A lesson for us all.
Wish You Were Here
My favourite Pink Floyd song. And this performance is just… very emotional. There’s something about four old fellers, guitar, bass, keyboard and drums, ditching the backing singers, percussionists, saxophones and synthesisers, putting aside a lifetime’s worth of animosity*, and just playing the damned song. It was for a good cause, but you know, the music is cause enough sometimes.
It’s a song whose spirit transcends the actual lyrics, I think. I’ve never traded my heroes for ghosts, but it still feels like it’s for me and about me. That’s a kind of musical alchemy.
I was crying when I watched it on the telly in 2005, and… yeah. Wish you were here.
*although I do like to imagine the conversation when Roger decided he wanted to sing a verse: “but Roger, you… you know, you can’t really, uh, it’s maybe more suited to somebody who can, um… sing?” Can’t blame him though.
Dancing in Heaven
From The Armando Iannucci Shows, the oddly dreamlike sketch show, written and fronted by the small, hairy mastermind behind The Day Today, I’m Alan Partridge and The Thick of It.
The programme is a mix of sketches and monologues. It’s frequently surreal, but the show sets a tone in which everything has its own logic. It meanders along, and you get caught up in the slow-pulsing rhythm of it as much as anything else. The result is much like slowly drifting into somebody else’s anxious, paranoid daydream. But in a good way.
That’s Hale and Pace working in a shoe shop at the end, by the way. Of course it is.
Andrew Preview
Because it wouldn’t be Christmas without it. “I am playing all the right notes…”
Historicals
1899: Thanks to limited diet and inadequate sanitary conditions, diseases were more virulent in Victorian times. They were also taller and had haircuts and shoes. Here we see a cluster of the highly contagious, and often lethal, smallpox virus trying to look innocent in a corner.
Island in the Sun
So this is how I want my 2010 to look. How’s yours shaping up?
Ode to Joy
Mee mee mee mee mee. Meeeeee mee meee meee mee. Mee mee.
The Science of Music
A proposed series of experiments designed to test the scientific validity of Britain’s songwriters.
Experiment 1.
THE HYPOTHESIS
That the lyric “slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball” is not only coke-addled, cod-psychedelic whimsy of the very worst kind, and so irritating that I’m still furious about it 14 years after I first heard it, but that it’s also unworkable in a universe of Newtonian physics.
MATERIALS
Noel Gallagher, 1 Cannon, 1 Cannonball.
METHOD
We set Noel Gallagher walking down a hall as slowly as he likes. We load the cannon with gunpowder and a cannonball. We aim the cannon at Noel Gallagher. We fire the cannon.
PROBABLE RESULTS
General fun and merriment at the very least.
CONCLUSION
Somebody really needs to fund this experiment, in the interests of expanding human knowledge, and in the interests of expanding Noel Gallagher’s surface area all over a corridor. Come on!
FOLLOW-UP EXPERIMENT:
HYPOTHESIS: “You and I are gonna live forever.” MATERIALS: Liam Gallagher, 1 Cannon, 1 Cannonball.
ps this was my 200th post. Glad I used it for something worthwhile.
Song of the Year
Revenge. From the album of the year, Dark Night of the Soul by Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and David Lynch.
Fact File #4: Christmas
Be careful what you wish for, Roy.
Christmas is celebrated around the world as the time of year at which we give thanks for the many excellent 3-for-2 offers in Boots and Marks & Spencer.
The tradition of eating a turkey at Christmas was started by a goose.
In one of the infinite number of parallel universes predicted by quantum theory, it really is Christmas every day, and Roy Wood is curled up in the corner of a tinsel-filled room surrounded by fake snow and children in chunky knitted woollen hats, and he’s weeping glittery glam tears and whispering: “make it stop, make it stop, please Jesus for just one day make it stop.” And then the kids start singing and the band begins to play, and he weeps some more.
More facts next time, fact fans!
Ramshackle Charm 