celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I was struck, on reading through the various obituaries and tributes for music industry mogul and Arista label founder Clive Davis, by his resemblance to actor, comedian and gravelly-voiced professional Londoner Mike Reid.

Reid (who died back in 2007) got a mention (the only one, as far as I can tell) on this blog almost exactly a year ago in a musical context. Reid's voice, general look and mannerisms were, I'd assume, largely the inspiration for the Fast Show's Dave Angel character. Davis, on the other hand, sounds (or sounded, anyway) pretty much exactly like you would expect him to sound. 

celoubrity junkeylikey of the day

Cast your mind back, if you will, to (roughly) this time three years ago, when we'd just moved house and were sifting through the mountain of junk that the previous occupant had left behind. We never actually got to meet him - the closest we got was talking to him through a closed front door when we came to do a second viewing of the house with the estate agent and found him unexpectedly at home, self-isolating after contracting COVID. Perhaps, and I'm being as charitable as I possibly can here, this disrupted his plans to do some clearing out of assorted junk in the lead-up to handing the house over and eventually led to him just saying fuck it, I'm off, and bailing out.

The aforementioned junk was all over the house, in the loft and also in the rickety metal shed occupying a corner of the back garden. The stuff in the shed probably contained the most interesting material, including a pair of handcuffs and a diary which I think belonged to the previous owner's ex-wife and seemed to have been started in the wake of her having been dumped by some subsequent boyfriend.

On a similar theme to the handcuffs, the junk in the loft contained a browned old paper CD/DVD envelope bearing the legend "ORGY" but sadly with nothing inside. Maybe this was the one item the previous owner deemed worthy of packing up and taking with him. 

Also in the loft was an intriguing sepia photo - from quite a few years back, judging by the size of the collars - which could be the previous owner, but could also, judging by the heavy-lidded eyes that have clearly Seen Too Much, be a young Lou Reed. 

Anyway, the rickety metal shed pictured above (the green structure just visible on the right of the first photo) is no more and has been replaced by something unimaginably more fabulous, which I might devote a whole future post to, if I can be arsed. 

criclebrity lookeylikey of the day

Here's a timely one with the Ashes series in Australia about to kick off (tonight, in fact) and all England supporters filled with a mixture of trepidation (the last three Australian Ashes series have finished 5-0, 4-0, 4-0 in Australia's favour) and that most crippling and corrosive of all emotions, hope. I suppose a good start would be the series not being effectively over after the very first ball as it was last time. 

Anyway, here's England's unexpected nemesis from last time Scott Boland and actor Wes Bentley, one of the breakout stars of the multi-Oscar-winning American Beauty, a film which seems to have had a sharp (and probably partly Spacey-related) drop-off in critical regard in the last couple of decades but which I recall seeing a couple of times and quite enjoying, while noting that it seemed to think itself slightly cleverer and deeper than it probably actually was. One odd thing about it, though, is that all three of the young actors who were shot to stardom after playing major roles - Bentley, Thora Birch and Mena Suvari - have, while continuing to work in films, receded into relative obscurity since and not become the major stars that everyone predicted they would be. Bentley seems to have navigated the standard actorly route of sudden colossal stardom -> drug addiction, extreme mental derangement -> sobriety, return to regular film work prototyped by Robert Downey jr. among others. The only thing I'm aware of having seen him in since American Beauty is the remake of Pete's Dragon which also starred Robert Redford.

I'm not going to do a separate post for it, but we haven't done an "incidental music spot of the day" for a while so I will just draw your attention to the trailer linked above making use of Baba O'Riley by The Who, a song which has featured here before, back in 2007. 

incidental music spot(s) of the day

It seems that Adriano Celentano's 1972 single Prisencolinensinainciusol is the advert music of choice at the moment, as I've seen (or more accurately heard) it used in two places lately, firstly this easyJet advert and secondly this advert for Poretti beer. 

I first encountered Prisencolinensinainciusol while watching this episode of QI, which was first broadcast in December 2014 - I couldn't say whether I watched it "live" or not; probably not. Anyway, Adriano Celentano seems to occupy a similar niche in Italian popular culture as Serge Gainsbourg occupied in France - massively popular and influential in his own country, little-known outside it. Celentano is still alive (at 87), however, Gainsbourg very much is not.

Just to recycle a couple of observations from this tweet (plus a couple of new ones):

• it's an absolute banger and somewhat ahead of its time for 1972
• its influence on Yello's The Race in particular seems clear to me: insistent beat, semi-spoken lyrics, parpy horn stabs and all
• Mike Reid's cover version Freezin' Cold in 89 Twoso was released not, as you might have assumed, in 1989, but in 1974 and is not significantly more comprehensible than the original despite presumably containing some actual English words. He definitely says THAT'S TRIFFIC at one point, though
• Celentano is name-checked (at about 2:05 here) in Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3 by Ian Dury and the Blockheads

The other thing I noticed this week was during a viewing of Beethoven's 2nd, the vastly-inferior sequel to the barely-tolerable Beethoven, featuring a dead-eyed Charles Grodin, phoning in a performance while presumably looking forward to paying off his mortgage, and also some "endearing" kids and a large St. Bernard dog, which we Brits, as custodians of English as she should be spoke, would pronounce St. BER-nard in the proper God-fearing way. The Americans, however, pronounce it as St. Ber-NARD with the emphasis on the second syllable in a slightly weird and jarring way. This is by no means my biggest gripe with the movie, just to be clear.

