jennifer's body, a review. snappy title.

i could see the review writing itself, 'the difficult second album', 'megan fox: fuck yeah! film: meh' but it was not to be.

i am of course referring to jennifer's body, or let's look at megan fox and her near perfect female form. this is true. if you are going to see this film and not 1 second of your time is spent thinking what it would be like to meet [euphemism] her, you are clearly mentally ill and should be put down. i mean i am the last person to be a lad shouting about boning every woman i see [i of course jest here], but there is a lot of focus on the fine young female. but she nearly has too much going on in her face to be really beautiful [just my opinion]. i mean i know at least no actresses and so what i'm about to say is totally unfounded, but it is almost like actresses are wholly vacuous so that they can truly accomodate the characters that they will become in films. you talk to them and they like music such as muse and guns'n'roses [i hate these people, my blog is a testament to this. i respect them as artists, then the hating begins :)] and are non too fussed about building a full personality because they know that their looks will get them places and money, and so fear not in being vacuous.

this is fact. i mean just as thatcher and blair have done in the past, i'll just repeat the same thing three times-get involved in a war then fuck off and later be resented. satire.

so, 'jennifer's body' was a good film-it had a wide filmic knowledge and sort to pay tribute to a number of films that i've seen and could recognise, namely 'mystic river' [pretty bad film, keanu reeves once again looking perplexed and dennis hopper being the outcast weirdo. i know you sound surprised. it is pretty bad though, murder teenagers yawn yawn yawn. see there is that politican speech kicking in], 'carrie' [a truly quite brilliant film, chilling and just bloody good], 'juno' [which will be returned to] and 'a lot of other american high school dramas' [not a real film but instead a catch all term for a range of good and shite films that i have not seen]. also 'drag me to hell', which i have only just googled sam raimi for as i couldn't raimi-member his name. [hold for applause and laughter]

spot the comedy?! laugh?! no

with a freshly cleaned set of gnashers and a lot of empty bowels i shall continue. the film was not the best thing/horror film to ever be produced [my favourite new horror was the very nourishing 'let the right on in', great film-bleak, nasty and engrossing. yes!] but it had a lot of charm and although much of the plot had been seen before, as referenced above, the film had a charm as delivered by the script by diablo cody. the film smelt strongly of the one that made her, jk simmons, valerie tian [still sporting the same glasses], the very geeky lead [in a way] character and all that business-but the different tone was punctuated by the wit of cody. the line referring to megan fox [jennifer] hovering were very nicely interwoven with gruesome images. i can't think of hundreds of others, but it did make you laugh and the climatic scene was well done.

i felt sorry for the chip character as he was fobbed off with trying to be a nick from nick and norah version of michael cera, and he wasn't-quite very weak as a character. sorry.

the scene of the film was where nerdy needy kissed jennifer, and you could see all the men in the cinema [the grand total of two girlfriends present excepted] squirming as it was fit. i mean come on, just like mulholland drive. the lesbian bits are clearly going to get some press and for at least one person i know twas his favourite bit. bit too obvious, but good nonetheless. i can't explain what it is about two females in passionate throws, but it makes me happy ;)

the jennifer obsessed character of needy [in my opinion a terrible see-through name, see the film and it's writing isn't without faults] is annoying in my opinion and the bits where you like her top and tail the film. however may i add that some of the handheld camerawork at the beginning was crap, there were too many cuts and different angles for what was about 10 seconds. just like beginning of quantum of solace, there was nothing you could get into-just went "mental" too quickly. i know, this is a great phrase, ramones esque ['go mental', track 8, after 'i wanna be sedated', album 4, road to ruin-some really good words in that song, non-sarcasm :D]

the end credit sequence was epicly brilliant, you knew it was going to happen but just really really well done.

overall 7 on 10, let's make love [partridge reference] but really 7/10, and fuel for a character i am working on. ooh, intriguing!

keep it rockin'

this is just a tribute...

instead of being a song, this is a blog post. just so you know.
you probably do.

great start, but anyway! this blog post is a tribute to my ickle friends.
i shall thus do a bit of description of this week and why it was good. as it so happens it was the most expensive week [not very much so but still] that i've had in a long while, monday afternoon was work which was simple and fine. tuesday i met a certain cleary man at 0815. yes that is right, it was so early i got to see school children walking to school [didn't want to and didn't get many kicks out of it...] and something that i don't really understand.

