'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

I haven't been up to a huge amount lately; judging by today's sun the time of hibernation may be ending, but there's been a lot more reading and DVDs than antics. Spot of furniture construction for xandratheblue (sometimes I wonder if I may have overdone the John Steed-style 'pose as feckless incompetent' bit, people do get very surprised when I'm practical), comedy then pub on Sunday (Michael Legge especially good as the bewildered MC, Steve Hall from Klang talking more about his swimsuit area than I might have wished, but still excellent). I've watched a lot of films, but more on them later in the week, I think. Two series finished and one promising new show started, so let's keep this one televisual.

My hopes for BBC One's new space colonisation drama Outcasts were not high; I'd heard bad things about how the makers didn't like it being considered science fiction, and as a rule that just means someone is making very bad science fiction. Imagine my surprise when it turns out to be the hardest SF I've seen on TV...possibly ever. And that's hard in both senses; the set-up is not that far off Firefly, but this is a lot less jaunty and swashbuckling. This is about the hard slog of the early days, the muttered references to how bad things were on Earth, the realisation that humanity is down to a few thousand people and even they can't live peacefully together. A good cast - Liam Cunningham, Hermione Norris, Keats from Ashes to Ashes and Apollo from BSG - but not all of them make it to the end of the episode. I like it when shows kill off major characters unexpectedly, it helps to maintain the sense of jeopardy.

Primeval used to be good at that too. This series, not so much, even though the protagonists have suddenly developed a quite uncanny ability to go on missions without adequate back-up, then drop their guns. Since ITV attempted to cancel their one good programme - for showing up everything else they produce, I assumed - it has got visibly cheaper, not in terms of the monster CGI (still great) but in terms of what seems a hurriedness to the writing, and a weird emptiness of the sets. They've saved a ton on extras, but ended up with something that feels a bit too much like Bugs, if anyone remembers that. But if nothing else, it's the only TV drama I've spotted which has any interest in demonstrating the evils of PFI.

But for really getting through the main cast, since Oz ended there has been nothing to equal Spartacus: Blood and Sand. I'm not surprised they're following it up with a prequel, because there really aren't many characters left to follow into the future except Spartacus himself, and Andy Whitfield is too ill to resume that role, poor bastard. And of course prequels have their own problems, because you know who's going to make it. So this may turn out to have been essentially a one-off - but what a one-off. Looking back, even in the earlier, sillier episodes the big theme was there, and that theme was the real trickledown effect. Not the happy, fluffy right-wing fantasy where we all get rich off the very rich's spending - the real version, where the moment's whim of someone higher up than you can up-end (or simply end) your whole life. Again and again, person A suffers simply because B has just had a row with C. And especially when B literally owns A, that can be fatal. Even when they don't, a catastrophic cascade can still result - but the indignities and worse, the difficulty of love or friendship, of being unfree are powerfully drawn. And where the corny old film of Spartacus used this haunting horror of slavery to praise the American Dream, to show how much better things are nowadays, the TV show is made in darker, wiser times. It knows that, unless there happen to be a couple of oligarchs watching, the audience are slaves too.

Yes, it's that time of year again; I think I've heard everything that's coming out (and the Duran Duran was really not worth waiting for), I've listened back to the ones I couldn't make up my mind about, and then I've started juggling positions and seeing which orders made sense. Nonetheless, this list is of necessity provisional; I completely missed until this year the arrival of at least two albums which should have been in 2009's top 20, by Circulus and George Pringle. It should also go without saying that like any such list, it is entirely subjective. And Number One is really not going to surprise anyone to whom I've talked about music in the past couple of years. So without further ado, ( the chart rundown )...and there was a 30-40, but halfway through putting in the HTML for the italics, I decided no, all of those are either too samey or too patchy. They had lovely moments, but they weren't great albums. And moments don't make albums. A lot of my favourite songs this year - Big Boi's 'Shutterbug', Robyn's 'Dancing On My Own', My Chemical Romance's 'Na Na Na', Shrag's 'Rabbit Kids', Underworld's 'Between Stars' - were from albums other people really rated, but which to me sounded like more than half filler. Then you had Spoiler Alert!'s 'Booster Gold' and Mitch Benn's 'I'm Proud of the BBC' (an EP track and a stand-alone single, respectively), and Gaga's 'Telephone' from a 2009 album. I don't buy the whole death of the album line, mind; there have always been great singles that hunt alone, or live on patchy albums. But I have found that when an album isn't physically present, it can no longer nag at you from the corner of your eye. When it's not even digitally present, when there's only access to it - on Spotify, most especially, with its refusal to tell you what you were doing even the five searches back that it used to manage unless you specifically note an item at the time - then only a song itself, lodged in the brain can remind you about an album, remind you that you were briefly very impressed, pull you back. And it doesn't happen as often as I would have expected. Is that determined by the music the year had on offer, or is it a general thing? No idea. But looking back at that list, thinking about all the albums that didn't make it, an awful lot of music this year has sounded tired. That is not in itself a bad thing - tiredness is an emotion which, like any other, can set the tone for great art. But not all of them were accomplishing that transmutation and, even when you think about the ones who were...well, it's not the best of zeitgeists, is it?

