1 post tagged “the jackal”

It's odd how sometimes completely insignificant events can be etched with startling clarity on your brain but yet you can forget fairly important details of really major events in your life.

It's like that when I remember the first time I listened to "Better Living Through Chemisty". I was standing in an Our Price on the Kings Road in with a friend of mine called Alex having blown off college for the day. I was actually listening to the OST for "The Jackal" which was a crappy film but had a pretty great soundtrack (including "Western" by PFM) and there was the one track, "Going Out Of My Head" by this guy Fat Boy Slim which I really dug.

You have to remember that, at the time, Big Beat didn't sound incredibly light weight and clichéd. "Exit Planet Dust" had been released a few years ago and "Dig Your Own Hole" had just come out. The Chemical Brother's were doing their Heavenly Social sets at the Turnmills and I'd heard of this club down in Brighton called the "Big Beat Boutique".

So, next to "The Jackal" soundtrack OurPrice had kindly placed this album with a 3.5" floppy on the front cover - a reference apparently to New Order's "Blue Monday" and a title that was a nod to both the Chemical Brothers and, allegedly, to Norman Cook's use of Ecstasy to get over depression.

I remembered Cook from The Housemartins and as his previous incarnations in Beats International, as Pizzaman and later as Freakpower so I figured what the hell and blew a little more of my student grant on the CD. I'm sure that if the tax payers who funded my jaunt to university had known they would have understood.

And I listened to it a lot those first few weeks - I'm pretty sure I got more out of it than if I'd spent the money on extravagances like 'food' or 'text books'.

I actually have no idea whether this next video is official or not - I suspect no but what the hell, it's pretty anyway. The crosses are apparently in the town of Siauliai in Lithuania

and finally, in honour of this weekend and because the video, whilst home made, has a certain mesmerising quality to it

which makes me wish I was at college again just so I could blow off lectures and go lie on some grass somewhere.