Hood winks

Those of us with fond memories of Thunderbirds may have been experiencing deja-vu while reading recently of newly-appointed, chrome-domed Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel...













Nouvel

The Hood

Selby date

I was alerted by yesterday's Guardian that the 26th April 2004 was the 4th anniversary of the death of Hubert Selby Jr., probably best known for his novels Requiem For A Dream and Last Exit To Brooklyn, both later turned into screenplays by the author. His readers and fans may be familiar with his recorded output too, but for those that aren't, and those that are curious to hear Selby's voice (which could be charitably described as "lived-in"), here's a track from Live in Europe 1989. The track is The Queen Is Dead (the working title for Last Exit), and indeed it's a short excerpt from the book that inspired the title of The Smiths' magnum opus. And it's only a day late!

Download The Queen Is Dead Hubert Selby Jr. (mp3) (deleted Aug 2009)

Official Selby site

Haig convention

Saw Paul Haig live on Sunday.

Saying it like that makes it sound like an everyday occurrence; on the contrary, it was his first full gig in nineteen years. Given his new-found status as a name to drop, I half-expected a room full of nubile Franz Ferdinand aficionados; disappointingly, the room was full of thirty- and forty-somethings with thinning hair (your correspondent included). Haig himself, however, looked terrific; while most post-punk heroes making a return to the live scene are barely recognisable husks of their former selves, one suspects that Haig, like Richard Jobson, Gonnie Rietveld and a few others, has a portrait in the attic that is slowly aging while he gets younger. Okay, I'm exaggerating slightly, but they're all remarkably well-preserved.

You'd have forgiven the man for having a few first-night nerves. Not a bit of it; he seemed ebullient. The set was an extremely short and sweet eleven songs, with no encore, performed by a tight backing band (actually Haig's side project The Cathode Ray), and included two Josef K songs (It's Kinda Funny and Sorry For Laughing, natch), as well as recent single Reason, Justice, and Something Good. No Big Blue World or Heaven Sent, sadly, but after nineteen years away, the audience knows better than to push its luck.

What I hadn't expected was how funny he was. I always thought of him and his former group as intensely serious- in fact, I'd read that Josef K never talked to the audience, and I didn't get the impression that his solo gigs were laugh-a-minute gag riots either. I actually wondered why the prankish and terminally unserious Billy Mackenzie considered him a suitable musical accomplice for much of his final years. Well, now I can see. It wasn't exactly amiable banter with the audience; it was more like a Goons monologue or a Reeves and Mortimer sketch as Haig essayed various voices, impressions and gnomic utterances (actually, now I come to think of it, I had also read that Malcolm Ross and Haig traded Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin routines on stage...). Example: after the first song, and possibly apropos of the palatial splendour of the venue, he channelled the late Frank Butcher and blurted "Point o' lager and a whoite woine for the lie-dee" in a very passable cockney accent. Later in the gig he mused to no one in particular "Do you prefer a bourbon or a garibaldi?" (this time as Miss Jean Brodie). Later still: "Dirty boy! Go to bed!" (a west Scotland accent)- whatever was he talking about here? Can anybody enlighten me? Suffice it to say he had me laughing.

He plays Nottingham and London later this week, with sojourns to Glasgow and Dunfermline also pencilled in for May, so for a top post-punk comedy turn, don't be vague- ask for Haig.

RoLinc

Ghost Rider

Download Paul Haig Nitemute (mp3) from Cinematique 3 (deleted Aug 2009)

Buy CDs

Ready steady Kook

While I'm at it, now that The Kooks have released an album entitled Konk, will the 80s NYC no-wave group Konk reform to release an album called The Kooks?

It's happened before of course:

David Bowie

Nick Lowe

Lazy Madonna

Is it just me, or does the new (rubbish) Madonna single sound like the new national anthem for a former Soviet state (say, Uzbekistan), as commissioned by a crazed energy oligarch, and remixed by the Black Eyed Peas?

Just me then? O-kaaayyyy.

Did I mention that it's rubbish?

Hear for yourself here. (and see Maddy on top of a Triumph 2000)

Updates

Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that the site has had a slight re-vamp in the last day or so. You can now share anything that particularly annoys you with others by e-mail, or via Digg, Facebook, Reddit and all those other Web 2.0 thingys that "the kids" (© Alan McGee 1986) are telling me about. Just click on the "Share This" widget underneath posts. If you were a subscriber, you may need to subscribe again. Sorry 'bout that.

Motor rollers

Just managed to catch a terrific show on the always-excellent BBC4, entitled Motor City’s Burning. Unfortunately, it’s now disappeared from the BBC’s iPlayer (which is where I saw it after downloading it a couple of weeks ago), but these things usually get repeated ad infinitum, so keep an eye on the schedules and there’s a good chance it’ll turn up again.

Tracing the history of Detroit’s music over that fertile period from the early-1960s to the early-70s (i.e. from the inception of Motown to the last throes of Iggy and the Stooges, by way of the MC5), the programme mixed contemporaneous footage with modern-day talking heads reminiscing. While neither the subject matter nor the documentary’s tried-and-tested format could be described as new or ground-breaking, the quality of the interviews was what made Motor City’s Burning so engaging. From a bare-chested Iggy Pop (does this guy own any shirts whatsoever?) to the MC5’s Wayne Kramer and Rob Tyner, via an incredibly well-preserved Mary Wilson of the Supremes, the show joined the dots between the ubiquitous motor industry, Berry Gordy’s company, and the political and financial disenfranchisement that led to the riots of 1967, before taking in the White Panther movement and the Stooges primal howl. If it had been extended by half an hour and managed to take in Detroit’s latter years as a hotbed of techno (again, the presence of Ford, General Motors et al not a coincidence), then it would have been nigh-on perfect.

Perhaps the most eloquent and sympathetic interviewee was John Sinclair, marijuana martyr and MC5 manager. Seemingly chastened by his experiences, he appears to have opted for a quiet life away from revolutionary rock ‘n’ roll, though he gleefully reminisced about the band’s appearances in now-decrepit and abandoned Detroit ballrooms.

The show sent me back to the MC5’s astonishing first album, Kick Out The Jams (as the documentary asked, would any record company sanction a live album as a group’s debut these days?). And it still holds up, though the impact of the title track has been slightly blunted through over-playing. So, instead, here’s the first track on the album, Ramblin’ Rose, a to-the-point workout that clocks in at only 2 and a half minutes if you exclude the lengthy spoken-word introduction, and which, to my mind at least, sounds a bit like Cream if the latter had been taking amphetamines rather than heroin.

Download Ramblin’ Rose by the MC5 (deleted May 2008)