Apparently David Cameron's not just a Smiths fan, he likes Modest Mouse too. He's certainly doing his bit to keep their album titles topical. I skirted the edge of the protests yesterday. I wasn't in town to agitate or demonstrate - I did that the last time a party students trusted turned out to be lying about tuition fees, and I don't see that my contribution would achieve any more this time around - but since one of the routes I could take would combine the journey I was making anyway with a little disaster tourism, why not? With the lines of riot police blocking empty streets, the searchlight helicopter, the riot vans haring around in sixes, it all felt very Eastern European.

This was on my way to see the Jeays festive show at the Battersea Barge which - perhaps because of the disruptions? - wasn't as full as the past couple of years. The raffle format bore fruit, as it usually does - even when audience members chose songs I don't love on record like 'The Man from Del Monte', Phil's live performance has enough of Brel's demonic side to make them fascinating. The regrettably obligatory support slot from performance poet the Speech Painter was introduced by Phil in verse. A lengthy poem which was far more savage, and much funnier, than any of the supposed poet's work. It almost seemed too cruel. Almost.
Other shows seen this week include Brontosaurus Chorus (on excellent form - album-in-full shows are so much less depressing when it's a new album rather than a sanctioned classic), Jonny Cola (still with the new line-up), Boy Stood Alone On Mountaintop (solo acoustic singer-songwriters aren't really my thing, alas), Bleech (Amy Pond's sister and a slightly out of date Hoxtonista trying to be Elastica, but not as good as that sounds) and Pan. Apparently two thirds of Pan used to be Le Tetsuo, a name I knew but not a band I ever heard. The name doesn't really suit them, the sound being very tight and constrained, and their singer looking like David Morrissey as the young Gordon Brown. These are not bad things, you understand - simply things which contradict the name. I can't quite make out the lyrics, but the words I catch in one chorus include 'lesbian' and 'exes', which are both good words to have in your chorus.

Another film I'd been meaning to see for ages: Network. Like They Live, I wonder whether its anti-TV vitriol is still too much for it to be broadcastable? Strange if so, because if Network has one message it's not anger - even if it is the "I'm as mad as Hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" speech which everyone quotes. No, it's how the Spectacle will assimilate anything, ( spoilers, for a 1976 film, but still ) Just look at all the money Rage Against the Machine made Sony last Christmas.

The Sunday wobble about which I've posted previously wasn't the whole weekend, of course. There was a leaving do for rosamicula, which doubled as a welcome home for dawnage and whatever Rick's LJ is, as if in obedience to some hitherto unknown Law of Conservation. At the Walrus, which I've always wanted to check out simply for the name, but which I usually only pass en route to the more prosaically named Horse. I'm not sure what it would be like as a winter pub, but in summer, it has the garden to be a godsend. Then another new drinking destination for Saturday's birthday festivities, Bourne & Hollingsworth, which exists somewhere between wartime speakeasy and provincial tea-room, and serves cocktails in teacups, and where I made my first attempt at MP3 DJing, for a given value of 'DJing' and certainly not one which merits posting a setlist, before heading on to DSM where I remember very little beyond the presence of the DBB. I blame the Laundry novels for any current addiction to TLAs.

The sketch which made me laugh most in last night's (as ever, admittedly patchy) Mitchell & Webb was Caesar. But the ones which most impressed me were the one where they bit the Apple hand that feeds, and especially the opening self-criticism session. As against Peep Show, their own work sometimes gets accused of a certain traditional, cosy quality. Good to see them rolling with those punches and coming back with this level of savagery.

