London's So Nice Back In Your Seamless Rhymes

It's very difficult to describe from this distance just how exciting For Tomorrow by Blur was back in 1993. It was, though, and like them, hate them, or erroneously write them off as cockernee knees-up chas and dave chimney sweep music and nothing else besides, the fact remains that during a genuinely threadbare and uninspiring stretch for homegrown pop music, it came thundering along like, as the head of their record label put it, "a knight in shining armour". While For Tomorrow stalled outside the top twenty, for better or for worse it set the tone and the template for the much bigger events that lay ahead. You would have to be a currently serving leader of a political party to dispute or dismiss that, frankly.

To be entirely honest, I was already excited enough about the return of Blur as it was. I'd been a fan since their first single She's So High/I Know (nobody ever remembers I Know), and had seen them live three times by the time that Leisure came out. Although I cannot claim that this is how I would have put it at the time, looking back it's clear that - much like a certain Andrew Collins writing in the NME - I had sensed something in their uneven recorded output, particularly in the b-sides, that hinted at a far greater potential when many of the other bands I liked at the time merely left fans hoping that they would scrape together enough half-decent material to make up a worthwhile album. I also - to some derision - stuck with them when the tide of opinion briefly turned against them, and was so keen to get hold of the largely ignored Popscene - still my favourite single of all time, incidentally - that I persuaded my distinctly unimpressed father to pick up a copy on his way back from work on the day of release.

Although they largely managed to hide the turbulent making of Modern Life Is Rubbish from their fans at the time, it was still obvious that Blur had been suspiciously quiet for a long while, and anticipation was steadily building; not least when Mark Goodier announced on Radio 1 very early in 1993 that he had heard some advance tapes of the new material and 'couldn't wait' to play it on the radio. When he did finally give the first public airing anywhere to For Tomorrow, I recorded it off the radio and played it so much that I actually damaged the tape. A couple of weeks later I bought the single - on several formats, as this was the height of 'Part 1 of a 2CD set' marketing madness and I wanted as many new songs as I could get - and then a couple of weeks after that the album. It would probably prove scientifically impossible to even vaguely estimate how often I heard For Tomorrow during that month alone; and even then not only in the same form as I'd taped it off the radio.

Hidden away on Part 1 of the 2CD set was the 'Visit To Primrose Hill Extended' version of For Tomorrow, more or less identical to the shorter radio-friendly version except for a minute-long section towards the end where the band and the brass section go off on a stroll around the chorus chord changes. This is more than just a looped section yanked from elsewhere in the track, and is an entirely new diversion that fits perfectly with the musical mood and the theme of the lyrics; in some ways it also echoes the hurtling-across-London antics of the promo video, despite not actually accompanying them. However, I have long had a theory that this was actually supposed to be the version used for Modern Life Is Rubbish, but was swapped with the more familiar edit at a late stage for not especially clear reasons. And if you'll keep your hands on the rails and try not to be sick again, I'm about to share that theory with you.

First of all, there's the small matter that the version of For Tomorrow that did end up on Modern Life Is Rubbish is exactly identical to the one clearly labelled on the single itself as the 'Single Version'. There is absolutely no variance between the two whatsoever, and they have exactly the same mix, exactly the same length, and exactly the same lyrics. This is, it has to be said, something of an anomaly in Blur's otherwise famously meticulously documented sleeve credits, with the only comparable incident being when some formats of M.O.R. erroneously claimed to feature the 'Road Version' when they didn't. There could easily have been another more obscure reason for this misleading description finding its way onto the finished article, but the suggestion that it originally needed differentiating from the album version in some way is plausible to say the least.