i went to rainham mark grammar school which required passing the 11+ to get into, and so usually you are perceived to be one of these 'boffs'. as a school we had a 'rivalry' with the large comprehensive boys school across the road and a bit of a way away. one of the finest moments in our school career was when a small group of howard [comp school name] boys had stormed the field and proceeded to actually have a bit of a riot.

our storming headteacher [twat] marched himself onto the field to confront these uneducated poo boys! [i know, wit! also rainham mark wasn't a public/private school and was in fact state run school so none of this hoighty toighty mocking malarky. also at the end of the day, however good it is, it is still in medway. voted 7th worst place to live in the uk, only place in the south too. victory...]

BUT what happened was an event that has gone down in history, as these howard boys threw a brick [or another heavy and blunt object] at him and hit him slap bang in the middle of the forehead. he was bleeding quite profusely. brilliant! i can't remember much else from that day, that was a highlight. another brief and brilliant memory from school was in about year 10 or 11 during interform football. the referee for the game was our form tutor so he should have been favouring us, but within a minute my friend got sent off for going into a tackle with a high foot. i say going in with high foot, he jumped and kicked the prick on the other team in the chest.

it was amazing, as said prick was just that and maybe deserved it. but watching from the sidelines meant that i got to laugh like hell with two friends-it more than made up for the cold weather and being outside. genius! ah school *sighs and dreamily looks to the sky*

anyway, the point was that whilst waiting for james i saw some of the comp boys walking past wearing one of these. here.

i mean these bags are tiny and on a 14 year old school boy, it doesn't do their coolness much good. but apparently these sort of things are in fashion, as according to my friend matt [who is an ict tech at school in maidstone] loadsa boys have them. i just find it astonishing because if any boy were to have had a bag like that when i was at school, they would have had seven shades of shit beaten the fuck out of them! but now it's cool. it is odd and makes you ponder where masculinity has gone.

please bear in mind, this judgement is coming from a forlorn little rotund monorchid with chronic shyness and no girlfriend, but is this a sign of the decline of masculinity? i dunno. i mean, i am clearly the saviour and archetypal male so i do have a right to talk about such things.

as a small rant, skinny jeans. yes, cos it's attractive to show off the fact that you have the legs of 12 year old girl! i mean how is that cool?! really. i have quite large [a bit muscly and a bit fat] thighs and reasonable calfs and so i require a pair of jeans that don't make me look like a tit. i dunno, i don't really understand holocaust chic in females and think that despite looking cool sometimes there should be female/male boundaries that are drawn up. i know i sound like an old man, but then again implementing these ideas would mean that matt and i would only enjoy ourselves a minimal amount in the tap'n'tin [wait, i hate the place] as we often play the game, would you hit him. more often than not we do want to.

however the joke is on us, between us we have had a total of about 15 months in relationships. i supply one month to this tally. only one gf each, so level there!

but anyway, i did indeed meet james at 0815 and we ventured to the ole greasy spoon on the a2 and enjoyed a hot beverage each. we looked over the daily mirror, which supplied it's dear viewers with two photos of lil ole maddie as she may look now, one with a portugeese suntan and one without. it was amusing, neither picture showed the glitch that she has in her eye-and also the suntanned photo showed maddie with darker iris colour and eyeball [think white -> sepia] colour. i'm not saying it was like this, but it was almost like someone had the one photo and was told to get creative with photoshop. stupid.

so we sat and mocked the world in a highly satirical graduate sense and then ventured to my house for a day of watching pretention. and by this i mean this and this

watching these films whilst drinking coffee [me] and earl grey [james] and then sausage sandwiches was great fun. if you think you have heard challenging music try scott walker's stuff, not the walker brothers as this is quite nice pop-but a lot of his stuff has incredible sounds but his voice gets some getting used to. an interesting character nonetheless, very shy and very avant garde. not for those faint of heart. i had seen the radiohead doc before but it was great to see it again, the almost uncertain breakdown of thom yorke and showing the real life of a group of well educated and middle-class guys doing what they love around the world and having that almost destroy them. interesting, also challenging images aren't the norm in gig films. you can't imagine a band like guns'n'fuckin'roses having this-instead it's more like "look at us cunts". that is my distaste for pompous american twats.

