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

Went to 333 last night for the first time since it was still vaguely cool. It's a lot better now it isn't, although there were still residual traces of venue-that-thinks-they're-it cluelessness. The ground floor has become essentially a normal pub called the London Apprentice, to the extent that I was wandering baffled around the frontage looking for where the venue entrance had gone to hide, and had to be assisted by one of the Ethical Debating Society (who are much tighter these days, though seemed surprised to hear it). Then there was another band who had a keytar in their favour but not much else, before The Murder Act who were looking very striking and sounding more so, somewhere between Gallon Drunk and One More Grain. After which we pissed off to drink cans in the street because we are that cool. Q and I, both having recently been touched for funds by our alma mater, got a picture complete with cap in hand, which we may or may not send them by way of explaining our refusal.

Other gigs seen since I last posted about gigs seen:
augstone in acoustic troubadour mode on Upper Street, on the day when Upper Street was haunted by a most unpleasant smell. No connection, I should add. At least, not so far as I'm aware.
Brontosaurus Chorus Dom's new band, who were a bit loud for the 12 Bar, supporting Rebekah Delgado and her sexy weeping angels.
The Gonzo Dog-Do Bar Band, whose Bonzos tribute bafflingly omitted 'Sport (The Odd Boy)' in spite of the show coming right before the Olympics. Still, they finished with a damn fine 'Mr Apollo', and generally did justice to songs which can easily lose the appropriate strangeness. martylog's Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra supported, with a very eerie new song about allotments the high-point.
The Thlyds - or rather a tribute - in a show which can be heard here. If The Thlyds did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them - a voice for disaffected young Britain which, crucially, isn't the risible Plan B. 'Let's Have A Riot' at the Olympics fell a little flat, what with us doomsayers having been proven wrong for once - but the rest was brilliantly sneering.
Gyratory System, in the perfect venue of the Social, which is to say a fashionable breeze block. They sounded - or more than sounded, felt - like a burning robot factory - but with a groove.
Thee Faction, incendiary in another sense of the word, and Joanne Joanne, an all-female tribute to...you can work it out. But only the early stuff. More punk than Rhodes, Taylor and le Bon ever sounded on record, but that works.
Keith ToTP and Dream Themes. I've written about them both plenty on here before. Whatever it is they have, they've still got it.

Yes, well. Not a vintage year, was it? I've only got a Top 20, which I think is the least since I started doing these. On the plus side, that means it's feasible to write a little bit about *why* each album is ace, something I never really had time for before.

( And let's mix things up and do it countdown-style )

And so the summer of superhero films kicks off with Thor, and we now seem to have reached the point where - thank the Allfather - a lot of the genre mainstays can be taken for granted. So rather than going through the standard plot beats and the origin and blah blah blah, Kenneth Branagh can stitch together a culture clash comedy, a conspiracy thriller and a high fantasy take on Shakespeare's histories, and it's still a viable blockbuster, even with near-unknowns in the lead roles. Both of them perfect for their parts, as well - Thor the affable dickhead, and a plausibly devilish Loki (and the idea that Hiddleston initially wanted to play Thor is baffling - if it were ever even remotely plausible then he must be an even better actor than he seems). The support includes some more familiar faces, almost all of whom seem perfectly at home in their roles - Idris Elba as Heimdall owns the role as well as winding up Nazis, Anthony Hopkins is a perfect Odin. The Warriors Three are a slight misfire: Hogun was always The Other One and the guy from Ichi the Killer can't change that; and even Titus Pullo was never going to convince as Volstagg when I'd so recently seen Orson Welles' Falstaff. Great Errol Flynn-ing from the guy playing Fandral, though.
And what do they do with all these ingredients? Smart things. Like, having the Earth action take place in a New Mexico town, because that's jeopardy enough and it makes a change from all the big cities that usually get imperilled, and besides there's Asgard for all that, and Asgard looks amazing - just Kirbytech enough without feeling like a clunky homage. And speaking of the comics references, ( spoiler ) in the post-credits sequence for which surprisingly few people stayed around. And it felt properly cosmic - stripping out the comics' usual compromise with christianity, when Jane Foster gasps 'my god' at the sight of Thor, you know it's meant literally. It helps that the whole thing looks and sounds so solid, right down to those end credits with Yggdrasil as a nebula. These are not aliens who've been taken for gods - they are gods.
Problems? Well, the Warriors Three I've mentioned, and Sif's not much better. Indeed, the female roles generally are a bit thin, except for Kat Dennings as Darcy, a character who if she was in the comics, I completely missed. Dennings is also in Defendor, an altogether less glitzy superhero film I watched this week. Essentially it's Kick-Ass with one quite plausible change: the would-be superhero is not an idealistic kid, but a mentally ill middle-aged man. Played with a brilliant mixture of anger, confusion and faith by Woody Harrelson. Well worth a look - but, let's be honest, not a patch on the punching-right-through-monsters fun of Thor.