Then there's the conspicuously high profile that the extended version has enjoyed since then. More often than not, extended and alternate versions of familiar songs are - usually entirely reasonably - destined to become the forgotten and dispensible corners of an artist's discography, sidelined once they have fulfilled their intended purpose, and generally left off 2CD Deluxe Editions for 'space reasons'. The 'Visit To Primrose Hill Extended' version of For Tomorrow, however, has been distinguished by so much disproportionate prominence that you could almost suspect someone somewhere was attempting to reclaim it as the official version. Not only did it find its way onto the 2CD reissue of Modern Life Is Rubbish, it's also been the one that they've reached for whenever an official compilation or retrospective was in the offing, notably on The Best Of Blur and Midlife, and was specifically used on the long-lost dawn-of-the-Web 'Blurradio' project. It has also pretty much always been this version that has been played live, even when they haven't actually had a brass section with them. Meanwhile, in notable contrast, the 'Acoustic' version of For Tomorrow that also showed up on one of the single formats didn't even find its way onto Blur 21.

You do also have to ponder on why it would have existed in the first place if it hadn't been intended for a wider audience at some point. Blur rarely did 'long' versions of tracks for their singles, and out of their not inconsiderable discography you could only really point to the actual proper bona fide old-skool Extended Versions of I Know, There's No Other Way and Bang, which date from a time when 'Indie-Dance' was still a viable commercial prospect; full-length remixes of There's No Other Way and Girls And Boys done primarily for promotional purposes; a number of 'guest producer' reworkings fitting in with the musical ethos circa Blur and 13, few of which actually found their way onto singles; and last and by all means least the 'Live It! Remix' of Entertain Me, which was accidentally released as a b-side to The Universal instead of being mounted on a flaming anvil and fired into a bin. On top of this, owing to several failed attempts at recording a second album, Blur at that point were already groaning under the weight of decent potential b-sides - ten spread across the various Modern Life Is Rubbish-era singles alone, and a further half dozen or so shelved completely - so there was no particular need to go creating Extended Versions, especially for a song that was hardly going to be 'crossing over' with dance music DJs. More speculatively, the longer version prominently features top session brass ensemble The Kick Horns - who can't have come cheap, especially at a time when the album budget was rapidly running out - along with a couple of otherwise unused guitar lines from Graham Coxon, which doesn't exactly fit in with his usual waste not want not approach.

So, if it was originally intended for the album, why in the name of all that is rational and logical didn't it end up on there? Well, one quite possible explanation for that is simply a lack of space. As the surplus of serviceable b-sides might suggest, there was no shortage of songs being considered for Modern Life Is Rubbish itself; at least twenty were serious contenders at various points, and Graham has described the process of trying to cram in everything they wanted on there as 'horrible'. Everyone involved seems to have had a different opinion, and right up until the last minute the band were trying to get certain songs (notably Turn It Up and Miss America) removed and certain others (notably When The Cows Come Home and Young And Lovely) added, ultimately to no avail. Already a lengthy track even in its 'Single Version', For Tomorrow came into the equation very late in proceedings, and even then there was to be a further complication; when the complete album was presented to them, Blur's American label demanded an additional track to appeal to a more 'grunge'-orientated listenership, and the result - bizarrely - was Chemical World. For both artistic and commercial reasons, there was never any question of leaving this equally brevity-deficient new song off the album, so is it possible that the shorter For Tomorrow was substituted to free up as much space as possible to accommodate it? It's also worth considering that For Tomorrow might not always have been the opening track of Modern Life Is Rubbish, and the longer instrumental section might well have made more sense elsewhere in the tracklisting.

All of this might well seem like a great deal of thought and effort devoted to something that's not even one of Blur's great what ifs, let alone one of pop music's great what ifs, but even so it's a lot more entertaining than splitting hairs over something you're not actually that interested in. And who knows, would the entire course of the nineties - not just in chart music - have run differently if a longer version of For Tomorrow had appeared on Modern Life Is Rubbish? Probably not, but it's worth thinking about. Possibly. If you want to know why Colours and Pleasant Education were missing from Blur 21, though, then I'm afraid I'm fresh out of ideas.

You can find more of my thoughts on Blur and the road to Britpop in Higher Than The Sun, available in paperback here or from the Amazon Kindle Store here.

