that I would still bear Luke Goss some kind of grudge for that, but the intervening years have been good to me and I am reconciled with my past. Indeed on many counts I have been proved correct, such as my refusal to wear shiny black shoes with white socks and my jeans turned up.

Instead of feeling sorry for my younger self, I now worry retrospectively for the Goss twins, especially Luke who as the frontman seemed to have the more tortured, artistic soul of the two. I wonder what happened to them once the tide of fame receded; whether their long-term aspirations and dreams were ever fulfilled, whether they ever found true comfort in the arms of another.

It seems I had no cause for concern on the career front. I may be a little behind the curve on this one, but I read today that Luke has just made his Hollywood breakthrough in Guillermo del Toro’s new Hellboy movie, in which, according to the New York Times, he plays “an angry blond elf-prince who robs an auction house and whose twin sister bleeds maple syrup whenever he is injured.”

I wonder if Matt ever bled maple syrup when Luke got nicked on the ear with the hair clippers.

The New York Times reviewer makes no reference to Luke Goss’s past, whether through ignorance or tact I have no idea. The overall review of the film is favourable, but Luke’s presence is enough on it’s own for me to book my front-row ticket. The kids who pitch up at their multiplex will no doubt accept the angry blond elf-prince without a second thought, but we can say that we knew him back when he was just a boy like us who wanted to be famous.

The Wisdom of Crowds?

Happy News from Norf Lahnden.  It’s been reported on the Arsenal website that 1300 children at Emirates Stadium just raised over £100,000 for charity by breaking the World Record for a game of Chinese Whispers – that game where you pass a message along a line of people and see how much it can change through tiny misunderstandings.

…the Chinese Whisper started with the message ‘Together we will make a world of difference’  highlighting to the children that by working together they can help others lead happier, healthier lives… after 500 children it was recorded as ‘Everyone is evil’. By the time the message reached the last child, it had changed dramatically and was read out as simply; ‘Haaaaa’.

I think this says it all, really.

Arsenal

Crap.  Connolly’s Agent at Fucking Arsenal (link on sidebar) has got me linked as an Arsenal site, so I guess I’d better write something about them.

Here’s a quick overview of the wisdom of ignatz. There is a bizarre idea going around at the moment that other people are entitled to their own opinions. This is clearly nonsense, and all other people’s opinions should be directly replaced with the following:

“ARSENAL ARE A SELLING CLUB” / “WE SHOULD BUY STARS” / THE GREAT GOONER INFERIORITY COMPLEX

The Great Gooner Inferiority Complex, or GGIC, is a big problem this summer with Arsenal having just gone three seasons without a trophy. We’ve been up to our arses in whining, sulky, spoiled-child Arsenal supporters, threatening to throw their toys out of the pram if Wenger doesn’t buy them a big-name player for their birthday, preferably someone who just had a reasonable Euro 08.

I could explain why this is so wrong, why supporting your club is not about being able to wear the name of some superstar on the back of your shirt, and why we should feel privileged that we are Gooners at a time when we have one of the most exciting young teams on the face of the planet to support.  But I can’t be arsed.  If you can’t get excited about supporting Arsenal right now, I don’t know why you bother.

I’ve supported Arsenal since I were a nipper, through the wilderness years, on the basis of some feeling that Arsenal were somehow bolder, cooler, braver and more determined than the others.  Since Wenger joined us and started to build teams that could rip the opposition apart, that vague feeling has felt more and more like reality.  That stuff is more intoxicating than mere success.

HLEB / NASRI

Hleb is one of the most individually gifted players we’ll ever see in an Arsenal shirt.  He’s in that tier of players just below the greats.  There’s something holding him back from greatness, and I wish I knew what it was; I would have loved him to stay and win trophies with us, I know we’ll be fine without him, but I’m still sorry to see him go.

Nasri looks less skillful than Hleb, but more direct and unorthodox.  He’s another dodgy-finishing low-scorer though, so we shouldn’t expect more than 5 a season from him.  I’m lukewarm on this one – I’m just not sure he’s got what we need.  I will be delighted to be proved wrong.