When it wasn't giving me the fear re: space, one of the things I like about that Ray Bradbury collection* I'm reading is that, for all that it came out through a science fiction imprint, it doesn't feel obliged to be all SF. I'm only a quarter of the way through, but if a story doesn't need to involve a spaceship or a time machine, then Bradbury doesn't throw one in just to keep within his genre; sometimes all you need is two men meeting on a beach. As I may have mentioned once or twice before, I'm not too keen on genre boundaries, which is why a project like the Neil Gaiman co-edited anthology Stories interests me. If you know McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, this is basically a less confrontational, more entryist approach to that. The cover, instead of a masked lion-tamer, is just contributor names - it's almost as studiedly uninformative as the title. And where Chabon's introduction railed against "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory short story", Gaiman simply extols the joy of the story in which the main question is - "what happened next?" The two share a couple of authors - two of the big beasts, in fact, Michael Moorcock and Gaiman himself, both among the main reasons I'm reading either collection in the first place. Beyond them, Stories makes a deliberately wide-ranging selection. There are other people I actively want to read - Gene Wolfe, Joe Hill. There are people I've vaguely meant to read - Michael Swanwick, Walter Mosley. Then there are people I'd never have thought to read, some reviewers' darlings - Joyce Carol Oates - and some big sellers - Jodi Piccoult. The clever bit being, of course, that for any reader, each of those four categories is going to include a completely different selection of names. In the interests of fairness, I'm reading every story, and if I've not been convinced to investigate the oeuvre of any of the writers I wasn't already interested in, nor has any of them been quite as bad as I expected (though there is something of a fixation on stories of elderly siblings). Obviously, part of me hopes that the people coming in for Oates will be rather more impressed by Gaiman...but the world's not quite that satisfying, is it? And if nothing else, I will probably read some more Mosley. Maybe even some Swanwick, though I was put off by the self-evident falseness of one of his central conceits: apparently characters in books don't read books. Even leaving aside the bookish heroes of MR James, Lovecraft and Borges, what about Dorian Gray, Don Quixote, Scott Pilgrim?

*I put the non-Bradbury part of Monday's post into the 'who do you write like' meme currently prowling Livejournal, and it told me Edgar Allen Poe. I was quietly pleased, but then realised I was missing a trick, especially when I saw Bradbury himself was one of the answers, and entered his contribution instead, but apparently he writes like Douglas Adams.

In spite of London Transport's best efforts, I made it to the Good Ship last night in time for Lullaby Oscillatrix, and The Icebergs, and The Angry Bees, three very different new musical adventures involving my endlessly creative chums (OK, 'musical' might not be quite the right word in the case of the Bees). And the faff en route did at least mean I could pretty much finish off Anna Minton's Ground Control en route. It's a book I've been trying to read in public not just for the normal reason of it being nicely pocket-sized, but also as my own small rejoinder to the situation it describes in which, as that review is headlined, "they sold our streets and nobody noticed". The current government has encouraged councils to privatise public space, to sell off assets which were bequeathed to local communities in perpetuity (if not legally, then morally, this is clearly theft), to design cities in accord with unproven and pernicious theories. There's so much here I didn't know. Just one example: since 2004, compulsory purchase orders no longer need to show public benefit in any terms other than monetary ones. Needless to say, the idea that said money will benefit the public relies on our old favourite, trickledown economics - because in the short term it's going straight to the developers. Shameful. Also, it would seem, inescapable. This all took place under a nominally Labour government, which is shameful and ludicrous, but it's not as if it would be reversed by the admitted Tories, and I no longer even have any confidence in the Lib Dems.
In 1821, John Hunt was imprisoned for an article describing MPs as "Venal boroughmongers, grasping placemen, greedy adventurers and aspiring title-hunters...a body, in short, containing a far greater proportion of Public Criminals than Public Guardians." Obviously a lot has changed since then; now MPs realise that prosecution only makes martyrs and the system ticks over nicely if you just ignore how much the public hates the whole damn pack of you, so critics can make high-profile TV dramas like On Expenses which essentially advance Hunt's point over an hour of docudrama (the usual disclaimer admitting that some details have been compressed then turns around and reminds us that "mostly, you couldn't make it up") with a fine cast including Brian Cox and Anna Maxwell Martin...and nobody bats an eyelid, and MPs complain that they can't be expected to travel in standard class with the proles, and they use slave labour in breach of the minimum wage laws they passed themselves, and we head towards an election which is once again going to beat all the records for low turn-out because nobody's fool enough to believe any result would accomplish anything, especially not after we saw that even if we had a genuinely inspirational politician like Barack Obama - which we clearly don't - then, like Obama, he would probably be incapable of achieving anything if he got in, not with the system arrayed against him.