One of my many other gripes is the seemingly arbitrary use of Jimmy Olsen's Blues by the Spin Doctors as musical overlay to some sort of comedy montage. I have fond memories of the Spin Doctors being A Thing for about five minutes back in the early 1990s and I did at one point have a copy of their album Pocket Full Of Kryptonite, which has a few rockin' tunes on it, along with some more questionable stuff. The good stuff includes the hit singles Two Princes and Little Miss Can't Be Wrong, as well as the opening track Jimmy Olsen's Blues. Now I had no idea who Jimmy Olsen was, but it's pretty clear from the subject matter of the song that he's part of the Superman universe, that being what the song is about, and one of the lines in the song provides the album's title. A song with that clear and specific a set of subject matter is a bit of an odd choice for a film sequence completely unrelated to it; to put it another way, it's a bouncy tune and I guess it works fine as long as you don't listen to the lyrics, something I concede the film's target audience of under-10s probably don't do. 

I should add I also remember seeing the Spin Doctors at Glastonbury in what this clip tells me was 1994 - my principal memory is of some crunchy renditions of the hits and a bit too much free-form guitar noodling from the undoubtedly very talented Eric Schenkman, which I evidently had not taken enough drugs to fully appreciate. 

incidental music spot of the day

Hey, we haven't done one of these for a while (three-and-a-half years or so in fact), but I was struck by the loose yet funky tune that plays over the latest Haven Holidays advert, as it was highly recognisable to me as Can You Get To That by Funkadelic. My recollection is that I discovered Funkadelic off the back of some sort of Greatest Guitar Solos Of All Time article in a music magazine that pointed me to Maggot Brain, which certainly fits the bill as it is essentially a ten-minute guitar solo courtesy of guitarist Eddie Hazel.

That in turn led me to the album of the same name, and thence a few of the other albums from their early/mid-1970s heyday, including my favourite one Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On which not only was a fixture in the CD player in the RV we hired for our honeymoon in Canada in 2011, but also provided, in Sexy Ways, the first dance song at our wedding in June 2011, a choice I absolutely stand by 14 years later, even as I largely disown the improvised dance moves I came up with to accompany it.

As an aside, if the Stone Roses hadn't heard the title track of Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On before they wrote the lengthy funky stop-start outro to I Am The Resurrection then I'll eat my hat. 

aged blogger smells rat, headline meaning

Here's an interesting headline from Rolling Stone which I spotted the other day. Nothing so weird about that one, you'll probably be saying, it's just confirming that Steve Howe really did sue someone (it's not clear who) for some sort of copyright infringement over a song.

The key to smelling a rat and subsequently the real meaning of the headline here is actually knowing who Steve Howe is, something which probably divides sharply along lines of musical preference and, depressingly, age. Anyway, Howe is the guitarist with British progressive rock band Yes, who, rather remarkably, are still a going concern, albeit with only Howe as an "original" member. I say "original" as even Howe wasn't in the very early incarnations of the group, only coming on board for the making of their breakthrough album The Yes Album in 1970. I suppose what I mean is he's the only member from their "classic" period which ran from about 1970 to about 1974.

Anyway, despite what the surface reading of the headline might suggest, it is in fact Howe and the current incarnation of Yes who are being sued for copyright infringement by a guy called Riz Story. To be fair the sub-headline makes that reasonably clear.

Have I heard any of the songs in question? No. Do I, in fact, give a fuck? Not really. The point is the headline, and some odd American conventions regarding headline structure, in particular the use of a comma to splice words together in place of the word "and". This is jarring to the uninitiated and highly satirisable even to the presumably initiated (both the fictional headlines below are from The Onion). 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I experienced a jarring moment while reading about the upcoming change in presenter on the Radio 2 breakfast show. I should make it clear that while I do listen to the show, in very specific circumstances that we'll come to in a second or two, I don't really care who presents it, and I find both Zoe Ball and Scott Mills fairly uninspiring as radio presenters. The reason I listen to it at all is that it's the noise that my alarm clock/radio is programmed to make at the appointed hour in the morning, on weekdays anyway. I can't say I actually pay much attention to the show's contents, but instead generally whack the snooze button once and then when it goes off again heave myself out of bed, mostly drowning out the radio with a cacophony of groaning and creaking and farting noises. 

But why Radio 2? The rudimentary reasoning goes as follows: Radio 4 might either be not loud enough to wake me up, or the topics discussed on the Today programme might distract me into shouting at the radio or something and make me late. Radio 1, on the other hand, is probably a bit brash and noisy and inclined to Young People's Music which, honestly, is just shouting with a beat. What about craftsmanship? Ballads? Anyway, Radio 2 it is. The added advantage of Zoe Ball's show in its current form is that she does a sort of version of Thought For The Day (called, if you please, Pause For Thought) just after the first snooze interval elapses, so that gives me a good incentive to get up and turn the radio off before Kate Bottley or someone similar comes on and tells us all about how if Jesus were here today (and of course he is, in a very real but also not actually real sense) he'd be down at the local multi-storey car park doing some sick parkour in baggy shorts and a hoody, or something.