but we went up to rainham town and to be fair, james was dressed like he was a tramp despite being a full time paid member of society and so whilst we were browsing the magazines the man in the shop was like 'don't read them, go to tesco if you want to do that'. he couldn't say much as he was wearing the really round glasses [you know the style i mean] that my dad wore in 1994. twat, and fucking fascist [to quote the best film ever]!

so after a whole day together james went back to lordswood. this was on the tuesday. the rest of the week shall come after i piss and refill my coffee cup :D

on wednesday evening my parents left for devon as they are sorting out my great-uncle as his health is sadly going downhill quite steadily. so since then [it is sunday night now] i have been looking after myself, the house and progressively annoying cats. they are just so fucking hungry all the time, but also quite slim... odd. and wednesday night saw a return to the pub quiz with my friends after a two week sabbatical away from it. we did ok, as per usual and included some joke answers such as 'dj luck' and 'mc neat' as i was the nutter with the wit and the pen :) but that was good, and after a misadventure with some guinness beforehand [was finishing up some with my dinner, chugged too much and proceeded to spray it all over the table-including through my nose. painful but funny at the same time, i hate those ones!] but a couple more drinks meant that i was feeling a little bit drunk, and as i have been doing so little of that recently it was nice. however not that much happened and so i shall just continue onto thursday after a small reference to an answer that we gave in our lost quiz.

once again i was the one with the pen and matt and steve [other team members and 'friends' as they are so called] and the question was: what lives in a drey? the real answer was squirrel, but i was very pleased with my answer of a snoop doggy dogg :) no-one else really got it [outside of our group], but it made me smile.

i am currently listening to bloc party's second album and i am on the song 'i still remember' which is an amazing song :D it is up there as one of my favourite 21st century love songs! also bloc party related, i was playing the main guitar part of their song 'this modern love' in front of my grandparents the other day and they thought it sounded good [because it does] i was going to challenge their somewhat very conservative [big c and small c conservative] opinions by saying it was written by a bisexual black man, but re-thought this as i couldn't be doing with the hassle.

so onto thursday, and i had received the news on monday that i wouldn't be needed for work on thursday and with the knowledge that my parents [who i bemoan a lot, but still they are real people to interact with after all] weren't to be about i feared that i would be bored out of my mind. however i had my day brightened by the announcement that a very good friend of mine would be back in medway for a coupla days-so mainly as a way of fighting off boredom [and definitely not through wanting to meet up with her...] we met up, and as per usual it was fun.

as a total aside, can i just ask why people st*r swear words? it really annoys me, as if you want to be 'offensive' be so and if you don't, use baby talk [eg-'you fucking dick' should either be this or baby talk, 'you flipping idiot' never 'you f*cking d*ck'] i dunno about you but i get bloody upset with vowels! those little fuckers really do wind me up when in words, it is like they are the power behind the offensiveness of the word and by removing them you are showing that you aren't grown up enough to fucking swear. arseholes. i mean come on... this maybe because i am of the opinion that speech should be free, and if you don't like what someone says you can: a) complain about it or b) ignore it. life is too short.

anywho, back to my meet up. the usual wandering happened but as we know i am small and need a wee often, and so we went to the coolest hang out where all the cool kids go. tesco cafe :P also i have cold hands and i am less than sensible and didn't wear enough layers/appropiate clothes to block out the cold. the classic game of what colour are your hands? mine are purple and orangey and blotchy-i win!

so sitting about in the cafe, i was as per usual being a bit of knob [i know that you are all surprised] but still a nice person at the end of it all. there is strong bond between us [in fact between me and almost all of my friends-that's why we are friends... weird that :P] and so she ignored me. we had been chatting for a while when suddenly this old man slowly wandered up to us and said something. i had no idea what was going on, and so i did my usual reverting back to being a quiet tortoise in his shell. sipping coffee.

but off my friend trotted to help out the old man, i was still pretty confused. she returned a couple of minutes later and explained to me that he needed someone to butter his toast for him as he had recently had a stroke and could no longer do it himself. it is the small acts of kindess that make me think so much of her :)

after finishing our drinks we trotted around the spectacle that is the big tesco, with nothing imparticular in mind. i got angry seeing the height of pretention in the charts [muse's album... just look at the titles. jesus] but that was about all the excitement-as well as looking at the masses of christmas chocolates. this sounds dull, sorry!

