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Sparks have spent 35 years making music, much of which still sounds like it comes from at least that far in our future. Bands who've been around that long should still be able to play the classics - Rolling Stones in Rio this weekend sounds like quite an experience, but to begin by playing the new album in full? For most veterans, that would be madness. Not here, not when Hello Young Lovers is album of the year so far. Were it not for Russell's inadvisably indie haircut, you really wouldn't think they'd aged in all that time. Ron still looks like Hitler as a robot accountant, leaving him perfectly able to play off his deadpan image by punching out his duplicate or rock rock rocking like a mother. It is, by any sane standards, an extremely good show.
Then, after a brief interval, they play a selection of songs from the other 19 albums. No disrespect to the new material, but after all, here they can cherrypick, so this easily eclipses the first show. I think I've already seen the concert of the year.
If you've found yourself in a slightly eerie place after reading a very good Alan Moore interview in the new issue of Mustard* while listening to Errors' 'How Clean Is Your Acid House?', and then watching the excellent BBC4 adaptation of MR James' 'A View From A Hill', an episode of The Avengers should be just the thing to help you sleep soundly, yes? Well not if it's the one with Jim Hacker as an adult baby, it won't. Still nothing like as unsettling as Innocence, though. French arthouse or no, I'm amazed this film wasn't the subject of a tabloid Paedogeddon witch-hunt - especially since part of what makes it so alarming is that you can never quite tell if it's the film's fault or your own that it seems so wrong. The Angela Carter and Dario Argento links have been noted before, but the other reference for me was The Prisoner, reworked as a girls' school play.
(Last night's South Bank Show wasn't unsettling, though, just deeply annoying. Instead of the usual mainstream media portrayal of comics, contrasting how they are now with a simpleton's half-remembered view of how they used to be, this contrasted manga and anime with said simpleton's view, thus implying that all Western comics still are like that, and all manga is ace. Yeah, right)
When the economist Amartya Sen was installed as Master of Trinity, I was among a number of those present quietly humming the Imperial March from Star Wars. Even then, I had no particular beef with the man - it was just something which seemed amusing at the time. But having read his eminently sensible policies on religious tension - policies which are not mine but not cowardly either, policies which may well be more pragmatic than mine and are certainly less aggressive - I feel rather ashamed.
(Of course, the Guardian, being the Guardian, had to print that piece on the reverse of this - an article so bad I can't quite decide whether it's pernicious or meaningless)
I know I often applaud news items simply for sounding like science fiction, but when it's people dying because oxygen has been privatised, it's another matter. Likewise the child with two heads - if the second head has a brain, and shows independent volition, then how the blazes can it be a parasite? Or rather, how can it be any more of a parasite than any other baby?
*One of the less spooky details being that he's a huge fan of Viz's Drunken Bakers.
Then, after a brief interval, they play a selection of songs from the other 19 albums. No disrespect to the new material, but after all, here they can cherrypick, so this easily eclipses the first show. I think I've already seen the concert of the year.
If you've found yourself in a slightly eerie place after reading a very good Alan Moore interview in the new issue of Mustard* while listening to Errors' 'How Clean Is Your Acid House?', and then watching the excellent BBC4 adaptation of MR James' 'A View From A Hill', an episode of The Avengers should be just the thing to help you sleep soundly, yes? Well not if it's the one with Jim Hacker as an adult baby, it won't. Still nothing like as unsettling as Innocence, though. French arthouse or no, I'm amazed this film wasn't the subject of a tabloid Paedogeddon witch-hunt - especially since part of what makes it so alarming is that you can never quite tell if it's the film's fault or your own that it seems so wrong. The Angela Carter and Dario Argento links have been noted before, but the other reference for me was The Prisoner, reworked as a girls' school play.
(Last night's South Bank Show wasn't unsettling, though, just deeply annoying. Instead of the usual mainstream media portrayal of comics, contrasting how they are now with a simpleton's half-remembered view of how they used to be, this contrasted manga and anime with said simpleton's view, thus implying that all Western comics still are like that, and all manga is ace. Yeah, right)
When the economist Amartya Sen was installed as Master of Trinity, I was among a number of those present quietly humming the Imperial March from Star Wars. Even then, I had no particular beef with the man - it was just something which seemed amusing at the time. But having read his eminently sensible policies on religious tension - policies which are not mine but not cowardly either, policies which may well be more pragmatic than mine and are certainly less aggressive - I feel rather ashamed.
(Of course, the Guardian, being the Guardian, had to print that piece on the reverse of this - an article so bad I can't quite decide whether it's pernicious or meaningless)
I know I often applaud news items simply for sounding like science fiction, but when it's people dying because oxygen has been privatised, it's another matter. Likewise the child with two heads - if the second head has a brain, and shows independent volition, then how the blazes can it be a parasite? Or rather, how can it be any more of a parasite than any other baby?
*One of the less spooky details being that he's a huge fan of Viz's Drunken Bakers.