So here I sit in the library on a dismal day at the fag-end of a decade on which nobody quite seems able to put their finger, but a decade at the start of which I wouldn't have been sat writing anything like this, having been strictly a messageboards and emails boy. The post-christmas milestones have been passed; thank you to all who made my birthday, and I remain amazed that the Freaky Trigger pub crawl could find an OK and a great pub within minutes of where I worked for eight years but neither of which I had ever entered (and about how many viable post-apocalyptic Ant&Dec TV formats there are, but over that topic it is probably best to draw a veil). Which means now it's just about waiting out the last 36 hours. Back home, my CD player currently contains one of the first great albums of the previous decade, St Etienne's Foxbase Alpha (albeit in that most noughties of formats, the 2CD deluxe reissue) and a burned copy (the second most noughties format) of what may be one of the next decade's first great albums, the new one from Los Campesinos!. I have no idea what I'm saying here, I just felt the moment should be marked, even if it's not much of a moment.

It always used to be - perhaps still is if you catch me off guard - that asked when I'd like to live, I'd instantly reply 'the twenties'. Yes, as a rich person, obviously - just like anyone who thinks we've never had it so good is obviously thinking of themselves rather than a Third World peasant, just like nobody ever said Rome and meant as a slave (well, except maybe a few serious submissives). But a while back a doubt dawned and has been niggling ever since - were the twenties rich any different to the arses clogging the gossip mags I spurn? Do we just romanticise them through distance, the same way classic pirates seem sexy while having your yacht seized by Somalis with automatic weaponry is distinctly less so? DJ Taylor's excellent Bright Young People - The Rise and Fall of a Generation: 1918-1940 is doing nothing to convince me otherwise. Yes, in America the gilded twenties produced some artists of genuine stature - the Fitzgeralds, Dorothy Parker - but over here we mostly ended up with never-was-es like Stephen Tennant and Brian Howard, always just about to write masterpieces which somehow never quite materialised. Of the books written from and about the scene which did appear, most are now only ever read as research for social histories like this one, and even those which survive for wider public attention - which basically means Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies - are still principally known for reflexive reasons just as they were at the time; like their subjects, we read them to be at once scandalised and fascinated by the thinly-veiled documentary of the times*. Times which only produced these books. Which we only read because...and so on. If Waugh had kept his powder dry on the topic until Brideshead years later (assuming he'd somehow supported himself in the meantime and not become another Tennant or Howard), would literature be much the poorer?
But mostly, what was written about them was the gossip mags, the disgust/obsession of the middle-market rags, the same we see nowadays. "The reader's curiosity, in fact, was almost bovine. It went only so far. It wanted, above all, to be reassured that the grass it ate was grass, that the people presented for inspection, whoever they might be, were worth reading about." Consider the junkie Brenda Dean Paul, the radio news following her escapades with the same urgent irrelevance as Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty gets from the websites and tabloids. And never mind Winehouse, she couldn't even claim such nugatory cultural achievements as Doherty, being an 'actress' in the loosest possible sense (but then, she did exist in a time before ITV drama, so that at least could have changed).
Understand: it's not Taylor taking this line - he laments the decline of the Bright Young scene into a parade of wannabes and ever-increasing efforts at novelty, but the wondering if there was ever anything there in the first place is just me. Similarly, the modern parallels are if anything underplayed. Though the book being a couple of years old, there's one at least which couldn't possibly have spooked him like it did me. Describing a Punch satire of the scene:
"Losing sight of Lady Gaga for half an hour, the interloper eventually finds her with her arm round the waist of 'a young heavyweight in horn-rims dressed as a baby', listening to a hollow-eyed girl ina tutu and an opera hat who is singing a song with the refrain 'It's terribly thrilling to be wicked'."
Of course, counterpoint all this with the worries of parents about how the Bright Young People were wasting their time, refusing to acknowledge the serious side of life and you realise - if they had, they'd still have been wasting their time. What else could they have done? Gone into business and been wiped out by the Crash. Gone into finance, and caused it. Gone into politics and achieved about as much at the rather duller masquerades of the League of Nations as the Bright Young People did at theirs which at least had plenty of cocktails - or stayed in domestic politics and as like as not been damned forever for going along with appeasement. As a wise man once said: "Yes, you may be wasting your life. But it's your life to waste. Hell, no matter what you chose to do, you were wasting it anyway. And that you have the chance to doom yourself in such a way...well, that's glorious." Or as an even wiser man put it, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". The good times are good times because of what they become as a half-memory which itself becomes an aspiration. Sometimes it's better not to meet your heroes, not even in a group biography.