That Was This Life That Was

In March 1996, a bunch of law graduates moved into a shared house in Southwark. Over the next two years, BBC2's rare excursion into credible and likeable youth drama This Life kept us all hooked (well, all of us except snorting drama-ier-than-thou bores) with a whirlwind of casual sex, criminal behaviour, industrial-strength quantities of cocaine and that sodding Sneaker Pimps song again and again and again and again and again, all of it brilliantly undramatically underplayed by a talented cast of relatable characters who couldn't really give a toss one way or the other, frankly, and still managed to get up for work in the morning. Then BBC2 opted to pull the plug and end the series on a high, and it was never seen again. No it wasn't. Shut up.

Although few could claim it was really a realistic depiction of their own lives - let's face it, the majority of the target audience could probably have found more to identify with in The Adam & Joe Show - This Life was notable for treating 'vices' as low-key everyday pursuits, for its accurate evocation of the effects of the switch from three years of dossing around to a high-powered work environment, and for talking to rather than down at the sort of viewers it sought to attract. And surely pretty much everyone had a housemate who just wouldn't sod off from the front room when they'd brought someone back and were hoping for a bit of privacy. But how well does it really stand up now? Well, Ms. Forbes, if you will present your findings to the jury...


This Life Was Better Than Our Friends In The North

Well, what better way to start a look back at an edgy and controversial drama series than by being edgy and controversial? To this day, mentioning This Life within the earshot of self-designated 'cultured' individuals will generate a slowly building chorus of "aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh, but Our Friends In The North, do you not see? aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!", which refuses to abate until you throw in the towel and pretend to concede that the adventures of Daniel Craig and some ropey wigs was a televisual landmark of such importance and significance that it should eclipse all mention ever of another show that had the audacity to be on around the same time and have a similarly young cast. Whether or not this extends to other programmes that were also on around the same time, and that references to The Girlie Show, Crapston Villas and that thing where Martin Clunes and Neil Morrissey were New Romantics or something must be similarly shouted down, has sadly not been clarified. Well, enough of that nonsense. Our Friends In The North may have had a heavyweight cast and a staggeringly good decade-straddling script that skilfully and effectively tackled every major sociocultural issue in British life from the sixties to the rise of New Labour, but This Life was, plainly and simply, more fun and had better jokes and better music. No not aaaaaaaahhh!


Put Some Bloody Clothes On!

Part of the aforementioned 'fun' of This Life was in the regular characters' alarmingly relaxed attitude to nudity, and even when they weren't actually having sex they could be constantly seen walking in on each other getting changed, or just generally wandering about the house in the absence of key items of clothing. Quite surprisingly and progressively for the time, the overwhelming majority of said nudity was male, too. But how times change, and while time was when Kira flashing her bra at a departing Moore Spencer Wright head honcho would have fulfilled your unexpected erotic thrill quota for an entire week, nowadays there's so much digital nakedness available on tap that it all just looks a bit unnecessary. As nice as Anna's arse may be, it is possible to get too much of a good thing and by the end of the series you're left wondering if Daniela Nardini had to be treated for the effects of exposure. Plus we also had to put up with the decidedly less visually palatable likes of Mr. O'Donnell and Egg's dad getting in on the act and out of their clothes, which nobody either wanted or needed. No matter how many furious letters to Points Of View may have been inspired by Milly's apparent inability to remember the concept of 'pants' at the time, sometimes what seemed shocking way back when just looks boring now.


Anna And Miles Are More Likeable Than Milly And Egg

Rewatching This Life, you get the distinct impression that you're supposed to find the stable, reserved, relatively career-focused couple more admirable and aspirational than the non-couple made up of an arrogant prejudiced public schoolboy with no money worries and the self-destructive sexually voracious Caledonian bruiser. On face value this is probably largely true, except for the fact that Miles and Anna freely accept that they are the cause of their own problems, are never afraid to charge headlong into difficult situations, and despite their expletive-fuelled cynicism generally have a more positive outlook on the world. Whereas Milly and Egg - both of whom, in a clever and subtle scripting touch, are going by handles that purposefully distract from their birth names (Djamila and Edgar, in case you were wondering) - are underneath it all basically just a paranoid moaner and an aimless drifter who hide their heads in the sand, allow seething resentment to build up unchecked, and continually mislead each other about even the most minor and trivial thing, and yet still manage to blame everyone else in the world for everything that ever happens to them. It's no wonder poor old Warren spent so much time in that therapist's office.