ADEBAYOR

I veer between thinking that we should keep him and that we should cash in on £30 million. On the one hand we won’t find anyone as good to replace him, and on the other we have a good-looking forward line even without him.  The whole situation is doubly frustrating because if Eduardo and RvP had stayed fit last season, I think Arsenal would have won the Premiership, with those two scoring a higher proportion of our goals and Ade probably not reaching the 30 mark.  This means we would have won the Premiership and no-one would be offering £30 mil for our main striker.  Neither of those things being true however, on the whole, I think sell now, we won’t get offered that much for him again.

If he goes, I’d like to see Roque Santa Cruz as his replacement.  Remember the four Ps: Proven Premiership exPerience is Priceless.  I just made that up, can you tell?

FLAMINI / BISCHOFF / RAMSEY

Flamini was our indispensible player last season.  A box-to-box engine, imparting pace, bite and energy to the midfield to complement Fabregas’ craft.  The conventional wisdom was that we needed a Flamini replacement as a top priority this summer. A defensive midfielder, someone famous who had a reasonable Euro 08 and who preferably costs a hundred and twelve gazillion pounds.  This despite the various facts that Flamini  was 1) not famous, 2) not really a defensive midfielder and 3) didn’t cost a hundred and twelve gazillion pounds.

Instead of following conventional wisdom, Arsene has chosen a player called Amaury Bischoff and another called Aaron Ramsey.  Neither player is a famous defensive midfielder, neither cost a hundred and twelve gazillion pounds and also neither played at Euro 08, so I’m optimistic that they are both exactly what the squad needs.

USMANOV

Keep that bugger away, far away, from anything you hold dear.

AND FINALLY…

OMG!!!!!! I CANT BELEIVE WENGER WONT BY NOTHING BUT KIDS!!!!!! HES A IDIOT!!!! WE NEED TO SELL ALL OUR SHIT PLAYERS AND BY DAVID VILLA SO HE CAN FALL OVER LOTS.

That’s me done, until the season starts.  Promise.

“Incredible.”

Much side-clutching going on here as a result of Harry Pearson’s fantastic piece at the Grauniad today. Harry’s targets for gentle mockery are close to my own heart – the Sports Journalist and Football Pundit. He waxes lyrical about their unnaturally low disbelief and amazement thresholds:

Incredulity is the default setting of our nation’s experts. To them everything from rain to a Ronaldo step-over is beyond the bounds of the rational.

Spot on, Pearson. The sheer bewildering complexity of life, as expressed through the game of football, often has philosophers like John Motson stumped. Even the full-time whistle, generally a 1-in-1 chance occurrence, can invoke awe-struck incomprehension.

In contrast, Harry goes on to recall the joys of Jeux-Sans-Frontiers, “a game show invented in the mid-1960s by Charles de Gaulle.”

The General was determined to ensure there were no more outbreaks of the sort of pan-European gunplay that had marred rather too many long lunches in his lifetime. He decided that one way to prevent a third world war would be to encourage young people to spend summer evenings shinning along a greasy beam, wearing huge papier-mâché heads, while other young people dressed as medieval servants pelted them with giant vinyl strawberries.

Noting that many of Britain’s finest commentators cut their teeth on this event back in the seventies, Harry sees a cure here for the perpetually incredulous British punditry – bring back Jeux-Sans-Frontiers and send Lineker, Hansen, Shearer, Lawrenson et al off to cover it.

After a few evenings in Ghent and Grenoble watching half-a-dozen 10ft foam-rubber frankfurters trying to force their way through a gap in a polystyrene wall before they are knocked to the ground by a giant bread roll, surely even Alan Hansen would start to recognise the entirely plausible when he saw it.

Scolari’s Glittering Performance

The more journalists blog, the lower my esteem plummets. There’s something about the blog medium that undermines all their normal journalistic rhetorical tricks and techniques for making themselves sound authoritative.

Blogs encourage you to reveal a little more about your personality than you otherwise might – and the problem with many journalists is that underneath that rational, analytical facade lurks a starstruck teenager desperate to be in the gravitational orbit of the powerful, rich and famous.