*On the other hand, while I rather like the look of The Noughties Were Sh1t ("This blog will chart the worst of the noughties. The rubbish new genres, the horrible new trends, the idiot popstars, the dullard celebrities, the pitiful movements and the squandered promise of a rubbish generation. Think of it as a process of truth and reconciliation. We must make sure that the fucking noughties are never allowed to happen again"), I'm conflicted in the awareness that even aside from having myself had a pretty good decade - I may be a victim of the economic bust having never really got the benefits of the boom, and yet compared to a decade ago I live in a much better place with more friends and more avenues of entertainment - that site is the work of one of the best bands of the decade. A band whose driving force is disgust with that decade. And so the contradiction spirals on.

( A Day And A Night And A Day by Glen Duncan )
Since which I decided, after a few Conan stories which were dubiously racist and rapey even by Robert E Howard's standards ("Women are cheap as plantains in this land, and their willingness or unwillingness matters as little" - this is the hero speaking, remember - "But I am not such a dog as to leave a white woman in the clutches of a black man."), to read some nice light space opera. Except it turns out that like the Glen Duncan book, James Blish's 1956 They Shall Have Stars is about the spiritual malaise of humanity in the first decades of the 21st century. The USA's democratic traditions are wounded after certain elements of the administration decided, for reasons of "security", to place themselves above the law. A key government position became hereditary, building on trends initiated when "a stunningly popular Man-on-Horseback who dripped charisma but had no brains to speak of" was President. Space exploration has stalled, tangled in bureaucracy and vested interests*; "scientific ideas have become so abstract that even their originators can't suggest ways to test them", except by ever more grotesquely massive and experimental means (although at least unlike CERN, theirs seem to work). It's not so much a space opera as a prologue to a space opera in the other books - for one junior senator, against all odds, finds himself in a position to turn things around...and no mention is made of his race, but Bliss Wagoner is at least as silly a name as Barack Obama, right?

*As with Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, this dystopian vision of pretty much now is slightly too optimistic, in that apparently no major moves were made in space since the 1981 establishment of a base on Titan. We should be so lucky as to live in that dystopia.

The headlines of late may be a seemingly endless parade of semi-comprehensible financial doom, so I've been very glad of the Somali pirate debacle. Yes, I know that real modern pirates are not nice men (for that matter, nor were the old school, whatever the twinkle in Errol Flynn or Johnny Depp's eye might try to tell you otherwise). But it's still hard not to love a story in which pirates nick 33 tanks, and then manage to shoot three of their own number during a debate over tactics.
"He said radicals on board wanted to keep the shipment of 33 T-72 tanks and other weapons in Somalia while the moderates wanted "to back-pedal on the ransom issue"."
Moderate pirates!

Marie Antoinette is a spectacularly boring film. And I use those words precisely - it is at once spectacular, and boring. I've watched both of Sofia Coppola's previous films in a sort of doze, but this time I was watching with friends so that wouldn't fly. Nonetheless I was lulled into enough of a dream state that, as when you're in a cruise ship which is also your school, the distinction between Kirsten Dunst and Scarlett Johansson ceased to have any meaning to me and I started talking about the former's album of Tom Waits covers. The sets, the costumes are so lavish, made and dressed and shot with such obvious love...and yet the film conspires to make you stop looking at them, or at least half-close your eyes, with its majestic tedium.
The new series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, on the other hand, was clearly made for about thruppence and yet it's full of thrills. And that's not even as strained a link as you might think, because the astronomer in the first two episodes has previously played Robespierre opposite Richard E Grant's Scarlet Pimpernel, so there. But really, this was cheap; there's some model work with the radio telescope which would have been at home on Thunderbirds, and yet it's still a better Sontaran story than the last series of Doctor Who managed. The only problem being - they do rather let this show sneak out, don't they? I know it's on in the teatime slot for children, but they must know that a fair amount of adult Doctor Who fans want to watch it, so why is it not brought to our attention a little more?

Am increasingly losing patience with the mice. Given I have now learned that 'put a donk on it' is a viable solution to all problems, I am wondering how best to put a donk on a mouse, and even (though I hesitate to ask) how exactly that would help.