The Minor Characters Were All More Likeable Still

Remarkably for a show that already boasted a fairly large regular ensemble cast, This Life featured an even larger assortment of friends, colleagues and enemies (oh and 'Quasi') who hovered on the periphery of the various house dramas and indeed frequently on the periphery of the house itself. Jo, Kira, Ferdy, Kelly, Lenny, Nikki, the ever-mysterious Graham, Miles and Anna's downright odd boss Hooperman, various brothers and sisters and parents and even the odd 'dealer' all wandered in and out of various storylines without ever losing their sense of positivity or their somewhat more relaxed and less self-absorbed grip on reality. For some viewers, their assorted comic mishaps with careers, relationships and, erm, finding somewhere to get a sandwich were even more enjoyable than the main action and it's little surprise that they are in some cases remembered every bit as fondly as - if not more than - the main five. Well, apart from Dale. Oh, and while we're on the subject...


Was Rachel Really All That Bad?

Captain Black sided with The Mysterons after Earth had blown up their home city for no good reason. Mike Teavee had the temerity to enjoy the output of a medium Roald Dahl was a bit sniffy about. Raggerty's sole crime was wishing Rupert Bear would go away. And then there's Rachel from This Life, a divisive and suspiciously android-like individual who continued to inadvertently pour oil on troubled waters until Milly smacked her in the face in the last episode. But was this really warranted? Was any of it even her fault? Well, although there's no denying she was well and truly locked in a six-of-one passive-aggressive war of workplace attrition with Milly, wasn't afraid to use promises of never-actually-delivered sex to get what she wanted, and was as ambitious and opportunistic as they come, it's also true to say that she was helpful and supportive to those that bothered to reach out to her (notably Warren), seemed genuinely hurt when Milly launched into the 'I don't like you' rant, made more than enough genuine-seeming overtures to her office enemy, and occasionally dropped worrying hints of dark goings on in her family home. There's even a case for claiming that her 'telling' Egg about Milly's affair was vague enough to have been a 'you'll lose her if you're not careful' pep talk gone wrong, and that perhaps her desperate cry of "I didn't tell him!" wasn't quite so much of a load of Not-Talkin'-'Bout-Shaft-style baloney after all. The jury's still out, really, although they've already returned their verdict on one particular pillock...


O'Donnell Is A Jerk

"Never trust a hippy", mused Egg of the gang's law firm mentor Mr. O'Donnell, occasioning an eye-roll from Milly who was presumably fed up of his hero worship of John Lydon and thought that Tracy Chapman and Michelle Shocked said it all much better and without swearing at that nice Bill Grundy either. But said hippy's untrustworthiness went way beyond his encouraging Milly to become a very different kind of 'legal partner', from his shabby attempt at winning back favour after firing Warren by sending a crate of booze to his leaving party, to his gleeful favourite-playing indulgence in the volley of glares between Milly and Rachel, to his general treatment of Kira and Kelly as more or less on a par with a couple of footprint-embossed McDonald's cartons that had blown in to the office on a muggy day, all of it cunningly framed behind a Tony Blair-esque calm voice, proclamations of fairness and friendliness, and waffly talk of positivity and 'how we move forward from here' and blah and bleh and yawn yawn yawn. Well, no, it doesn't work on the audience mate - O'Donnell is a solid-state jerk through and through. If Moore Spencer Wright were so vocally concerned about their reputation that they dismissed Warren for being gay in a built-up area and gave Kelly a written warning for opting to urinate in the lavatory rather than on the floor of the reception area, would they really have wanted this tosspot conman on their board of partners?