There are always exceptions – those journalists who just make you more impressed with their dedication and ability.  The BBC’s chief football writer, Phil McNulty, is not one of them. He just posted this fawning account of a press conference by Big Phil Scolari, the new Chelsea manager that reveals more about little Phil wot wrote it than it does Big Phil himself.

Chelsea’s new coach … capped his coronation with a glittering performance of charm, passion and a command of the English language that made mugs of us all

Made mugs of them all indeed, if they all went off to file starry-eyed, 1000-word man-crushes like this. Made mugs of them all, if they all let slip how much they had been looking forward to painting him as a big, crazy, foreign buffoon.

No chance of perspective if these “mugs” are so susceptible to glamour; so caught up in the perfect deliciousness of their insider status, that they could even consider describing a football manager’s press conference as a “glittering performance”.

Good luck Scolari, you’ll need it if you ever upset these idiots and they decide it’s time to punish you.

As for me, I’m only bitter because I’m jealous.

Sri Lanka in the top 20!

Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace have recently released their 2008 failed states index, and the good news is that Sri Lanka came in at number 20. Congratulations all round people, sterling work.

How it works is that each country is scored from 1-10 (10 = bad) on twelve different indicators. The scores are added together to produce a total score for that country, and each country is then ranked on their overall total. Sri Lanka’s placing was achieved with a total score of 95.6 out of a possible 120.

Oooh, I know! Fun!  You can rate everything online these days from films to football players – well here’s a chance to rate Sri Lanka’s descent into the dark ages.  Below are the scores that the Fund for Peace gave out, see if you agree.

DEMOGRAPHIC PRESSURES: 7.0 Too many people in too small areas, contributing to conflict. Sounds about right, I’d agree with 7.

REFUGEES AND DISPLACED PERSONS: 9.0 I can’t remember the figures, but it’s at least a couple of hundred thousand families.  In a nation of only 20 million, that’s bad. Agreed.

GROUP GRIEVANCE: 9.8 As group grievances go, you’d have to admit this is a biggie.

HUMAN FLIGHT: 6.9 Don’t know much about this, let’s assume it’s a fair score.

UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT: 8.2 Same goes for this one, I’m assuming it’s fair.

ECONOMY: 6.0 Now this one I have a bone to pick with. Firstly, the data for this index was compiled from May to December 2007 and things have deteriorated since then. Second, the government is in debt up to its eyeballs to fund the war. Third, rice and petrol to name but two are fast becoming unaffordable for the average Sri Lankan, and inflation is running at over 20%. Fourth, these measures generally overestimate the importance of growth, especially in an economy whose good growth figures are a fiction maintained by the government simply printing money. This score needs to be bumped up to at least a 7.5.

DELEGITIMIZATION OF STATE: 9.2 Well, it depends who and where you are. In the South there seems to be a hefty majority of people who still believe that the government is successfully representing them, and are willing to back the Rajapakses all the way. I’d drop this to an 8.5.

PUBLIC SERVICES: 6.6 The relatively low score looks fair. Public services are crap, but at least they exist. The state is still a massive employer.

HUMAN RIGHTS: 8.0 Again, I think this is a lowball. I’m no expert, but we’re talking about a country here where people are routinely terrorized both by the LTTE and their own government forces; where they are murdered, disappeared, intimidated; where they are blown up on buses and shelled out of their own homes; where children are forcibly recruited into terrorist armies; where journalists are targeted for reporting the truth; and where people are too scared to do anything about any of it. Make it an 8.5 at least.

SECURITY APPARATUS: 9.3 Militarization of society anyone? Shady militias? Criminal gangs masquerading as law enforcement? Strangely unaccountable security forces? Paramilitaries? All present and correct. Tick.

FACTIONALIZED ELITES: 9.5 Otherwise known as the “complete bastards have taken over my country, they are all trying to kill each other and they don’t give a flying fuck if they take me out too” index. No argument from me.

EXTERNAL INTERVENTION: 6.1 This score has to be low-ish because there are no peacekeepers or external forces on the ground. That said, the influence of both Tamil Nadu politics and of the LTTE’s global fundraising network shouldn’t be underestimated. Let’s bump this up a couple to 6.3, just for the sake of tinkering.