On Saturday two places I've been past hundreds of times finally became places I'd been into. The Finsbury Park Nando's first, and later - after 'The Doctor's Wife', which was glorious in concept, and mostly in execution too, yet seemed oddly slow in places - the Unicorn. Which sits along the 29 and 253 route in that nowhere territory that is neither Camden nor Holloway, and which turns out to have the atmosphere and prices of a pub in at least Zone 4, and to feel oddly like a venue from a dream - "I was watching my flatmates play in a band, but when I turned around, we were all just stood in the corner of a suburban pub". And for all that I am now the non-musical inhabitant of the Maisionette Beautiful, the Indelicates album on which I am part of the backing choir is now available. And, regardless of my small contributions, very good indeed.

I picked up Edward Hollis' The Secret Lives of Buildings in the library more or less at random, but it's a fascinating read. Hollis is an architect by trade, but is fascinated by the great lies and false dreams of architects - the ways that buildings never quite turn out how they were supposed to, and that even if they do, people get in the way. And that then people get to a point where they start trying to pin down the authentic form of a building that never quite had one. It's psychogeography of a sort, I suppose, but nothing like the wandering, gonzo style with which the field has become almost synonymous. From the Parthenon to Vegas and Macao, it pieces together the story of humanity through what we've dreamed and built and repurposed.

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?

Does that massive new tower at Elephant & Castle have a name yet? I got my first proper look at it vaguely finished over the weekend and assumed it must be the Cheese Grater what with the wind turbine holes and slope making the top of it look exactly like a cheese grater, but no, apparently that's the one at Leadenhall. It certainly deserves a name, I rather like it.

I love music, but I've never felt I had much to contribute by making it. I'm very happy to write effusive posts on here about bands, or appear in their videos (another of which has just gone up), but they told me at school that I wasn't musical and I know this story is meant to be about horrid teachers failing to spot one's astonishing potential but no, in my case they had a point. Since coming to London, I have been in one band (for a given value of the word) for one night - The17, with Bill Drummond. I thought I'd best leave it there, because how do you top being one degree from the KLF?
By being on the next Indelicates album, apparently. augstone passed on an invite so I headed up to Walthamstow with him, his fellow Soft Close-Up David (who was also in the same The17 performance as me, as it happens), keith_totp and thedavidx, to all of whom a recording studio is pretty much a second home. I just tried my best not to a) break anything or b) lose my cool, even when I realised that Denim had recorded there. And Baxendale! And The Long Blondes! And that we were singing along as a sort of backing choir for Philip bloody Jeays (not physically present)! It's not as if I'm going to be individually audible or anything, but nonetheless, I'm on the next Indelicates album. Bloody Hell.

Otherwise, it's been a relatively quiet week and weekend - albeit also very pleasant, with Friday in the Ewok village and Sunday's barbeque managing a decent amount of cooking before the downpour, plus Prom Night on Saturday, the first time I've had a solid reason to wear a bow tie out after watching Matt Smith rock one in Doctor Who (and remember how ahead of time we thought "Geronimo!" was going to be his catchphrase and that it would soon get irritating? By my reckoning he's now said "Bow ties are cool" just as often as "Geronimo!"). Good little episode on Saturday - yes, it essentially stitched together three Buffy episodes ('Normal Again' for the basic premise, 'The Gift''s "What makes you think the other world is any better?" "It has to be" and the demonic ringmaster performance from 'Once More With Feeling'), then borrowed evil geriatrics from Hot Fuzz with a zombie film twist, but the seams didn't show, and even if they never used the name, the villain was the ruddy Valeyard! And still, those wonderful central performances - for the second week in a row my favourite bit in among so very many choices was a little, gestural thing, when the Doctor thinks the baby is due and adopts that panicked wicket-keeper stance. And because the BBC is utterly marvellous, it also gave us a penultimate Ashes to Ashes which has left me with no clue how they're going to resolve this, but a burning need to find out. I think I'm going to be a bit late to Nuisance tomorrow night.

The new Indelicates album is available for download on a 'pay what you want' basis. Which, for those of you who've never heard them before and need enticing, does include 'free'. Given it's the best album of the year so far, and I'd be very surprised if it weren't still the best come December, I think that's a pretty good deal. Hell, even if you can't spare the time to check out a whole album on my say so, just try one track: I would link to the beautiful, bereft acoustic version of 'Savages' except that's album-exclusive, so just for a change I'll recommend the disgusted Weimar cabaret stomp of 'Be Afraid Of Your Parents' instead.