Anyway, I seem to have gone on a bit, but no harm done. The point is that the article on the BBC News website included a picture of what appeared to be a crude and slightly cruel effigy of Scott Mills hewn from shiny pinky-orange wax and then left in a room that was slightly too warm for a couple of hours, but was in fact, it turns out, the actual Scott Mills. The first thought I had was that he looked a bit like those two guys who'd had their chins extended (among various other procedures) so that they ended up looking a bit like Vic & Bob's The Ponderers, only with more terrifying hair and teeth. The trouble was, I had no idea of their names. Luckily I am pleased to be able to report that a Google search for "weird plastic surgery guys" proved instantly fruitful and revealed their identity: Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff, both of whom died within a week of each other of COVID-19 in early 2022. That's Grichka in the photo below, or so the internet tells me, but it doesn't really make much difference.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Special recently deceased sporting celebrity slash dreadful 1980s music throwback edition today, as we see recently deceased former Olympic shot putter, World's Strongest Man and budgie enthusiast Geoff Capes face off against Joe Fagin, singer of various songs soundtracking the hit TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (a show I should say I have never seen even a single minute of) one of which, That's Livin' Alright, gave him his solitary chart hit in early 1984. 

Despite the one-off nature of this brush with the charts, Fagin had the barefaced chutzpah to entitle his 1996 compilation album All The Hits Plus More. The cover images available on the internet for his earlier album Time Is A Thief reveal an amusing typo in the title of the song Love Hangs By A Thread which puts a whole new Berlin leather bar spin on it:

lookeylikey slash headline of the day

Is it just me who has trouble parsing this headline I saw the other day?

OK, so let's start at the beginning: "I'm a Wimbledon champion marrying fan" - well, OK so you're a fan; I might have hyphenated "Wimbledon champion-marrying" or even "Wimbledon-champion-marrying" just to make it clearer, but let's carry on ... wait, now the rest of the sentence doesn't make sense.

Back up all the way to the beginning and it becomes clear that the starting "I'm" relates to "champion" rather than "fan", and that it was the fan who stopped the champion for a selfie. It didn't help that I initially read "help run tennis" as "help ruin tennis", but that's the fault of my appalling age-related vision deterioration, not the headline writers. 

It seems to me, and I could be wrong, that assuming "fan" to be the subject of the first line is the more natural reading. It would really only have taken the addition of an "a" before "fan" to flip the default reading around, though. I'm not sure whether this is more properly classified as a garden-path sentence or a noun pile-up, or maybe even a crash blossom.

Anyway, the actual story relates to 2017 Wimbledon champion Garbiñe Muguruza, the only player to defeat each of the Williams sisters in Grand Slam finals, and, and I hesitate to say this these days for fear of being LITERALLY CANCELLED, possessor of a very lovely pair of legs. The guy she was accosted by for a selfie in New York just happens to be a top model who was working for Tom Ford at the time, just in case you want to calculate your chances of being able to successfully pull off a similar manoeuvre on the top tennis star of your choice without getting your ass tased and ending up with an ASBO.

Impossible to comment on women's tennis in any way without sounding like a colossal sex pervert. #Wimbledon2014

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 28, 2014

Anyway. it also struck me while looking through some photos of Muguruza for, hem hem, "research purposes" that she looks a bit like Imogen Heap, who I see I used the phrase "strange equine beauty" in connection with here, and also compared with Ronni Ancona. I actually think the Muguruza-Heap resemblance is closer, but I include all three anyway; make up your own mind.

a world in a grain of xand

Another men's golf major, two more additions to the list of record low rounds. You'll recall that that number has stood at 62 since 2017, and the list has now, as of the completion of the 2024 PGA Championship, expanded to five entries. Xander Schauffele's round on the first day at Valhalla is the more significant of the two as it provides the first example of a round of 62 leading to a victory, and also the first example of a golfer shooting the new(ish) record low score twice. You'll recall that Greg Norman and Vijay Singh were the only double-featurees on the old list. 

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Branden Grace	Open	2017	third	tied 6th	Jordan Spieth
Rickie Fowler	US Open	2023	first	tied 5th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	US Open	2023	first	tied 10th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	USPGA	2024	first	WON	Xander Schauffele
Shane Lowry	USPGA	2024	third	tied 6th	Xander Schauffele

Two further related topics: firstly I can't hear Xander Schauffele's name without mentally singing "every day I'm Schauffele" in the style of "every day I'm shufflin'" from LMFAO's 2011 dance-floor banger Party Rock Anthem.

Secondly I was struck by the oddity of Schauffele winning the PGA after Scottie Scheffler had won the Masters; in particular that the name of the winner of the second major of the year contained 88.9% (i.e. eight out of nine) of the letters in the name of the winner of the first major of the year (only the "r" is missing). But is this a record? Well, no, or at least not if you allow for the trivial case of the first two majors of the year being won by the same person (and therefore the rating being 100%). That's rare, but has been done a handful of times, most recently by Jordan Spieth in 2015. 

A wander through the archives will convince you that there have been years where the rating has been zero (i.e. no letters were shared) - Floyd and Pate in 1976, Faldo and Irwin in 1990, Immelman and Woods in 2008, Willett and Johnson in 2016 for example. In other years the numbers bounce around somewhere in between. More than 50% seems rare - for instance Phil Mickelson in 2010 shares 55.6% of the letters in his surname with Graeme McDowell, but if you look at the following few years you get 30% in 2011 (Schwartzel/McIlroy), 50% in 2012 (Watson/Simpson), 40% in 2013 (Scott/Rose) and 16.7% in 2014 (Watson/Kaymer). 

