No 90mm last week 'cos I was Illy McSickerson of Crappy Town and, to be honest, I've not really been able to shake it this week either. Bleeeeuurgh.
But it's a bright, sunny but cold day and kind of reminds me of being in Toronto. So this seems appropriate.
Updated: weirdly enough there's actually a short film about a man's ever more exteme attempts to get it out of his head.
Named after the West African Trickster God with "with 'Skunk' added to 'make the name nastier'" you can see why Skunk Anansie were tipped as being the next huge thing. A charismatic and incredibly striking lead singer with socially charged yet bouncy and danceable tracks. They never really seemed to get mega-huge though and then, in 2001, they just split up. I have no idea why.
Always liked this video, not much to say about it though.
Liked this song too but, I have to admit, video's a bit poo though.
Like Don Hertzfeldt my continued adventures flirting with continuity are becoming increasingly plagued by haphazard interaction with "facts" and "sanity" but, you know what. I DON'T CARE. MUHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA. I can do whatever I want AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT! I am the Alpha and the Omega. I have become Darth destroyer of rational sequences!
*cough*
Ok, look. I'll level with you. I'm treading tenuously here and if I go with the Insanity Defence then there's a chance I might just get away with it. Ok?
So basically the problem is that I went to see Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine on Friday in their definitely-last-one-ever never-coming-back 20-years-since-we-formed 10-years-since-we-split-up reunion gig. Carter were one of my favourite bands when I was a nipper and so I felt I really ought to do something to commemorate that. But I'm stuck with this every-more-burdensome shouty-womens bands thing that only has a few left on the list and my OCD style nature won't let me just abandon it.
Which leaves me with a dilemma.
However, surfing the residual come downs of a rather too many retro-nostalgic 'cider and blacks' the solution hit me with all the subtlety of a bottle of White Lightning.
Bear with me - it's not pretty but it will have to do.
First off - this is Shampoo.
Who did a song called "Trouble" which, if you remember it at all you'll remember it as being annoyingly catchy.
Now watch that video. It's not annoyingly catchy - it's actually just crap and it's annoyingly self-evident that they really can't sing. Shampoo are actually a bit interesting - they wrote the first Manic Street Preachers fanzine and were in the MSP video for 'Little Baby Nothing' (this was presumably before MSP got a bit preachy and rubbish and James Dean Bradfield porked up and started turning into someone who looks like they're a woodwork teacher at school).
Like No Doubt they started off doing vaguely punky stuff and then realised thta there was more money to be made doing Pop Punk which allows suburban middle class teenage girls to feel punky without actually being punky. They are now big in Japan, natch.
Then, in 1995, Carter released "The Young Offender's Mum" which had a cover of said song as a B-side. I think you'll agree that it's much, much better.
And so, with a conceptual skip and a jump and a touch of intellectual dishonesty we're where I wanted to be having skipped past Shampoo who, let's face it, are a bit rubbish, with maximum possible haste. Hurrah for intellectual dishonesty!
However, we're now faced with yet another problem. Like many of the bands that I liked in the mid-nineties the best songs often had really shite videos. This presents us with somewhat of a dilemma - good video or the best songs? The cop out solution, and the one I'm going to use here, is to post multiple videos thus sucking bandwidth from YouTube and depriving Google of those vital pennies.
In order then - probably the best known Carter single, the one that gets the best sing-a-longs at gigs and probably the only single ever to chart anywhere in the world that references Nicholas van Hoogstraten. As an added bonus it pretty much sums up exactly what a Carter gig was like back in the day and if you take an average of all the young men in the video then you get a pretty good reference to what I looked like back then including horrific undercut.
It's also the track that contains the phrase "This ones for the grebos, the crusties and the goths" which basically summed it all up, to be honest.
Then an attempt at another 'proper' video with some nice London porn - for Americans and other aliens it's Carnaby Street they're using to bother and confuse the tourists, notable for being the home of 60s Swinging London™.
Finally - I used to have a 9ft tall poster for this single hanging on the wall opposite the end of my bed and every morning when I was at home (as opposed to at school) I'd wake up to the words "includes Down the Tube Station at midnight and other Black and White Post Punk classics"
But that was to underestimate them - ok, so they looked a bit daft but they were punk, probably the last great English punk band if I'm pushed. And the lyrics were genius - forget Pete Docherty who looks like a over hyped greasy thumb in a hat - they covered bullying in the British Army (Bloodsports for All), slum land lords (Sheriff Fatman), the peace process in Ireland (Look Ma No Hands) and a host of other socially relevant topics in a way that no-one else (other than maybe Billy Bragg) was doing at the time but did it without being preachy and with wit and with the kind of clever puns and word play that I'm led to believe only Rammstein do now (seriously - Du Hast has incredibly clever lyrics).
And the live gigs were amazing.
Gosh, I've gone on a bit.
I found this lying around an old drive somewhere - the thumbnail doesn't really do it justice but it appears to be an attempt to auto generate a Quicktime movie based around the top image search results for the word "conform"
... it's possible I'd been listening to too much Cabaret Voltaire
Look, it's a slow Sunday evening, ok and I'm absent mindedly drinking tea and catching up on stuff whilst the the exploding sound of ill-gotten consumer explosives punctuates the otherwise oddly soothing sound of the traffic on the Holloway Road. Forgive me a little introspection.