but after her purchasing jelly babies and me having a slash [i think it was my third of the afternoon :P] we then popped to the pub, where we decided that eating so many jelly babies it hurts was a good idea... i bought a guinness but couldn't convince a student to drink too, other than water... rock'n'roll! nutter :P but eating jelly babies by severely maiming them [biting off the heads and feet. i am so purely evil. sorry guys-also as a note it is starch that is the coating on the lil buggers, who would have thought it?]

but after a few hours chatting usual crap, well mainly me with the crap- it was time for it to be over as it was dark and neither of us wanted to be raped on the walk home-for me it was nearly 2 miles, so a nice long walk.

it was an utterly lovely afternoon, with one of my favourite people in the world. i feel that our friendship now is the most grown up that it has been, and that i am now being myself and not a vague version of myself which is a tad charming. the thing is [why am so honest? damn me! to quote scroobius pip 'over thinking is the chink in my armour'] i do sometimes think about how it might have been, and how it could be now-but within a minute i remember however destructive it is for me, i would want to see her happy and chances are that wouldn't happen if she were to be with me. song. [mainly for the title]

also i probably wouldn't still be yearning [even the admittedly small amount as it is now] for her if i had a shred of confidence and or belief in my 'pulling' abilities, or if the facts/numbers aren't so against me i would be fine, but that's me in my own little ways! still a bit of a twat though. but as james said to lighten my mood once a while ago, at least i am not an insufferable cunt :P

actually having re-read this [james' comments] i have a big smile on my face.

but yesterday my good friend chris returned from university for his 22nd birthday, and we went to the cinema [not just us two, it was a group sex of six] to see 'the men who stare at goats' and i was quite disappointed, 6/10 as a numbered review. it was trying to be a coen brothers film with the cast and overall oddly comic feel to the film, but the trailer showed pretty much everything from the film... i do hate it when they do that-but still a film that had clooney/bridges/spacey could and should have been executed well. ewan macgregor's accent was better than i expected but still he wasn't top drawer, also it was pretty much like seeing the dude later in life-not that inventive. personally i loved bridges in iron man as he was out of stereotype and showed himself to be good... but there we go!

afterwards we popped to the pub and on the way chris was bemoaning the pretty much entirely left-wing people in his college [of the scumbag variety, at cambridge] and said they all hate thatcher but don't mind blair. he said about iraq and i was very pleased to counter him by noting the sinking of the belgrano, as it was going away! i was pleased myself as i had fully countered his argument, something i had never done before. it was not like i was defending labour or blair, i dislike them both and will more than likely be voting tory in the next elections. i know i am a tad mental and bored of the 'left wing' and so, whilst retaining many many liberal beliefs [as i am a total hypocrite. i could give examples, but can't be arsed] the time has come for a change-i dislike pretty much all politicians, but lib dems are pointless and labour are muchly the same. tories are by far not the best, but who else is there who could actually change the country?! i mean actual change, not dreamy idiocy [greens and bnp]. so there we go.

we had fun, joked about gary glitter and people's inability to see the world as wholly laughable. aparently there are things you shouldn't joke about-i totally disagree.

but that is i believe that, a week in under 3000 words. a mammoth :)
truely rambling along on this one, now to spell check the mother!

smiles, contentment and 'don't panic' by coldplay-lovely :)

keep it rockin'

newman and hall

a general one this shall be, sounding like that lil green cunt yoda. my mum questioned my dislike of sci-fi but why i liked men in black [as it was on yesterday]. the sly old hag had me against the ropes! i do hate [probably to strong a word, but i shall use it anyway] most sci-fi films but men in black and men in black II [starring the almighty black-white man, mj] are great films. well, they are entertaining and good.

as for other sci-fi, i dunno. it's not like i have a bad education in the field but it must be the fact that the words sci-fi and geek are inextricably linked. and rightly so. i have seen all of the star wars films [i'm pretty sure] and can only remember enjoying the fight scene between yoda and christopher lee in one of them. the rest is babble, the editing is generally bad-i mean swipes in a non-ironic way? i may be missing the point of series of films such as star wars, lord of the rings and the latest indiana jones [which had a shit loada shit twists]

i just don't really enjoy fantasy, except from pixar films. except for cars, i have seen them all. but this is my only real allowance for fantasy. i have an interest in documentary films and real-life tales [like fargo] and there is something so entertaining about tales at least set in this world. as i write i am watching road to perdition with characters called john rooney and michael sullivan, not jabba the hutt and r2-d2. end of moaning about space operas [not even my term, wiki's]

politics now, this is easy. the bnp were on tv and some members of all political parties were outraged to see an elected official on tv. what a bastard. in all seriousness though, the man is a racist tosser who should be allowed to say whatever he wants. the only way of limiting him should be the education of the masses, and not the effortless double standards of the most read tabloids in the country. here.