Put A Tim From The Office In It

One frequently overlooked aspect of This Life is the presence of a then-unknown Martin Freeman as shifty, annoying Ocean Colour Scene lookalike Stuart. His most memorable moment comes when, having successfully half-inched a couple of House Tenners when nobody was looking, he pauses to take a celebratory swig from an open can of lager. Little does he realise that Egg had earlier relieved himself into it (presumably deploying near-supernatural levels of directional accuracy), occasioning Mr. Freeman to pull a 'shocked' face and spit it out exaggeratedly in glorious shakycam stutter-o-vision. There are those who would suggest that this has since informed his entire approach to acting, from Watson to Arthur Dent to Bilbo Baggins to That Bloke In Meet The Robinsons to, well, Tim From The Office himself. We of course could not possibly comment. But as for certain other employees of TV's Hilarious Wernham Hogg...


What Did Ricky Gervais Do All Day?

One aspect of This Life that nobody ever gets an opportunity to overlook is that Ricky Gervais took time out from going to see The Spin Doctors at the Civic Centre to act as the show's official 'Music Consultant'. This technically involved working out what sort of music the characters' real-life counterparts would have listened to, and indeed which scenes and circumstances might have been best underscored by which songs. What this actually translated to was picking one or two artists per character and relentlessly cueing their best known numbers in again and again and again, giving the strange illusion that the house existed in a sort of weird alternative universe where nobody had ever made or received a compilation tape. In fairness sometimes this works, and every so often you get a welcome reminder of terrific forgotten songs from the era like Anywhere by Dubstar, while having Kira as a Kenickie fan was certainly a neat touch. On the other hand, though, you get the fact that Miles likes 'jazz' - i.e. he mentioned John Coltrane once - denoted by Corduroy's Out Of Here being played in literally track by track over the course of the series. Must have taken hours of 'consulting', that one.


How Long Had Warren Actually Been Travelling For?

Partway in to the second series, his dreams of a high-flying legal career having been temporarily derailed, Warren takes off for a spot of global sightseeing with the aid of a pair of ruby slipper-esque DMs from his housemates. Australia and America both seem to be on the itinerary, though he still manages to get back in time for the very last scene, showing up to witness Milly and Rachel clawing at each other's faces while sporting a vague hint of a beard and a Hawaiian shirt that indicates he's beamed in directly from whichever beach he'd ended up on without having time to change. However, even allowing for possible onscreen skipping over of unseen events, it can only be at the outside three weeks between his departure and the wedding, suggesting that his plans might not quite have been so grand after all. Then again, how would Miles and Francesca's courtship and wedding have fitted into that short a timeframe? Do any of the things that happen actually add up in any logical way at all? Can I go back to trying to work out what happened in wiped Doctor Who episodes please? No? Oh alright then. There's just one last thing to say...


This Life + 10 Did Not Happen

BBC2's decision to end This Life on a high and with viewers wanting more was a shrewd and successful one, as it left the show's reputation intact and untarnished. We can be glad, then, that nobody ever saw fit to mount a revival nobody asked for which undid all of the good character work of the original, indulged in unfunny 'ha ha ha we're all comfortable thirtysomethings just like you!!' non-humour, made absolutely no mention of what became of Jo, Kira, Kelly, Rachel or even a piss-spluttering Martin Freeman, and generally achieved such a low standard of drama and entertainment that it made A Very Polish Practice, Further Up Pompeii! and Doomwatch: Winter Angel look like high art in comparison. Because that did not happen. Not even slightly.

Ten Reasons Why Dagenham Dave Is Better Than Smells Like Teen Spirit

"Smells Like Teen Spirit - it's no Dagenham Dave, is it?", I recently mused on Twitter. And while that may have been a deliberately provocative throwaway joke, it's also actually somewhat on the true side. For while the deceptively lazy 1995 half-hit in its own bizarre way encapsulates everything I have ever liked about the ideologically-challenged quiff-led erstwhile Smith (and, in fairness, everything that a lot of other people dislike about him), it also in a similarly bizarre way nails exactly what a reasonably well-adjusted youngster from the other side of the Atlantic with a liking for expensive trainers could never quite hope to find in the shampoo-averse caterwaulings of Kurt Cobain (1967-1993) and company.