I'm going to conclude that the Scheffler/Schauffele sharing ratio is a record, without checking exhaustively, because it seems almost impossible that it isn't, and I can't be arsed to do the legwork. I haven't looked, and am not going to, at the equivalent comparison between second and third majors of the year, but if the upcoming US Open is won by newcomer Rendax Easelchuff I imagine that would also set a record. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Anyone been wondering: what's that lanky guy out of The Verve been doing for the last 20-odd years? No, me neither, and to be honest you won't find out by reading this article on the BBC website which is basically just a promo piece for some upcoming solo gigs. What you will find, though, is that having avoided the stereotypical fiftysomething route of just getting really fat and bald, he's (we should give him a name: Richard Ashcroft) instead just got slightly more big-nosed and wrinkly while seemingly still retaining the leonine rock star mane - I say "seemingly" because he could of course be completely bald on top under the hat, indeed the whole hair could be one of those comedy hairpieces that's attached to the hat and lifts right off. 

Ashcroft and The Verve have parlayed quite a long and intermittently successful career of the back of maybe two years in the late 1990s when they coincided with the Zeitgeist, basically around the time of their third album Urban Hymns. In hindsight a lot of it sounds a bit one-paced and dreary these days - Sonnet would probably be the one to hang on to. 

Anyway, Ashcroft resembles no-one these days so much as 70s and 80s cannabis-smuggler, Welshman and late-90s celeb (surfing the same vaguely Loaded-esque ladsy Zeitgeist as Ashcroft) Howard Marks. You can make up your own The Drugs Don't Work jokes if you like. 

here'th thumbthing interethting

You might recall, if you follow me on Twitter/X, and why in the name of God would you, that I have occasionally - as a twisted means of expressing my love for, and pride in, my kids, though in a typically British oblique and emotionally-repressed way - mentioned some of their fascinating genetic traits, all thankfully on the quirky and endearing side of the dividing line that separates them from the more extreme tentacly Lovecraftian horrors that must be DESTROYED WITH FIRE.

A couple of examples are below:

fascinatingly-named genetic conditions that I exhibit which I have passed on to my eldest daughter: Darwin's tubercle (unilateral), Morton's toe (bilateral, as I think it always is). also, Shatner's bassoon, etc. #genetics

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 13, 2020

the internet is great. I have one of these, as do my father and my eldest daughter. wife and other two kids don't have it. FREAKS! https://t.co/sh0F1C1dwL

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 25, 2019

Another example follows: I'm not sure that we've applied a greater level of scrutiny to the boy in terms of his development after his early arrival and spending the first 91 days of his life in a series of gradually-larger plastic boxes with bleepy machines attached in hospital, but I suppose it's plausible that we might have. Anyway, one thing I've always noticed about Huwie is what I perceive to be his freakishly enormous thumbs. I have always taken this as an indication of future tallness as an adult once the rest of his anatomy catches up with his thumbs - as an aside, although he is currently slightly below average height for his age, the canonical example of teeny prematurity not being a bar to tallness and sporting prowess as an adult is recently-retired cricketer Stuart Broad, born at 28 weeks (Huwie was 27) but eventually a strapping 6 feet 5 inches.

However, it turns out that this may have been en error of perspective - I don't mean that I was accidentally holding the boy's thumbs really close, more that my expectations for appropriate child thumb size will have been influenced by my two daughters. And why not, you might say, except that Nia, who is generally curious about all things and now has a phone with access to the internet, ran into the kitchen the other day excitedly shouting "Dad, I've got toe thumbs!". Sorry, love, you've got what? "Alys has got them too!" Hang on, what?

Well, it turns out that "toe thumbs" are actually a thing, that particular phrase being one of several common colloquial descriptions of a genetic trait more properly called brachydactyly type D. This is the most common form of brachydactyly, supposedly affecting around 2-3% of the population. To illustrate, here is a parade of thumbs:

So you can see that Huwie's thumbnails are almost circular or perhaps even elliptical, with the major axis oriented vertically, whereas Nia's are elliptical(ish) with the major axis oriented horizontally and Alys' thumbnails barely exist at all. We're not fully comparing apples with apples here because Alys (like me) is an inveterate nail-biter while Nia and Huwie are not. Nonetheless there is a stark contrast between Huwie's thumbs, which give a general impression of tapering elegantly, and the girls' thumbs which are squared-off and stubby. No suggestion of any other genetic consequences of having weird thumbs, thankfully, and the only practical consequence is that neither of the girls will be able to play the guitar in the style of Richie Havens. 

So if it's an inheritable genetic trait, Dave, you'll be saying, what do your thumbs look like?

My desk isn't broken, by the way; I had to stitch two images together (badly) owing to a need to have a hand to hold the camera with. It's hard to be objective about something that, after 50+ years of looking at them, implicitly defines my mental image of what a "normal" thumb looks like, but I'd say I occupy a centre ground between Huwie and the girls. My ellipses are definitely horizontal but there's a bit more nail (even allowing for their bitten state) than, say, Alys has. 

Just for completeness, Hazel's are below. She has pretty regular vertical ellipses, so I have to conclude that it's me who is the carrier of the genetic freakery here.

celebrity lookeylikeys of the day

I have two for you today - now in theory I could parlay that into two posts in a pathetic and transparent bid to bump the blog stats up, post frequency and aggregate numbers not being what they once were back in the pre-marriage, pre-kids glory glory days of 2008, but you know and I know that that would be a shameful and hollow sham and a travesty and I respect you (yes, even you) too much to do it.