Dean Spanley is an utterly charming film which I think will be loved by anyone who owned a dog as a child, especially if he was one of the Seven Great Dogs. Sam Neill, excellent even by his own standards, is an Edwardian clergyman who, when plied with Tokay, reminisces about his past life as a dog; Peter O'Toole, more cadaverous and cantankerous than ever, is the narrator's father. That narrator being Jeremy Northam, who makes for an excellent straight man and stops the whole enterprise capsizing into silliness, because this is a strange tale but emphatically not a silly one. It's based on a story by the great Lord Dunsany - though not one I know, so I can't speak to its fidelity or otherwise except to say that it definitely feels like Dunsany.

This lengthy David Simon interview - mainly about his new show Treme but of interest to any fans of his work - makes me realise how much I miss good lengthy pieces from the days when the Guardian's Saturday mag was slightly less flimsy. Compare and contrast this Jonathan Ross interview from the weekend, and note how much of the conversation is skimmed over, sketched in, especially when Ross talks about comics. This would not have been abtruse stuff - he's a smart man who realises he's evangelising to a general audience - but there's no space for it. What we mainly get, even while the paper tries to distance itself from the tabloid agenda, is a reprise of the Mail-defined talking points. Yes, from another angle, but wouldn't moving beyond them have been even better?

Saw two of my favourite bands over the past few days - also, incidentally, the two bands I think of whenever some fool asks why young bands aren't addressing the issues of the day. Any time you see such a diatribe, remember the options: the writer is unaware of The Vichy Government or The Indelicates, and hence too ignorant for anything he says to be worth attention; or else the writer could not understand their lyrics, or did not consider them sufficiently political because they made no mention of 'Tony B Liar more like', in which case he is too stupid for anything he says to be worth attention. Both bands are confident enough that their sets were pretty much stripped of the old favourites, and both are creative enough that it barely registered because the new stuff is at least as good. Where matters diverged was in the support. The Indelicates had England's finest chanson man, Philip Jeays, solo and even better that way, wowing an incongruously young section of the audience; a particularly melodic and vaguely Springsteen incarnation of Keith TOTP & his etcetera; and the increasingly lovely Lily Rae. Vichy, on the other hand, were lumbered with one Joyride. Given they caused only sorrow, and stayed in one place (the stage) when we really wished they'd depart, I wondered whether this name might be cause for a Trade Descriptions case, but apparently not. Ripping off The Fall and the Mary Chain as ineptly as I've ever seen, and that's saying something, they managed to be thoroughly rubbish in spite of having one member in a Girls Aloud t-shirt and a song with the chorus "I'm the Bishop of Southwark, it's what I do".

Just finished Max Adams' The Firebringers - At, science and the struggle for liberty in nineteenth-century Britain, which is a frustrating bloody book. The main problem I had was no fault of Adams' - he overlaps quite a bit with Richard Holmes' Age of Wonder, which I'd not long read. But the comparison does show how Holmes' 'relay race' structure serves him brilliantly, while Adams lacks restraint and tries to tell too many stories at once, breeding confusion and occasional repetition. I was mainly reading the book in so far as I wanted to know more about John Martin, the painter who "single-handedly invented, mastered and exhausted an entire genre of painting, the apocalyptic sublime". I've loved his work ever since I saw his final great trilogy, Judgment, in what is now Tate Britain - it hangs there still, though very badly situated. He was big news in his time, though critical opinion was not kind then and is even less so now; as far as I'm concerned he still sits only a very little behind his friend and contemporary Turner as one of the best painters, never mind British painters, ever. Adams, on the other hand, likes him more than the critics but less than the Regency public. Then, for whatever reason, he has attempted to make this a group biography - perhaps because he was told they sell better now, on which more later. So we also get the other Martin brothers: Richard the soldier (his autobiography is alas lost, so he mainly appears in 'mights'); Jonathan (yes, confusing, but in an age of high child mortality it happened a lot) the religious maniac who set York Minster ablaze; and William, who started as inventor and ended another lunatic, riding around on a self-designed velocipede with a brass-bound tortoiseshell as a helmet, selling pamphlets about how he'd been swindled, a few of the stories true but most sheer paranoia.
Except the Martin brothers are still not enough, so they become a spine for 'the Prometheans', an undeclared, unrealised movement united in their desire to free mankind. Their membership includes Shelley, Godwin, the Brunels, various politicians...or does it? Because Adams' definitin of Promethean ideals seems more Procrustean; obviously most of his posthumous conscripts don't quite fit it, for which they are ticked off. Shelley was too extreme in his declarations, hence unpublishable and useless - but the Reform Bills were too timid and compromised. There is still good stuff to be salvaged from among this historical kangaroo court, but it's a trial.
And then, of course, the publishers clearly told Adams that The Prometheans wouldn't sell, so the title had to be dumbed down to The Firebringers. It's a bit of a mess, but not an uninteresting one.

