I can’t be bothered to really write anything much this week. I’m sorry.

I’ve got no excuse though, cos last weekend I went to the big record fair that takes place a couple of times a year in Leicester and went through my standard procedure of gawping at all the fantastic psychedelic rarities / cool-ass bootlegs on offer, then pointedly not buying them and heading straight off to spend all my money at the dodgy stall selling CD promos of new releases for £2 each.

So hence for once I should be able to give you some potted reviews of a variety of recent music which is actually considered relevant… but I can’t be arsed. Sorry. I also got a good haul of stuff from the library, meaning that if nothing else I’ve certainly been able to subject myself to loads of groovy new sounds over the past week. If I tried to hammer out a workable summary of it all over a couple of lunch hours though it would all be a bit businesslike and full of glib remarks and lazy comparisons, so fuck it, instead I’ll wait and see what parts of this week’s gear seep into my soul, and tell you about them when I really feel the need to.

In summary though, this week’s new featured artists are:

Todd, Kaito, The Shop Assistants, Amusement Parks on Fire, the Coachwhips, Mission of Burma, The Fucking Champs, Camper Van Beethoven, Alice Coltrane, Electrelane, Devendra Banhart, Adam Green, Charles Mingus, Milky Wimpshake, The Bevis Frond, Terry Riley.

(guess which of the above I’ve decided to dislike and win a prize!)

The hours I’ve spent listening to all this wonderful stuff have helped to counteract the droning (and not, like, good droning) banality of the barrel-scraping commercial radio that provides the soundtrack to my grey working days. Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not such an uppity, self-righteous git that I sit there howling in existential agony every time I’m subjected to eight seconds of Texas. While I’m actually in work I couldn’t give a shit to be honest, I don’t particularly hate it, it’s just there, like drizzle or the humming noises computers make. A couple of times a week they even play something quite good, like early Madonna or Destiny’s Child.

But what’s really, really horrible is the extent to which this stuff slowly infiltrates your mind, subconsciously colonising the space where I prefer to keep my recollections of, say, the nice music I’ve listed above. There’s this one particular song, I won’t mention what it is, partly through sheer distaste and partly to save you from being infected, but it’s a singularly infuriating little ditty of the worst kind, and EVERY NIGHT when I go home on the bus, there it is, twittering away in my brain, making me want to stab my face off and spew blood indiscriminately all over my fellow penniless and bored bus passengers. Sometimes it’s still there in the morning, as I trudge back to reinforce it with another day’s exposure. Clearly this is the sort of thing that calls for an immediate response – I’ve been playing all the mind-tricks I can think of to try and dislodge this shit from my head… concentration, selective memory, trying to re-establish my own musical dominance of my headspace. I thought I was fighting a losing battle, but then imagine how cool I felt when I was sitting on the bus yesterday, and realised I actually had John Fahey’s ‘Jesus is a Dying Bedmaker’ playing along in my head! What a result!

We’ve been considering a possible outing to Nottingham on Saturday to see Joanna Newsom, vague plan being to go drinking afterwards, hang around for a bit and catch the late/early bus back at 5am… but I don’t know if that’s looking very likely now. The snow is falling, and whilst that in itself is quite nice, it is most assuredly not the kind of weather in which farting around on the streets of Nottingham in the early hours of the morning sounds like a good idea.

If I ever track down the person who devised the Leicester/Nottingham train timetables, I’m gonna skullfuck them to death with a toilet brush. Which is the sort of empty threat it’s very easy to throw around in this desensitised age of ours, but nevertheless, I mean it – he or she is fucking dead.

If those flea-ridden, skag-peddling poxy bloody train barons could only get it together to trundle an extra wagon forty minutes down the line in the right direction at a sensible time of the late evening, this weekend I could be enjoying performances by the Blood Brothers, Joanna Newsom and the Detroit Cobras!

As it is I’ll most likely be weeping into a barrel of wine* and watching an old video of Casino Royale.

Damn them. Damn them all to hell!

Have a good week, and wrap up warm!

Over and out.


*Well ok, not actually a BARREL as such, but it’s a pleasant figure of speech.


POST-SCRIPT:

I should also say something I suppose about the sad passing of Ol' Dirty Bastard, which I'm aware about only from a tiny little article in a free paper -"weirdo rapper dies in studio" or some such thing. Now I can't claim to be much more than a dabbler in the world of hip-hop, but nevertheless I bow to no one in my admiration for the Wu, and ODB was fucking brilliant. People more qualified to do so can proably write better obits, but none the less I'll have a shot;

I think his death probably immediately makes mainstream hip-hop about 50% lass interesting from my perspective. The way rapped was just joyous and hilarious - I love his bits on the early Wu-Tang records, where in a purely technical sense he's not half as good as the others, wondering off the beat all the time and stuff, but his mental rantings are always the highlight... I love the way he always sounds like he's kind of puffed out, like he's just run up a big hill, but he's still really excited and has lots of stuff to tell you. And just the fact that he was called 'Ol' Dirty Bastard'!! Obvious I know, but, really, how crazed and funny is that?? Just a perfect example of his kind of mad sense of humour which you could never quite get an angle on... what a guy.

And unlike certain other dead rappers, it's impossible to ever imagine stuff like inner-city street kids painting inspiring murals of him, and people talking earnestly about what a genius poet he was an' shit... I haven't had a chance to read any of the memorials or anything, but I'd imagine when they corner all the big money rappers for a soundbite, the last word's gonna be "OBD, he was, well, um ... he was fucking mental." And I think that's a good enough headstone line as can be imagined. RIP dude - long may your deranged antics and cryptic pronouncements have those angels tearing their hair out. I can't even imagine what he'll have to say to the big man in the sky, but I wish I could hear it.

Man, is it the season of death or what? So much death in the past few months... not just famous ones, but distant relatives, obscure acquintances... everybody seems to be losing someone. To say nothing of the recent triumphs of death in world affairs. Shit.

And on that uplifting note...