Advent 2008: Window 6
Dec 6, 2007 · 1 minute readI am not a shrimp, I am a King Prawn!
DESTROY! DESTROY! BRING DOWN CAPITALIST BANKING SYSTEM! DIGITAL ANARCHY HARDCORE GO! REPENT, RECAST, RECANT! ATARI TEENAGE RIOT!
Replace the cast of Grange Hill will finger puppets!
We didn't want to move too far from the programme's intentions and will still cover things like teenage pregnancy and losing your virginity, but these will have to be told through the eyes of younger characters and usually within a comic framework."You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll kick the baby all across the gym with hilarious results! I have enough bile to vent on this subject for hours, but it'll undercut the Christmas cheer, so I'll seethe quietly in the corner...
I am be-fogging your mind! This is The Brain, and I bear a message for all you simple-minded fools during this time. Yes!
And I just can't help believing though believing sees me cursedMy music journalist dalliance came to an end this year, but before it did, I received a tip from Simon Sweeping The Nation about an advert in The Word. Getting hold of a copy, I rifled through the magazine, and there, just below Kieron's quote, was a line taken from my review of Johnny Boy's album. Yeah! Yeah! There was no better way to end my short stint as a music hack. It's now almost two years since the album came out, nearly four since You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve was released. And it still sounds like Tomorrow; Phil Spector stretched out to Infinity and shackled to a anti-capitalist polemic; Karl Marx to the beat. Stars shooting off overhead as Lolly and Davo, our two heroes, make their hopeless final stand. Who are these guys? Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! It's still my favourite song of the decade. And one of my favourites of all time. The subtle pans in stereo as the fireworks shoot through your headphones, the romantic cynicism, the moments between the verses and chorus where the Wall of Sound is twisted and bounced beyond all recognition. This frequency's my universe indeed. The album was never going to be able to live up to the promise of that one song, so what did the band do? Stick it on as the first track. That's balls-to-the-walls gutsiness. Shoot straight, you bastards! Following that, you're immediately thrown into Wall Street, a Bond soundtrack where Gordon Gekko is caught in a three-way with Saint Etienne and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. There's 15 Minutes which is (Love Is Like A) Heatwave chopped into pieces and served with Ecstasy, and then there's Livin' In The City, a celebration of the two industrial powerhouses of the North, Sheffield and Manchester, Factory and the British Electric Foundation. They may not reach the incredible heights of the beginning, but they get damn close. They have a tendency to be a little too serious, though the Rockabilly/Hip-Hop melding of Bonnie Parker's 115th Dream never fails to raise a smile. And then, finally, as if there could be an end, the band returns to Spector, to Be My Baby, to Mean Streets, to Johnny Boy. His theme, his story, the only way it could end.We're your friends, Johnny, what's got into you? Blasted into the black, bodies littering the street as a taxi sounds in the distance. The Poptimist within me wanted them emblazoned over the world, playing Top of The Pops with glitter falling from the ceiling as You Are The Generation... reaches Christmas #1, 15 Minutes soundtracking The Doctor as he rushes through to save the Universe, yeah! yeah!. But it was not to be. Yet every few months, I get a request from somebody on the Internet, somebody new who wants to find out more about the band. On those occasions, I feel like King Mob. So I still win. Learn To Be Invisible. Is it my album of the year? Probably. But I now own three copies of it spread over two years (the original Swedish version, the Japanese digi-pak, and yes, the UK release), so I'm taking it out of the running this year. To give everybody else a chance.
It’s Day 3 of the Snappish Thoughts Advent Calendar, and we’re still drowning in Title Case and Nostalgia. This time it’s a comic from the 1980s, a Spider-Man Annual no less, featuring Spider-Man (no, really?) and Arno Stark, Iron Man of 2020. This was originally serialised in Britain in the back of Transformers UK, and the final few pages were rather bleak for an impressionable eight-year-old.
Years later, I discovered that the credits on the story were a fabrication. The comic was actually written by Jim Owsley, who would later change has name to Christopher Priest (not the sci-fi author) and writer of titles such as Xer0 and Black Panther (still the best attempt to meld The West Wing with the fantastic world of the superhero. Sadly, Marvel only printed the first twelve issues in trade paperback, and even they're long out of print). Being a fan, it was a pleasant surprise to find out that he wrote one of my favourite Spider-Man stories ten years before I started following him. (To read the comic, you'll ideally need a reader application like CDisplay. Failing that, rename the file to have a .zip extension and you can extract the images out of the archive)For our second trip to the Advent Calendar, we’re going back in time, to TV-am and getting up at 7am to watch Christmas cartoons. Or, more likely, taping the movie shown at 4am and seeing it at a more reasonable time of day. And On…And On…
(for those interested in Ocean trivia - yes the music is from Robocop (the Gameboy version), and the composer, Jonathan Dunn, got nothing from its use here. The advert itself is 'inspired' by Zbig Rybczynski's Oscar-winning "Tango" short, which I would link to, but I can't find a copy online)For Advent, I’ve switched on the job queue feature of Movable Type 4 so I can schedule entries. One rather unpleasant side-effect (which I don’t think is present in WordPress) is that the blog checks for new events every ten minutes, so if you post a comment, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t show up right away.
And who’s the first to come through our chimney? Why it’s Brian Higgins and his gang of Xenomaniacs!
"Ho, ho, ho! I've brought a wonderful surprise! A Kylie Minogue b-side and, because you've all been so good this year, our remix of Kenickie's Stay In The Sun! Now, if you don't mind, I have to go back to the studio and untangle our next hit! Ho ho ho!"