October 28, 2004
"We will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House"
Hunter Thompson weighs in with an endorsement of Kerry, written in that exquisite, meth-flecked prose.
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October 27, 2004
John Peel
"No. No. It can't be true!"
I am working in my office yesterday testing an application and my colleague - a young woman in her mid-twenties - has spotted the headline:
I look at her, surprised that she cares. It seemed to me, as I guess it seemed to many generations, as if Peel spoke specifically to my youth, my angst, my inarticulacy. Later on, a text from a friend sitting in an office where no one else understands who Peel is and what his death means.
I have been listening to the tributes on the BBC website ... crying a little and remembering the tapes I made off the radio when I was a teenager. The first time I or anyone heard:
Love will tear us apart ... (a tape I used to listen to when I slept in a tent next to a pigsty outside Amiens in the summer of 1980, by day working as a farmworker, by night smoking Gitanes mais and listening to my Philips cassette recorder. The pigs must have gotten to know this and Queen Jane Approximately fairly well)
10.15 Saturday night (the session version, with a weedy sound - I later found the single to my astonishment on an Amiens jukebox)
Are friends electric? (when it was first released, played by Peel for a bit and then vanished. "Now I'm alone, now I can think for myself ...")
Sultans of Swing (again, when Peel was the only place to hear this and it sounded like what it was, a suburban English rock band emulating and exceeding white American blues)
Permafrost (the Peel session version of the Magazine song)
Turning Japanese (a Vapors song he really leathered)
Eine symphonie des grauens ... (I think that was how it was spelt - a wonderful song by the Monochrome Set which I searched for ever after in vain)
Eating Noddemix ... (the Young Marble Giants - and what became of them?)
In 1979, just before my A-levels, I went with my friend Mark to the Finsbury Park Rainbow to watch the Buzzcocks. The support act played boomy, guitar-based music. They didn't even bother to turn the house lights down. But I was electrified. This was Joy Division. I had sat up listening to them on John Peel ... And then again on tapes I had made.
Peel was a kind of John the Baptist to several generations of British music talent. Pink Floyd, Marc Bolan, David Bowie, The Cure, The Smiths ...
He played Lee "Scatch" Perry records until you got to like them. He played Laurie Anderson and Peter Blegvad. He was like your favourite teacher. You trusted him enough to suspend your judgement for five minutes ... as he did.
They said the BBC website got 30,000 emails in tribute to him.
He should get a state funeral, with music from the Fall. "US Eighties - Nineties" they could sing, as the bier came down the mall.
Posted by Mark at 11:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The election
Does anyone seriously believe that John Kerry is going to win? Listening to Bill Clinton's momentary intervention in a broadcast on Sunday morning one was struck by the difference in tone. Kerry still has that exhortatory, shrill sound in his voice. The echo of Al Gore. Clinton sounds calm, reassuring.
Voters liked being scared (pace Adam Curtis's new series The Power of Nightmares on BBC2) and they crave reassurance. They want dreams of terror confronted by folksy bravado. They will vote for gee golly Bush and his sinister cronies, rather than nervous uptight Mr. Kerry. Kerry on the dais is a strange phenomenon. Think your Dad dancing. Think anxious stork.
Posted by Mark at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Disappeared
This website disappeared for ten days. We aren't quite sure where it went. There was something strange happening on the virtual server of our machine up in Sheffield after we updated the IP address and it simply vanished. Sorry. Now we are back I will try to catch up.
Posted by Mark at 11:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 12, 2004
In Berlin, by the wall
In a squatted nineteenth century block of flats on Vossstrasse. The smell of dope drifting up the stairs. On the ground floor there is an exhibition of uninteresting photos of American jazz musicians, held up by bulldog clips and string. Creme paint is peeling off the ceiling in great loops. I am in the Ladies loo trying to open the window on onto a vacant lot. The light is falling. I take a picture of weeds and a concrete floor. It is near the Fuehrerbunker, is it part of it?
On the other side of the same building an enormous photohoarding, covering all five stories. A man's face - an advertisement. In the distance the lights of Potsdamer Platz.
Potsdamer Platz is an abomination. After the Wall came down the Treuhand - the bit of the German government tasked with disposing of state property - sold it very quickly to big corporations. It is now just as much of an indictment of corporate capitalism as the Wall was of the Commies. The Sony Centre is like Whiteley's on steroids. It makes you want to join the Red Brigades.
(Incidentally, following a Google search to find a site about Whiteley's I stumbled on the following: "Hitler was particularly taken with Whiteley's during a visit and vowed to make it his headquarters after Britain was brought under the yoke of the Third Reich")
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