lovely stuff. a brief break for marmite on toast snack, the change of clocks has made even hungrier than usual.
a return 12 minutes later, slightly less hungry.

children are amazing, and i realised this through an odd happening. i just walked downstairs and saw the large rubbish bin [we have one exactly the same design but much smaller-for compostable rubbish] and for some bizarre reason i wondered if that is what it's like for a child to see the smaller bin. i know i am not normal.

when getting the bus to work, there is a mum who always get the same bus on a thursday and she has a buggy with a small girl in and a small boy on 'reins' [they aren't reins really but i don't know the correct terms for how you control a child. other than smashing them in the face :P] and as they were getting off the bus, the small boy noticed that his mum's coat had got caught in the folding seat. his mum was trying to maneouvre the buggy in a small space and while this was going on, the boy tried to pull his mum's coat out, but bless him he didn't have the strength. his mum walked the buggy off and thus pulled her coat free, but she tried to hurry the small boy as she thought that he had been arsing about. it was a really simple act but i just loved the fact that she'd never really know that her son was trying to do something for her.

i shall return back to the timewaster letters, which were, to my very pleasant surprise, in the medway library system.

keep it rockin'

p to the r to the o ducers and that

i have a mystery follower, how exciting :)

i shall endeavour to make as many sweeping statements in this little blog as possible. i shall be discussing the importance of music producers, and the reason that this came about was a discussion with the man who really helped to introduce me to the rolling stones.

no not martin scorsese, as his film 'the departed' was the actual reason i started listening to the best band that this country has ever produced. arguments against my view will be carefully ignored :)

but my scumbag college cambridge [incumbent] friend and i were discussing the merits of their 1968-1972 run of albums and how they are held up to be the best albums that the band made. the albums [beginning with beggars banquet in '68] were also the first of the stones' albums to get a us/uk release of the same material, as previously tracklistings had been rehashed out of singles etc. but the run of:

beggars banquet-1968
let it bleed-1969
sticky fingers-1971
exile on mainstreet-1972

is generally considered to be when they were at their best, at least studio wise. i would have to agree, but i believe that a massive factor in this success was the introduction of jimmy miller into the producers chair. before bb [as it'll be henceforth be known], the stones had their manager behind the desk andrew loog oldham and he helped to give them a specific sound. however after the sgt peppers-esque misguided album 'their satanic....', they really got one fuck of an album down. also at this point brian jones was in the arduous process of leaving the band he created, as he was just too fucked up on hard drugs and fit womens.

but tracklisting of bb is still classic lp format of utter tunes to begin each side of the disc and a number of tunes that are there [album tracks as they are known as] to be there. however the two stand out songs are complemented by almost certainly the finest sounding acoustic guitars that i've heard, as half the tracks [if not more] are based around a strummed acoustic and just sound fucking good.

then let it bleed [read previous post on this mother of an album] is halfway between bb and sticky fingers which foregrounds the electric guitar much more. sticky fingers is another album which stands out as being awesome, the single from it again are almost certainly the highlight. until, this is, you reach the last track. it has everything, moonlight mile has made it into the blog title for a reason... the use of orchestral sounds is bloody great as the song winds down [not sure if it really does when strings come in, nevermind!]

i know a few tracks from exile, but i don't know them well enough to write on them.

but anyway, it is almost certainly no coincidence that the songwriting/in studio performance/production on these albums is unparalleled elsewhere in their back catalogue.

another example of the importance of the role of the producer is the ramones. tommy ramone, the band manager/original drummer/producer can be heard all over their early work. their studio albums:

ramones-1976
leave home-1977
rocket to russia-1977
road to ruin-1978

were all co-produced by the weird looking lil man [it's true, google him. that's why i love the ramones though-the bastard beach boys as i call them] and the choice of producer for the 1980 album was inspired. as their first 4 albums are almost certainly their best and delivered well, recorded cheaply and in short periods of time, rough and ready but still awesome. but they never really got big from them so phil spector was brought for the 1980's end of the century. tommy ramone gave up being ramoens drummer in before road to ruin, and it shows that there was little bad blood as he was still integral to the band.