So here's Dan Hartman, successful songwriter of the 1970s and 1980s and occasional solo artist in his own right (1985's I Can Dream About You is probably the one you remember if you're of a similar age to me), and Kim Hughes, Australian batsman of the late 1970s and early 1980s, most remembered - rather unjustly - for his luckless stint as captain during the 1981 Ashes series when he was on the wrong end of Ian Botham's various legendary deeds, and for resigning the captaincy in a tearful hot mess in 1984. 

Secondly, Huwie recently got Neil Gaiman's Pirate Stew out of the library, and among Chris Riddell's many splendid illustrations of the motley piratical crew is this flamboyant chap, who, I'm sure you'll agree, closely resembles Dave Navarro, guitarist with Jane's Addiction since their formation in the mid-1980s and with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers for quite LIDDERALLY One Hot Minute in the mid-1990s. 

four candles

I tell you what, the life of a tedious atheist is not an easy one, especially at Christmas. I know I don't complain much about it on here these days, but only because the weight of the world has crushed my spirit and, you know, what's the point of anything any more, really? Nonetheless there is a fine line to be walked between going WELL ACTUALLY every time anything vaguely religious is mentioned and nodding along in acquiescence to all of it, just for a quiet life. 

A good example is Christmas carol singing, which I quite like, not because I am filled with religious fervour at celebrating the birth of our lord and saviour Jesus Christ, but because communal singing is quite a nice cultural tradition, especially when it's cold and dark outside. The difficulty here is that if you want to do it you will very probably have to put up with quite a bit of religious nonsense interwoven with the occasional carols, since in general even the Christmas Eve singing happens in the context of a religious service, albeit mercifully shorn of the really heavy-duty praying and sermonising.

We decided that it might be nice to take the kids along for a bit of a sing this year and so we decided to go to the afternoon carol service at a nearby church. This turned out to be St. Mark's, a short drive away, rather than St. John's just around the corner, purely owing to scheduling convenience. Both churches are affiliated with the Church in Wales, which is broadly the Welsh equivalent of the Church of England. St. John's does allude on its website to being "firmly in the Tractarian/Anglo-Catholic tradition"; fortunately I neither need nor desire to know what the fuck that means, nor how significant any of these minor doctrinal differences are.

Anyway, it was perfectly nice, and they stuck mostly to the well-known favourites in terms of the carol selection, though disappointingly didn't finish will the usual cathartic bellow through O Come All Ye Faithful. There wasn't a huge congregation, probably 60-80 people at most, and so I did encounter the slight catch-22 situation you can find yourself in here, particularly if your voice is on the low side compared to the rest of the singers: you can't really work out if you're singing in tune without singing loudly enough to hear yourself, by which time it's a bit late. In a larger crowd making a bigger noise you can do it more discreetly, or at least conclude that it doesn't matter because everyone else will be carrying the tune along.

There were a couple of readings and a bit of slightly protracted audience participation in terms of populating the stable/manger diorama thingy they'd set up at the front of the church. Some odd differences in scale aside (tiny cow, mahoosive sheep, etc.) they stuck to the traditional animal line-up, rather than the wildly variable cast of characters you see at school nativity plays - fish, scuba divers, spacemen etc. 

The only thing that was out of the ordinary was that after the main business of the service had concluded the congregation trooped over to the back of the church to participate in some bizarre voodoo ritual involving candles and oranges. Those of you who have been paying close attention to my Twitter feed over the years, or just generally know more about stuff than I do, will recognise this as a Christingle.

Nia went to a Christingle church service with her Rainbows group this morning. I have (at best) mixed feelings about the whole thing, as you can imagine, but mainly just bafflement about what #Christingle is. seems to be something to do with oranges. #voodoo #religion

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) February 3, 2019

"A Christingle" is the correct usage, by the way, as the term refers to the object itself, which is, as you can see, just an orange with a candle stuck in it and four cocktail sticks skewering some marshmallows and raisins. 

The question you might usefully ask yourself here is: why does this tradition, apparently cooked up out of thin air by some guy in Germany (not, as you might have assumed, a guy called Chris Dingle) a couple of hundred years ago, seem so bizarre and the metaphors (the orange represents the world, the skewered sweets the four seasons, or possibly the four "corners" of the earth, etc.) so contrived, while the other stuff more central to Christianity's core belief system (the whole Nativity thing with the wise men bringing gifts, the resurrection, the subsequent water/wine business) is given, if not exactly a free pass, some nodding respect even by non-adherents? Any claim that the latter is different because it's based on stuff that actually happened is dubious at best, so you have to conclude that it's mainly about age. Two hundred years is not enough for bizarre shit to fossilise into unquestioned tradition, so I guess the Christingle thing is still in what I like to call the Scientology Zone. 

Anyway, the kids had a nice enough time without coming away filled with religious conviction. Nia is old enough to find the religion thing quite interesting, from a cultural/anthropological perspective, and we did have a conversation on the way home wherein I explained my theory of religion's persistent cultural "stickiness"; basically that it's useful for a community to have shared "stories" to help identify each other, and it's actually more useful for these to be fictitious than for them to be true. More on this here, mainly in the paragraph featuring the Captain Cavemen image, if you want to skip past all the stuff about Noel Edmonds. 