So by my count I’ve added 1.5 to the total, which would move Sri Lanka up four places into 16th spot, just behind North Korea. Who knows, we could make the top ten for 2009!

Now that would be something to celebrate while we’re sitting in Barefoot this time next year, surrounded by hand-woven silks, drinking ice tea and listening to the same shit jazz.

Meta: online writing

I’m a sucker for all things meta: the stuff that’s about the “about” rather than about the “stuff”.  If you see what I mean.

Those other bloggers amongst you who like to think about why and how you do what you do, should go read this essay by Caleb Crane about writing online.  I came to it via Slate, which I came to via Bookforum.  Just so everyone gets their due credit.

Crane, a long-time blogger, makes some smart observations about the good reasons why we have public and private faces, about how the internet blurs the distinctions between them, and why this may not be a good thing.

Online space is very public, in contrast to the private intimacy between text and reader that you get in printed fiction or poetry.  Online writers tend to overcompensate for this by publicly dropping their guard, losing their formality and loosening their style.  However, the hoped-for intimacy never arrives in return: as Crane puts it, “The environment remains dangerous. One skips through no-man’s-land in one’s pyjamas, as it were.”

Go read.

More Cassano

While we’re embedding YouTube clips of this quirky fella, here’s another quick one from years ago that seems to sum him up – an outrageous, sublime goal followed by emotional overload and borderline religious ecstasy:

Spaniards in the works: Spain 4-2 Italy (aet & penalties)

Trust me to pick last night’s snooze-fest of a Quarter Final between Italy and Espain as the one Euro 2008 game to stay up for. Half past two in the morning and with one serious chance on goal all game, I started losing the will to live. When it was all finally, blessedly over everyone trooped out of Cheers bar silently, grimly, like we’d just witnessed a murder trial and suddenly wanted to be home with our wives and families.

In this case it was undoubtedly the fault of the Italians, who would have put 12 men behind the ball if they’d had them. Italy’s only two players worth watching, Gattuso and Pirlo, were on the bench, both suspended for the game. This left them without a midfield to speak of, and when in possession, which was not often, they resorted to plan B – hit speculative long balls up to poor old Luca Toni, lumbering backwards and forwards up front, looking exasperated and confused, like a waiter who’s lost his order.

Cassano was supposed to be the second striker, running onto Toni’s knock-downs – a flawless strategy, except that Toni doesn’t knock anything down, and Cassano doesn’t run, let alone onto anything. He’s a curious player, producing some sublime touches, turns and passes last night, but he seemed happier out in the relatively calm backwaters of the wings, or on the edge of his own box – anywhere he was least likely to score. He’s also – er… shall we say, a little highly strung? Check out the Youtube vid below for a cheap laugh.

There was supposed to be someone linking these two to the rest of the midfield, but I can’t remember his name. I remember he got taken off after an hour or so for Del Piero, the other Italian worth watching, but who on the night, like his team-mates, seemed to be overcome by a fear of the penalty area.

The rest of the squad were only there to fill up the space between the Italian goal and the Spaniards, and generally get in the way. Faced with this thicket of Italians, and half-paralysed by the inevitability that they were about to be knocked out of another major tournament, Espain decided to pass it around for hours until David Villa fell over, then start again.

From the Spanish perspective, everyone played OK apart from Iniesta who was relentlessly crap, presumably because he’s in my fantasy team. The only ray of light in the whole evening was the form that (Arsenal legend) Fabregas continues to show, as he played a big part in creating Espain’s best chances after he was introduced. If Arragones doesn’t start him in the Semi-final, he’s a dunderheaded dunce from Duncington.

Congratulations are in order though, for the Italians were useless enough going forward that they failed to grab their traditional poached goal, leaving Espain in with a chance to win the penalty lottery, a chance that Casillas and (Arsenal legend) Fabregas grabbed with both hands and one foot respectively.

Hats off to the Spaniards, and then quickly back on again and down over the eyes for a long nap. Meanwhile, here’s Cassano at his best.