however the 1980 album was flawed as phil spector asked for hundreds of takes and went mental holding the band at gun point and just taking so much money, you can see how the album sounds off compared to their previous 4 outings. it's not even the songs, i heard their live album before end of the century and couldn't place the age of the songs-but the album has too much on it. in my opinion, it is just west coast surf pop crossed with spector wall of sound motown and lacks a rough and ready edge that is the ramones.

being rough and ready is essential to punk music, and i am currently reading up on the libertines, and wider-the other work of peter doherty. i love mick jones and the clash, but what the libertines needed was someone to tell them what to do. their first album is tight and well produced, with their pair of stand alone singles being produced by bernie butler of suede. however i feel that i can draw a strong comparison between the 04 eponymous libertines album and babyshambles' down in albion. both are produced by mick jones, and their is no control. in my opinion the quality of the songs [overall] on the libertines is greater than on down in albion and this helps the libertines album to still sound good enough to be worked into an album. seeing as though the band were fucking themselves up and breaking up, this is obviously reflected in a number of the album's track.

down in albion seems to have two or three songs where the production budget was spent [singles namely] and the rest of the tracks were a case of through ill judged lack of control, you can almost heart the crack pipes and syringes on the album. albion is an exceptional song and is correctly produced, and for me it is this song that really stands out as being brilliant. this shows that mick jones can produce [the clash's latter back catalogue too], but babyshambles weren't as good as the libertines' productions as carl barat was missing and kate moss 'helped out' doherty. he is not an idiot, just trusting and too kind.

as a brief aside, i love the kills and kate moss is going out with jamie hince. the kills are only two people and moss wants in, i hope that this doesn't happen as the odd relationship between hotel and vv makes the band fucking amazing and flying below radar. the best.

if you want a producer that can make things happen, stephen street is the man. he produced 07's 'shotter's nation' and you can hear his strong hand in the album, it is a complete album with full sounds and even though the songs on the album aren't all amazing there are a few that are at least very good. the track french dog blues is a personal favourite and it is with the help of street that it does sound good. the songs may still not be exceptional but they all sound good, something markedly different from the previous album.

doherty's solo album was also street produced, and is also full sounding and the introduction of a little man called graham coxon helps the album to sound like an artistic piece. the songs are higgledy-piggledy [not written as an album, more a compilation] and aren't really a contrived act. there is no, back from the dead and further moss/barat/critic baiting that is present in doherty's other works. in fact street apparently said to doherty to fuck off being a drug mess or he'd walk. necessary :)

i shall briefly touch on radiohead too, as my favourite album of their discography is still 95's the bends. it was produced by john leckie who produced the stone roses' fuck off debut. incredible sounding album that is, and the bends suffers from the same incredible audio-gasm-ness [spicing up my words with nonsense haha]. the bends is also the most obvious album to reflect the importance of the pixies on the band, the bends is still a guitar based album. after the bends, the keyboard and samplers became increasingly more prevalent in their sound. i don't dislike this sound. i actually feel that radiohead are the most consistent band around today, and nigel godrich is one hell of an amazing producer and i would kill a number of people to be able to work with him. but there is such an amazing charm to the bends that still grabs me by the ball and makes me yearn for more.

a final example is the beatles. a band that would have been nothing without george martin, the proof is let it be. phil spector tries to work a few tracks into nothing and is widely described as the worst beatles album. epstein and martin were key to the success of the beatles, with martin pulling together 3 egotistical tits and george harrison and their works to create great albums.

i feel sorry for phil spector as the two cited examples of his productions are weak. ah well in jail for murder, nevermind.

this is quite a beast :)
also magical/mystical blog reader should reveal themselves :)

a plan. the monorchids, thoughts?
keep it rockin'

"phoney beatlemania has bitten the dust"

it clearly hasn't, well done joe strummer- you are a crazy nutter!

personally i am bored of the hype granted for the beatles in the past few weeks. i used to love the beatles, when i was younger i absolutely adored their '1' album but now as an actual grown up adult man, [aparently] i ahve grown onto love other and better things. i choose my words carfeully here as the beatles are clearly the biggest band ever, undoubtedly, but for all their great popular music and pazazz-i want a bit of bite not just bark.