Overall it was quite nice, my squirmy discomfort with some of the more nonsensical elements aside, like being expected to intone a solemn "Amen" at the end of some craven pleadings to a potentially vengeful deity. I was, as I always am, conscious while singing of the absurdity of some of the lyrics - I definitely got a sideways look from Nia at "offspring of a virgin's womb" during Hark The Herald Angels Sing, and another one at "Veiled in flesh the Godhead see" a few moments later, at which I was presented with a mental image of Jesus wearing Lady Gaga's meat dress from the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards.

Finally, that BBC link contains the following paragraph, inadvertently revealing of the charming innocence of the showbiz reporter in the face of smutty innuendo:

Slashed to the thigh, and featuring a cowl neck, the dress came with matching beefy boots, hat and meat clutch. "I never thought I'd be asking Cher to hold my meat purse," said Gaga as she picked up her award for the Bad Romance video – perhaps unaware that Cher doesn't eat meat.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I can't remember how I came across this video featuring former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic (among others, including Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil - a much longer version can be found here) but it struck me that firstly I had no idea what he'd been up to for the last 30 years and secondly that actually one thing that he evidently had been doing was turning into Hank Kingsley from The Larry Sanders Show, as portrayed by Jeffrey Tambor.

and I know that I am dying, and I wish I could beg

I find myself oddly uncomfortable with some of the fulsome tributes to Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan, who died a couple of weeks ago. Not because he wasn't an exceptionally gifted songwriter and lyricist, nor because the Pogues didn't make some great albums, but because most of the tributes and obituaries either tiptoe around the elephant in the room or paradoxically embrace it.

We're into mildly contrarian HOT TAKE territory here, again, I suppose, so to go full devil's advocate I offer you the following opinion: MacGowan was a brilliant but troubled man - born, it should be noted, in Kent and sent to various quite posh fee-paying schools including Holmewood House and (briefly) Westminster before deciding to really embrace his ancestral Irishness - whose group, the Pogues, produced two unequivocally great albums, their second and third, 1985's Rum, Sodomy & The Lash and 1988's If I Should Fall From Grace With God. After that the quality dropped off markedly and after MacGowan's sacking by the rest of the band (for generally erratic and unreliable behaviour) in 1991 he produced nothing of any note creatively for the rest of his life, endured increasingly poor health including being confined to a wheelchair after an accident in 2015 and eventually died after bouts of viral encephalitis and pneumonia. 

The elephant in the room I referred to above is of course MacGowan's legendary drink and drug intake. I don't have any particular insight into the details but it's public knowledge that he had a heroin habit for some years; outside of that it seems to have been mainly The Drink. As has been noted a few times before, Irish culture in particular has a bit of a problem with The Drink and the associated romanticised notions of wild-eyed poetic types carousing till the small hours and having hilarious adventures with Paddy McGinty's horse et tediously cetera, ignoring the more prosaic tooth-rotting, soft-cocked, trouser-shitting realities of such behaviour. Is it possible to say that MacGowan's meaningful recording career would have encompassed more than a couple of albums if he hadn't degenerated into a mumbling toothless chair-bound alcoholic? No, but it might have stood a better chance, and the various obituaries that celebrate the drink intake as if it were some sort of essential adjunct to the creative process seem to be making some unwarranted and potentially dangerous assumptions. It's really the same question as could have been asked after Christopher Hitchens' demise some years back: would moderating the booze intake have made them worse at their job? Could it, in fact, have made them better? Even during MacGowan's lifetime, the series of journalists lining up to interview him, ignore his crippling cognitive decline and project some sort of poetic fantasy onto the blank canvas of the monosyllabic answers and incomprehensible cackling they actually got on tape was, eh, I dunno: unhelpful, let's say. 

There's a fine line to be trodden here, and I recognise the danger of getting into the whole "I like a drink, you are a bon viveur, he is an alcoholic" thing, or, to put it another way, it ill behooves someone (like me) very partial to a beverage to be pontificating too snootily about someone else's intake. But I would tentatively suggest it's about contrast: there's no better pint than the one you have at the end of a long strenuous mountain hike on a hot day, for instance. Cut out the contrast so that the drink bit is all you do and you lose a significant part of the point of the whole thing; then again that's what makes hopeless uncontrollable alcoholics hopeless uncontrollable alcoholics, I suppose. There is also an element in the various tributes of heeeeeeyyy whaddaya gonna do, he's Irish, which is of course a bit racist.

There is another elephant lurking about here, and it's this: when you read about some 63-stone teenager whose daily intake of grub comprises a gallon of Ben & Jerry's and forty-two pizzas, you have to ask: look, we've gone well past the stage where they could be walking down the pizza shop themselves to get hold of this stuff, and yes, conceivably they could be phoning out for it (although someone's still got to get up and answer the door), but generally there is an enabler in the mix somewhere. In the case of morbidly obese teenagers it's generally a parent, in MacGowan's case it was pretty clearly his long-time girlfriend and latterly wife Victoria Mary Clarke, who you might charitably describe as endearingly scatty and unconventional, or less charitably as simply bonkers. Either way she was clearly devoted to MacGowan in a probably counter-productive way.

