Festive 50 1992 no. 1

And now the end is here...I have enjoyed this meander down 1992's lane, although I understand how JP used to complain about the sameyness of the seasonal chart. I can't imagine that Pavement and Sugar and Sonic Youth were played on his show quite so much as they feature on the F50 rundown.

I've partiuclarly liked re-listening to (some) of the Wedding Present's hit parade (and the attendant videos) and The Boo Radley's Lazarus. Of the songs I hadn't heard before, Popeth by Datblygu stands out. Talking of songs I've never heard of, how did this get to be the most popular song of John Peel's listenership without me being aware of its existence? I guess I was paying attention to other music. Ok, let's fire up the youtube to hear it for the very first time...

Well, it's quite sweet isn't it? Reminds me of Lush, in their Sweetness and Light phase, Madder Rose and a bit Sundays, a more poppy Curve in the shoegazey bits. I like it, but I can't quite see it summing up alt-1992, certainly not in the way that Destroy the Heart, Can't Be Sure or Smells Like Teen Spirit were the indie sound of '88, '89 and '91, respectively.

Until next October!

The Twelve Days of Twitmas

Thinking about all the media storms that have happened this year, most of which have been played out on twitter, here are my twelve days of twitmas.

In the twelve months of twitmas, my twitter feed gave to me:

Twelve Ukip calypsos,

Eleven of Kim's buttocks,

Ten unwanted U2 songs,

Nine David Mellors,

Eight vile gamegaters,

Seven Myleene mansions,

Six John Lewis penguins,

FIVE PA-ARKLIFES!

Four Dapper Laughs,

Three Cumber memes,

Two Renee faces,

And a white van man in Rochester.

2014: January

In January, I went to Glasgow to celebrate Burn's Night. Nothing else happened, it's January innit.

Song:


DJ Fresh feat. Ms Dynamite - Dibby Dibby Sound - I don't know when I started preferring repetitive beats to strummy guitars but I can't go back.
Ballboy - Donald In The Bushes With A Bag Of Glue – there's a lot to be said for life long love and sex and security
James Brown - Think - Jimmy B invents dance music, in 1960.

TV:

The Bridge 2. I liked S1 but this series was better, it didn't need as much time to establish the characters, and the writers didn't wait until ¾ of the way through the series before they introduced the character who was the murderer. Here, it seemed that we'd seen the killers (the eco-terrorists), in Ep 2 but there was a larger conundrum at hand. Mysterious sub-plots wormed their way into the main plot.

I preferred The Bridge to the Killing because there was much less boring political stuff and whilst Sarah Lund was a great character, The Bridge had not one but two complex main characters, the emotional, troubled, rough diamond Martin, in therapy after S1's villain murdered his son, and the Aspergsy Saga, whose plain talking got results but didn't win her friends, or a mother-in-law, (TBH, her interrogation techniques seemed softer than the British police force's) and whose attempts at a romantic relationship brought most of the comedic moments. There was an amusing sub-plot in which Saga solved the mysterious illness Martin's son had developed (the nanny was poisoning him), not because she cared about Martin's son or, indeed, Martin, but because she needed Martin back on the case rather than hanging around a hospital room. There was also Rasmus, the hapless policeman, always doing the wrong thing, for whom I invented the hahstag #ohrasmus

Martin invented a look, part indignant, part amused, part angry, whenever Saga mentioned he'd cheated on his three wives, which she did in every episode. I have accepted Saga Noren as my personal saviour, role model and mentor. I worked out when people were speaking Danish (a series of yelps) or Swedish (they sounded sexy), but I didn't forsee that Saga would betray Martin so brutally – the sting so much worse because she'd admitted that he was her only friend a couple of scenes previously.