Just as the Large Hadron Collider seems to have left us in the same lousy universe we were in on Tuesday, so its associated Torchwood episode was a bit of a disappointment. Part of the problem is that what counts as mad science for us should be positively passe on Earth-Who - "Large Hadron Colliders? Oh yeah, UNIT has two. At Torchwood we only have one, but it's better. Pink. Of course, the Doctor didn't need one at all, he trained Higg's bosons to come when he played the recorder." It's the same mismatch we got in Marvel's various foolhardy attempts to have the events of seven years ago be a big deal on their Earth, even though that New York gets its skyscrapers trashed pretty much weekly. But even beyond that, ( spoilers ) You'd do better having Keith Richards warn against the evils of drugs.

There's been a lot of going back this week. I don't mean in the wider world - that seems Hellbent on beating a course back to the Dark Ages, to the extent that I can't be bothered to keep charting it on here, it depresses me to no end. I mean personally, whether it be the old gang back together at the wedding, or my plans for tonight when I'm off to the Verge (as was), scene of many a drunken night back in the Fan Club days, to see the New Royal Family, sober. Last Saturday I went to Stay Beautiful for the first time this year, an experience I half-expected to be valedictory, but which left me feeling much less out of place than I expected. And last night, even with Indelicates and David Devant shows on offer, I went to see the Blow Monkeys. Now in a sense, Devant or the Indelicates would have been more 'going back' - I've seen each I don't know how many times, and the Blow Monkeys never. Nor, in my decade or so of London gigging, have I previously been to the Jazz Cafe*. But the Blow Monkeys...I was introduced to them getting on for 15 years ago, just as my music tastes were starting to get beyond what the inkies and Select (RIP) were feeding me. Their infectious sense of calm and beauty, the genuine venom mixed in with an understanding that you can sometimes revolt better by transcendence than opposition - that wasn't very teenage, and in some ways it's still not very me, but it became quite formative nonetheless. I'd heard Dr Robert had moved on in something of the same wrong direction his contemporary Paul Weller did, and never expected a new Blow Monkeys album, or a chance to see them live. But then, that was before eternal recurrence came early and everyone started reforming.
Now, obviously I know that for the time being, time impacts on beings. But I've seen eighties acts before; Hell, I've seen seventies acts before. And most of them seemed to have jumped on to that celebrity track where ageing really does make people look cooler somehow, more lived-in and not just lived-out. Which is why it still came as a surprise when the chap in the audience I'd unconsciously pegged as 'the big lad who needs to stop trying to carry off the Dr Robert look these days' was, inevitably, Dr Robert. Dr Robert who was one of the reasons I initially got into the band because a few people had mentioned that I looked like him - and not putting myself or my younger self down here, but he looked like a much prettier me, which obviously had this narcissist hooked. Still charming, still sparkling, still with that voice and even that lisp - but not the young Apollo anymore.
And there weren't that many people there. First London date in 18 years, people know at least a couple of songs, not that big a venue - it should be fairly full, if not perhaps sold out. Not so. And predictably, some of that crowd are lig zombies who chatter through the new stuff - of which we get a lot but hey, I like most of the new album, I'm not complaining. What does puzzle me is the selection from the classics. Obviously they wouldn't get away without 'Digging Your Scene' or 'It Doesn't Have To Be This Way', and they don't try, or seem anything less than happy to be playing them again and comfortable with their past. But then we get songs that hit as duets, sung solo - 'Celebrate', 'Wait' and 'Slaves No More', the last of which I didn't even like much in the first place. Likewise 'Heaven Is A Place I'm Moving To' and 'Springtime for the World', songs I usually skip on CD. I wasn't honestly expecting 'Beautiful Child' in the current climate, or 'Cash' which I imagine would be a nightmare to play live, but wasn't 'This Is Your Life' a hit? Wasn't 'It Pays To Belong'?
I'm not saying I regret going, but I still feel like I missed something.

The support, incidentally, was Rhoda Dakar, ex of the Specials, accompanied by some bloke from Bad Manners on acoustic guitar. She played 'Racist Friend' from the old days, but not 'The Boiler'. Now, if you've never heard 'The Boiler'...it's getting on for 30 years old now and I'd say there's still nothing quite so harrowing ever to have been released in the disguise of a pop single. It wouldn't work in a cheery support slot for an upbeat band, it wouldn't work acoustic, and although she's aged incredibly well, one could hardly shout for it without the risk of being terribly misconstrued. But still, it seems weird to have seen Rhoda Dakar and not heard 'The Boiler'.

*Not what the name implies, is the short version. More a mid-size provincial venue, or the 12 Bar inexplicably rebuilt at double size. And £4.10 a pint? Get out.