And then, finally, there's Fairytale Of New York. A fine song, no doubt (co-written by MacGowan and fellow Pogue Jem Finer) but somewhat overdone these days, and the melodic motif that features in the song and repeatedly in the lengthy outro is surely partly nicked from John Denver's Annie's Song. And despite all the "lying there almost dead on that drip in that bed" stuff there is just a suspicion of some romanticising of the whole drunken bum thing. That said, it's still better than Mistletoe And Wine, which I'll wager was written and recorded entirely sober, except of course for a certain amount of intoxication induced by OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. Makes you think, dunnit.

welcome to the machine

Here's an odd thing I noticed yesterday which I surely can't have been the first person to question, and which I'm mildly surprised isn't readily searchable on the internet, what with obsessive Beatles completism being a thing, and people like Mark Lewisohn making an entire career out of cataloguing every aspect of their existence and recorded output. 

As you can imagine there's plenty of Beatle material on YouTube as well, from amusing Beatles-themed quizzes and challenges to all sorts of fascinating micro-analysis, from the rubbishness of the bass-playing on The Long And Winding Road to the identity of the mystery singer on some of the ad lib bits towards the end of All You Need Is Love to the identity of the mystery bass-player(s) on While My Guitar Gently Weeps. It's that last video that caught my eye - not so much for the central topic which is interesting but a bit obscure, but for the flash of a song list (presumably an early one for The White Album) which occurs at about 11:13. There are some handwritten notes in bluish-green felt pen alongside the typed song titles, which appear to give some visual cues for each song, maybe as notes for a planned promotional film or something similar. Anyway, the video pans down the song list and eventually (at around 11:18) we get to a song called What's New Mary Jane. This song is of interest to Beatles obsessives as it didn't make the cut for The White Album and was a "lost" Beatles track for many years until a version (this one entitled What's The New Mary Jane) surfaced on one of the Anthology collections in the mid-1990s. 

Stay with me here, because that's not the interesting bit. Have a look at the note next to the song and you'll see it says "Alexis machine".

A bit odd, right? Most of the other descriptions (the ones immediately above and below, for example) are fairly self-explanatory, so what's this about? And who is this Alexis Machine guy?

First thing to do is establish what this document actually is. This turns out to be surprisingly difficult to do, by which I mean that I'd have assumed that anything even slightly connected with the Beatles would have been obsessively analysed on the internet. This image proves surprisingly tricky to track down, but feeding this Japanese-language web page containing the image through Google Translate reveals that the image was contained in some of the extensive batch of souvenir material issued with the Super Deluxe Edition of the album in 2018. I'm unclear whether this is the same as the 50th anniversary edition, but I assume it probably is. A series of shots of the promotional booklet can be found here and include the image below. No indication as far as I can see whose writing it is - one of the Beatles? George Martin? Someone else?

So what's going on here? Well, I have two things for you. The first thing is that one of the assorted freaks and weirdos who came into the Beatles' orbit in the late 1960s was a guy who they (John Lennon in particular) referred to as Magic Alex. His real name was Yannis Alexis Mardas, and one of the things he did for the Beatles was make electronic machines. He later became head of Apple Electronics, despite having no technical expertise whatsoever; nice work if you can get it. He was also apparently credited as co-writer on early versions of What's The New Mary Jane, before later being removed for some reason. 

So it seems there's a good chance that the phrase is meant to refer to him in some way. But there's another thing: I know the phrase as the name of a character in the book The Dark Half by Stephen King. Well, actually it's not quite as simple as that: the book's principal protagonist, Thad Beaumont, writes violent thrillers under the pen name George Stark, thrillers whose protagonist is called Alexis Machine. 

There's another layer to the (glass) onion here though: King himself, appropriately for a book mainly about writing, borrowed from two other writers for the names of his characters: George Stark is a nod to Donald E. Westlake, who wrote novels under the name Richard Stark, and Alexis Machine is a nod to a character of the same name in a novel called Dark City by Shane Stevens, which seems to be out of print but of which second-hand copies can be had for as little as, erm, 78 quid. 

So, to recap: it seems plausible that the handwritten note next to a song Magic Alex was (originally) credited as co-writer of is at least partly a reference to him, though the syntax is a bit odd, as it definitely appears to say "Alexis machine" rather than "Alex's machine". If the phrase was specifically meant to be someone's name, though, you'd think they might have capitalised "machine". So is it just a coincidence that the phrase also cropped up as someone's name in a novel? The timeline seems important here: the document would have dated from around 1968, and Dark City was published in 1973. So it's theoretically possible that Stevens saw the document at some point in the intervening five years and thought: oy oy, that'd be a good name for a violent criminal in a hardboiled thriller, I'm nicking that. But how plausible is it that he'd seen something that at the time was just a piece of paper in a studio file? It wasn't part of any White Album packaging until the lavish 2018 reissue as far as I can tell. I'm going to go with: not very plausible at all. But how plausible is it that it was just a coincidence? Well, I haven't done the maths, but that seems a bit implausible as well. Perhaps I'm just resistant to that explanation as it would make the whole thing less interesting.

So it's a mystery. The only person who could have definitively answered the question would be Shane Stevens, whose books I have never read, and if they stay at 78 quid a pop I daresay I never will. Unfortunately we can't ask him, because he died in 2007.

feel the freeze down in my knees

been in a tent for quite a bit of the last week so seem to have missed that #RobbieRobertson has died. this is a nice version of his most famous song https://t.co/Oampfee74p

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) August 14, 2023

A few thoughts on the recent death of Robbie Robertson, principal songwriter and guitarist with The Band and occasional previous featuree on this blog. Just as with Arnold Palmer there's a contrarian HOT TAKE that one might offer among all the people queueing up to offer praise and adulation, so let's put that out there first and then we can poke it around a bit.