Stringer Bell is going to be in Branagh's Thor film. And we already knew Titus Pullo was involved, probably as Volstagg. I SAY THEE YAY. And speaking of things HBO, while the final Generation Kill did editorialise a little, while I don't think it's ever going to be as beloved as The Wire, that was an extremely good series - maybe even more so than The Wire it did a brilliant job of humanising the characters you hated, showing why they were such utter dicks, with even Godfather getting his moment at the end.

To my amazement, the proposed internet laws in the Queen's Speech were even worse than expected. If you've not been keeping up with the minutiae: the Government commissioned a report, Digital Britain, on how to reconcile the interests of the creative industries with those of net users. This report said that while unlicensed file-sharing was indeed rather naughty, internet disconnection was too draconian a penalty even for the guilty, never mind how many innocents would also be punished (Mum and Dad for the kids' filesharing, or a whole town for one illicit movie). So obviously, because we know how the government regards facts as dangerously subversive (just ask Professor Nutt), Peter Mandelson elbowed the relevant minister out of the spotlight, countermanded the report his own government had commissioned (they obviously didn't appoint a tame enough investigator, Hutton must have been busy), and countermanded anything sensible in it to put three-strikes disconnection back on the agenda. And, we now learn, so much more.
This in a world where Rupert Murdoch, until recently New Labour's bestest pal, talks about putting a pay wall around the websites of his various ghastly papers while stealing content from Edgar Wright. But you can bet that even if that happened two more times, even under the new rules, News International wouldn't get disconnected. In spite of how even musicians who don't make nearly as much money as they should would rather be ripped off online than live in a country which thinks disconnection is acceptable. The only consolation is that the relevant bill is profoundly unlikely to make it through before Goooooordon Brooown loses the next election. Not that I expect the other flavour of scum to propose anything better, you understand, but sometimes delay is the best you can hope for. After all, the horse might talk.

The Black Casebook collects a dozen strange Batman stories from 1951-1964, which is the period when the comic was as stupid as the old Adam West TV series, but without having to worry about the limited budget. So, Batman could be turned into a hulking monster, or find himself on an alien world called Zur-En-Arrh - which, if you've read Grant Morrison's run on the character, should explain why this collection has been put out, and why I was reading it. He contributes an introduction (although one which disagrees in some respects with the contents - he mentions 'The Rainbow Batman' when the book instead has 'The Rainbow Creature'. All the campy old elements are here - Bat-Mite and Ace the Bat-Hound - and by no sane standard are the stories or the art any good. Even the ideas are not so much "mad, brilliant ideas" as half-formed and hurries, born of desperation. Mainly it serves as a testament to Morrison's own talents, going back over the history of Batman and managing to find resonance even in these stupidest of stories which most modern writers would prefer to forget about.
Also, I know it's hardly novel to suggest Batman and Robin came across as a bit gay back in the day, but this book opens with 'A Partner For Batman' where you really can't avoid it. Robin has broken his leg just as Batman is about to train up a new Batman-type for an unnamed European country. Except Robin is convinced this is just a cover story and Batman wants to drop him in favour of Wingman! Cue such lines as, while Batman carries the injured Robin like a bride, "Batman's doing his best to sound gay. But I can tell his heart isn't in it!". And, from one onlooker, "A man is better than a kid any day!". Poor discarded twink.

Haven't had the energy or the funds to be out and about so much this week; even daytime wanders have been a bit sub-optimal, like yesterday when Highbury was deserted and instead of relishing this, I just wondered if it was anything to do with how very tentacly those red-leaved plants look once the leaves are finally gone. But, this just makes me look forward to tonight's Black Plastic all the more. Makes the weekend feel like a weekend, something which can rather slide when one is away from the habit of the working week.

Boris scrapped his first bendy buses today. His reign has now justified itself, and anything else is just a bonus.