i enjoy pop music, and i think that the beatles covers of tracks such as 'rock'n'roll music' are great, and the 'with the beatles' album is bloody good. but in this post, i wish to celebrate the past 50 years of music with a close selection of my favourite albums from a year ending in 9.

ok as a start, 1959, there are in my opinion no stand out albums from this year. hit singles however include: el paso- marty robbins, a teenage in love- dion and the belmonts, only sixteen- craig douglas, it doesn't matter anymore- buddy holly etc etc. brilliant songs, check them out. i was basically educated on fifties music by my mum.

1969, my choice for an album from this year is easy. as the beatles were collapsing in on themselves and working with phil spector, the rolling stones released 'let it bleed'. 9 tracks long, originally two sides of an lp. i often wonder how albums are properly compiled and if the opening track is a sign of things to come for the album, martin scorsese is to blame for my love of the stones. 'gimme shelter', as featured in pretty much everything by marty is such a stonkigly great song that is hard to describe its full power, so i shall sum up the dark and brooding nature of the track with the lines: 'war children, it's just a shot away' and 'rape, murder, it's just a shot away'. they are delivered with such incredible intensity, and merry clayton the female voice [this is an apocryphal tale] even miscarried during her pregnancy due to the performance.

a cover is next, and covers are something that the stones do very very well and i genuinely can;t understand why modern bands don't do more covers of classic songs-re thinking them for themselves. the beatles did it, the stones did it and the clash did it. oasis tried but as they are just a cover band anyway, this doesn't really count. the original robert johnson 'love in vain' has nothing on it bar his bluesy acoustic and his captivating voice, but the cover has weaving sounds and his brilliant-jagger's voice is potent and rife with whatever makes his him the best, in my opinion at least. him or mercury, there are no other contenders :)

then a cover of themselves, a true bluesy song named country honk. when the clash covered one of their own songs [career opportunities on sandinista!], it was fucking awful. simply the worst idea they ever had. but the stones put a lot more of a country vibe on country honk, fiddles sounds rich and jagger has much more of an american lilt to his voice. it isn't as good as their 'honky tonk women' single, of which the track is a cover, but sounds good. however it is probably the worst track on the album.

track 4, live with me. the saxophones are really quite prominent on this little number, and blast through the rest of the guitar and rhythm work. it has a big sound, that has now become the stones' live thing and sounds great with the duelling guitars and all the other bits.

to close side one, we have a filthy song that is only beaten by 'star, star' in terms of lyrically nasty songs. a tad crass with the words, 'we all need someone we can cream on', but that is the rolling stones for you. i can only really think of 'kiss my cunt, oh kiss my cock' from pixies u-mass as a filthier line from a song. the song is down tempo as albums a re built to be, but really i can't wait to talk about the next song.

'the midnight rambler', the intrigue of the central character is what pumps the song forward as well as the fucking marvellous break down a good way through the song. the writing of this song is clear that they wanted to make the figure an elusive and nasty bastard strolling through the south of america, much like max cady in cape fear. my opinion. the guitar work is very good as it is so relatively simple, but it is the harmonica that helps to give the song a great sound. 'i'm gonna hit-and-run rape her in anger', nasty and observational of the nasty america that was unfolding. whereas charlie manson deduced satanic meanings from beatles stuff, if he listened to the stones there is no deduction needed. the closing lyrics 'i'll stick my knife right down your throat baby, and it hurts', pure evil. amazing!

you got the silver, love/blues and keith richards. richards lead vocals are very nice, not as good as jagger's overall voice but again, my opinion. also my friend wiki says that this was the last track that brian jones worked on with the stones, because he was going mental mental mental on drugs! so the man that formed the band was fired for being a lay about and being to drug addled, this coming from keith richards too.

i am getting tired now. monkey man, great track. listen to it.

the final track from the let it bleed album is the uplifting ditty [a 7.5 minute long ditty] called 'you can't always get what you want'. it is a moving track, again just listen to it.

the album will have it's 40th anniversary in november, will it get any coverage? no. should it? yes. it is every bit as good as anything the beatles put out, but as the outsider band the rolling stones will not grant the same publicity. still the band still has three of its original members, and they still work as a band. lennon is dead, ono is not. justice? no. but was lennon a dick? probably yes.