So The Band's principal claim to fame is by association, specifically by association with Bob Dylan, whose backing band they were for a year or two around 1965/1966, just when he was at his peak of popularity and notoriety. Once they were a band in their own right (and their name, The Band, has a bit of faux-humble arrogance about it) their recording career as a group of significance lasted, at a push, a little over two years and three albums. Always a tight and compelling live band, they were mainly a touring entity for the remainder of their career until their farewell concert in San Francisco in December 1976, which, in a colossal act of cocaine-fuelled vanity and hubris, Robertson got his new showbiz chum Martin Scorsese to film and release as The Last Waltz. Having, as a consequence of his friendship with Scorsese, some control over the edit, Robertson made sure he came out of the film in the best light and got enough camera time on stage to ensure the rest of the band came across as his sidemen, even the vocalists, and buffed up some of his own performances (in particular the famous guitar duel with Eric Clapton) with judicious overdubbing. A shrewd businessman and a man of more ruthless self-control regarding drink and drug intake than most of his bandmates, Robertson also took a stranglehold on the songwriting credits, ensuring he came out of The Band's career considerably richer than all the others. A few solo projects and some lucrative film scoring work (much of it in collaboration with Scorsese) aside Robertson has spent much of the intervening 45 years or so buffing and re-telling his own legend, studiously ignoring his erstwhile bandmates' reformation without him, a venture only curtailed by their various premature demises. 

Whoa, you might say, that's a bit harsh, to which I would say: yes, of course it is, that was the whole point. My personal and slightly dimly-remembered experience with Robertson and The Band's music goes something like this: at some point during the late 1980s, almost certainly as a result of reading an article in Q magazine around the time of Robertson's debut solo album (which came out in 1987) I checked out a VHS copy of The Last Waltz from our local video shop and watched it. Around the same time I started at Bristol University and acquired a copy of The Band's 1968 debut album Music From Big Pink from the Fry Haldane record library (mentioned in relation to REM here). That remains a fabulously strange and unique work, largely out of step with the prevailing direction of rock music in 1968, and is, in my opinion, the best thing they ever did. One of the reasons for that is that Robertson's own songs - including The Weight, probably their most famous song - were augmented with some songs by, or co-written with, their erstwhile collaborator Bob Dylan, but also several by pianist and vocalist Richard Manuel (Tears Of Rage, In A Station, We Can Talk, and the admittedly dreary Lonesome Suzie). Arguably, it was the drop-off in Manuel's songwriting contributions hereafter that enabled Robertson to take control of things - Manuel was a more diffident character and a ferocious drug addict and alcoholic, none of which would have helped. His near-invisibility in the film of The Last Waltz is apparently largely a consequence of his pitiful drunkenness for the entirety of the concert. 

I retain something of a soft spot for Robertson's eponymous 1987 solo album - one of the first CDs I ever bought - but a clear-eyed re-assessment must point out two glaring flaws: firstly Robertson's own vocals, which AllMusic describe as "dry" and "reedy", which is probably fair, and secondly the quintessentially late-1980s feel of Daniel Lanois' production. This album came out within a year or so of Lanois' other two big late-80s albums, Peter Gabriel's So and U2's The Joshua Tree, and HOO BOY you can hear it. Robertson's vocal limitations probably explain why the album's best-known track and unexpected hit single is Somewhere Down The Crazy River, which is largely spoken rather than sung.

The point here is that Robertson and The Band, along with REM, Dylan, Beefheart and others, played a key role in my formative mind-expanding years in terms of music, which basically means listening to stuff that neither my Dad nor my school contemporaries were into. 

Anyway, you want the first two Band albums, definitely, and probably the third, Stage Fright. If you want a live album, 1972's Rock Of Ages is the one, much better than The Last Waltz - alternatively you might go for 1974's Before The Flood which documents The Band's American tour with Dylan that year and gives a high-energy shouty kicking to their collective back catalogue. The Last Waltz movie is well worth a watch as a historical document, though, although its portentous self-regard is a bit grating at times. Oddly, Robertson's death means that the Band's oldest member, Garth Hudson, is now its sole survivor.

arselebrity beardylikey of the day

A bit of background for this first one, although I suspect you'll be ignoring it as you'll already be mesmerised by the photo. I'm going to press on anyway, though, just in case anyone's still reading. Nia went on a residential weekend with the school a couple of weekends ago to the Urdd centre in Llangrannog in west Wales. Lots of exciting outdoorsy stuff that was right up her street including go-karting, zip-lining, various muddy assault courses and some leaping off a high-ish tower onto a giant inflatable landing mat. This mat came equipped with some odd orifices at the sides which I assume are to allow venting of air at the point of impact to prevent damage, but which could fulfil a completely different function for all I know. They certainly have the look of orifices which fulfil a different function, specifically the hindquarters of various species of ape in full oestrus.

Secondly, my old mate and former work colleague Harry (and his rather magnificent lockdown beard) and the late Dusty Hill, bass player and occasional vocalist (on some of the shoutier numbers) with Texan blues-rockers ZZ Top.