If you ever find yourself having a terrible moment of clarity about the gigging scene, wondering whether it isn't just a terrible parade of narcissists and special needs cases taking the name of art in vain - seriously, go see an open mic poetry night and your worries will vanish in an instant.
The band-based elements of the evening worked rather better (OK, shambolically - but entertainingly so, particularly the version of 'Unity Mitford' which, courtesy of a clown's guitar, ended up somewhere between Slash and 'My Lovely Horse'), and one of the Indelicates-affiliated poets (plays god in The Book of Job - The Musical, apparently) had his moments. And afterwards, after one of my occasional forays into roadieing (roadying?), we met some very generous but totally lost fruit thieves. But the open mic stuff...OK, if you do take the advice in the first paragraph, be aware that you do so at your own risk.

There's an art exhibition underway in the 'phone boxes behind the Royal Academy - because apparently that's where rejected pictures for the Summer Exhibition get left. It's pseudonymous, perhaps for legal reasons, but...well, some of the booths are quite shiney on the inside, shall we say. I like the postcard reading 'email mum' in among the tart cards, but possibly the most powerful contribution is the way that one of the booths has an overwhelming smell of stale urine - undoubtedly a comment on the degree to which Marcel Duchamp's urinal has at once defined and limited so much modern art. Right?

A lot of people have suggested - I hope in jest - that unemployment would see me getting into daytime TV. Even before the age of the DVD box set, I had quite enough reading and wandering to catch up on that this was never going to happen, but I was looking forward to some classic "films so sad they're only shown when the country's at work", and until this week I'd been disappointed. Sure, there were some Powell & Pressburgers, but I already have those on DVD (having got into them, if memory serves, through a screening of A Matter of Life and Death last time I was dole scum, a decade back), some Miyazaki I've already seen on Film4, but this week there was finally something new (well, old, obviously, but new to me). First, Jimmy Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. My policy of attempting any film which has given the Flaming Stars a title doesn't always work out - I think the only real great I ever found that way was The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and plenty were abandoned in short order - but this is a nice, nasty little gangster flick of the old school, all greed and brutality and innocence led astray in a world where, Production Code or no, it's clear there was no other choice. And then on Thursday, Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, the original Shangri-La story, which influenced everything from Iron Fist to Neal Stephenson's Anathem but has a tragic, terribly real escapism all its own, Ronald Colman the great diplomat who finds an earthly paradise away from all the struggle of the outside world - but can he bear to stay there, and if he does, what will it cost him? So seductive, and so much more topical than whichever catchpenny nonsense is being shown in primetime about the State of Things, with the inhabitants of the happy valley perplexed by the pointless avarice of the outside world: "Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! What unintelligent leadership! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity, crashing headlong against each other, propelled by an orgy of greed and brutality."

Not a dream, not an imaginary story, but the episode of South Pacific from two weeks ago (I forget where, reprised in the last couple of minutes but the whole show is pretty awesome). Nature is mental.

Didn't see as many bands/people as planned this weekend, as a combination of late-running gigs and inexplicable (though possibly weather-based) tiredness left two-stage plans looking untenable. So sorry to catbo and Artery, though if the latter are reading this I'll be surprised and slightly creeped-out. Saturday was the ever-eccentric Barnacles (who, by leaving their sailor hats at the gig, contributed to a later outbreak of camp posing and eventually Benny Hill impressions) followed by an 18 Carat Love Affair whom the sound-mix left rather less shiny than usual - though it seemed to suit the megaphone monster apparently called 'Truman Capote' which has now been added to their set. In between, we hid in the Famous Cock, whose emptiness on a Saturday night can't all be down to the Victoria line having another weekend off, and might instead owe something to it being a contender for London's most character-less boozer (the L*rr*k doesn't count - that has a soul, and its soul is despair). Afterwards, realising the Newington Green plan is no longer going to happen, we danced to Britpop classics, AC/DC and the Inspiral Carpets. Yes, in 2009, though in our defence it was 'Saturn V'.
Sunday sees Jonny Cola torpedoed by equipment issues. Then there are two other bands, one of which has pretty enough personnel that I give them three songs rather than the usual one-and-a-bit to impress me, before deciding instead to hang outside and take a brief trip to Gosh (Beta Ray Bill!). Then the new New Royal Family, playing 50/50 their own hits (I have already forgotten the 'Rules OK' dance routine) and rock'n'roll classics, thedavidx in an excellent Teddy Boy jacket. Unwisely, I have by this point decided that yes, maybe I do want a drink. I really didn't. Between this and the venue's eau de vomit (thanks, smoking ban!) I only manage two songs of the promising Last Army before departing.

Simon Indelicate on the music industry's woes; probably the best short piece on the subject I have ever seen, and we haven't exactly been short of them these past few years, have we? Contains bonus comment on why 'piracy' is a bloody stupid term to use for the illegal copying of data.