keep it rockin'

friends and film

i am watching a mighty wind-it is brilliant! christopher guest is one of the finest comedians, actors and directors of our time... a better woody allen than woody allen! what he does in his films [guest this is] is use a similar formula and makes people laugh, woody allen makes exactly the same film over and over again...

my opinions only [also i've only seen a couple of allen films-but reviews also suggest that maybe you should let things go a bit]

i spent a day at work and it was much better than last week's thursday, where it wasn't much good at all... details are a tad too personal so i won't say any more.

anyway, this is gonna be a short post as i'm lacking of words as i'm in a weird mood due to coffee/tiredness/excitedness/happiness etc etc

thanks: thister, thield, thlood, tharkson, thillespie, theary and most importantly thamp!

more when i'm not weird, or as weird... lad!

another day another dollar

i start work at half 10 today, the alarm was set for half 8. i woke up at 7, damn body.

to keep a reader happy, kirsty and donnelly... expect a few more of these as the certain reader is a demanding bugger!

but at the arse end of the day yesterday, i enjoyed a moment that lifted me from the previous squalor that i'd let myself into. as some/all/none of you know i work as a part-time carer for a family friend who has ms and this week i've been working full-time due to the fact that his full time carer is having to sort out family business.

usually stuart, fulltime, would take iain, my employer, out and about and that-however as i'm nowhere near as strong and steady [as i was thinking about this yesterday, i'm not that strong in my arms but my core strength is ok-i just have bad co-ordination and balance due to dyspraxia... yes i'm officially special] as stuart iain has been house bound and i can tell is somewhat frustrated at this and rightly so.

iain's long time gf emily [whom i help by doing the cleaning/ironing etc] came home from work, and it was at this point that something just clicked as i saw her helping iain up and into his wheelchair to examine the new decking layed out the back of their house. it was a simple and day to day act for them, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary [for them, for quite a few other people it would obviously be so]

the true love and dedication that emily showed at this point in time just made me smile so much, as ms is an utter cunt of a disease and inflicts truely disabilitating pain on people for no good reason and can majorly disrupt lives. however i feel that they way iain and emily have dealt with it is with true grit, the carry on regardless stiff upper lip of a large section of the british population.

i loved it. i smiled and walked into a fine summer's day-or what was left of it and then got on a bus home which i gave the soundtrack of ian brown and joe strummer. brilliant!

i shall briefly return to the main subject of my last blog via the song 'everybody's free (to wear sunscreen)', which jo whiley played on the radio yesterday as some scottish school results were being announced. i refuse to lose contact with penelope cruz [referring to last blog, surprisingly not a real name haha] as she is great and i simply want to see her happy and prospering in life, i can be stuck in my rut forever but i feel a strong need to remain friends as she swayed my life a lot [not only the fact that the word pjizzles is still the coolest phrase that deals with pyjamas i've ever heard hehe]

the tragedies in life [me, joking] are levelled up by the pure beauty of poetry in motion of a couple remaining solid and content or a young life just starting on the road to more love, success, smiles and good times. i'm happy to observe these things and know these people. the sad fact that i often don't experience the full passion and precision of love and life is overruled by the fact that i know that out their throughout this fair land there are millions that do. ace bananas.

as i always do with my blogs seem to ramble on and then towards the end briefly deal with other subjects. i shall do the same here.

whilst writing the above i've listened to radiohead, dan le sac, the prodigy [for whom i had to pause from writing to dance along to voodoo people] and now the streets. which is further nostalgia feeding kirsty haha

the gradball and being physically assaulted and having my ears destroyed by an uproarious miss sloan, classic :)
the pissing on the bus on the way home did make me somewhat of a legend amongst my contemporaries and then jetting off to iow festival the next day whilst hungover was all good fun

its only a few weeks til my birthday meet up in london. i pray for fair weather so that we [uni people, mainly film people] can hang out, get drunk, chat and smile away the day :) i shall arrange the details soon and so check up on your facebook inbox

a final piece to finish with. facebook people, learn to not put drinking/hangover in all of your status updates. well done, you drank a lot and had fun but we've all done it... it doesn't make you cool bragging about it. james suggested that i add 'the gospel according to stella' to my facebook profile as a religious view.

it is ironic and sarcastic. do the same.

smiles
keep it rockin'