Not convinced? Well, here's ten reasons why Dagenham Dave is better than Smells Like Teen Spirit:

- Whereas Nirvana have inspired a frankly terrifying volume of column inches' worth of sub-Quietus Cultural Despairers wailing "O TEMPORA O MORES O RED HOUSE PAINTERS" and launching into diatribes about how we failed to heed the message of when Juliana Hatfield was that rubbish ghost in My So Called Life and everything that's going on in the world now is all our fault (especially if you liked Blur), Dagenham Dave only ever inspired Mark Lamarr telling an anecdote about overhearing a bloke sat on a doorstep saying "he's well out of order... I mean, I'm from Dagenham, and my name's Dave...".

- In place of a heavily compressed and distorted guitar solo that inspired million upon million of teenage boys to adopt it as their 'trying out guitars in a music shop' showstopper of choice, Dagenham Dave has an hilariously lackadaisical weedy synth solo that could only feasibly inspire anyone to try and remember how the theme from Simon And The Witch went.

- The video avoids heavy-handed 'symbolism' with cheerleaders and mop buckets in favour of TV's Gripper Stebson doing some Moz-observed comedy business.

- Saying "a denial" sixteen times may well be a profound statement about something or other, but just going "Dagenham Dave/Dagenham Dave/oh Dave from Dagenham/Dagenham Dagenham Dave" is trying to get up people's noses for the sake of it.

- "On the window screen" is a more gloriously pointless distortion of the English language than mispronouncing "albino".

- Smells Like Teen Spirit may well be a clarion call to take up arms against something or other where nobody's actually sure what it is that came from the depths of a tortured yet artistically brilliant soul, but Dagenham Dave was an aimless satire of dull blokey blokes who'd done nothing outwardly obviously wrong written at the height of worries over an impending court case relating to a petty dispute over tedious details of a contract from years earlier. One of these may be slightly more easy to relate to than the other.

- "I would say more/but you get the general idea" is quite simply the best way to end a song ever. And that includes Footloose.

- On a more serious note, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the incident (well, incidents) that actually caused it, Morrissey was ostracised by the music press at that point in a way that Kurt Cobain never, ever was - again, something that it's actually slightly easier for some people to relate to - and the flippant throwawayness of Dagenham Dave could be interpreted as a massive two fingers to certain individuals who had long since given up judging his music on its own merits. Erm, possibly.

- Oh hang on, I said ten reasons, didn't I? Well, I would say more...

This Was... Cult Fiction: Part 2 'This Is Easy'

Imagine, if you will - or indeed if you can bear to - an alternate universe where everything's backwards and Nathan Petrelli has slightly different hair and Trackspotting proved so popular that the compilers got to do a second volume. There'd be more Tarantino barrel-scraping, probably with that one by Tha Dogg Pound from Natural Born Killers wedged awkwardly between all the tune-averting rock'n'roll stuff. There'd be the entire eighteen million minute version of A Final Hit by Leftfield. And there'd be The Passenger by Iggy Pop, doubtless crowbarred in on the back of a spuriously generic claim that it had been used in 'an advert' (or even - shudder - as 'the theme from Channel 4's Passengers').

Thankfully, though, we don't need the time-bending shenanigans of one Peter Petrelli to correct the dimensional alignment on this occasion, and in reality it was, sensibly, the compilers of This Is Cult Fiction who got to do the compilation lap of honour. The first volume had of course diverted from its Tarantino-centric brief in all manner of interesting if vaguely related directions, but even so it would have been reasonable to assume that any follow-up would have basically just included more of the same. Well, how wrong we all were. And that's 'we' as in 'anyone who actually bothered guessing at the potential contents of a purely hypothetical follow-up that probably nobody had even had the slightest thought about'.

While This Is Cult Fiction was busy doing the rounds of the card-mounted counter-top record store display racks, a very strange offshoot of the Britpop phenomenon had been rapidly gathering mainstream-bound momentum. A world away from the 'Noelrock'-toting 'lad'-espousing flag-rehabilitating dullards that the scene would later come to be tarnished by association with, the original adherents of what probably wasn't really known as 'Britpop' at that point had - more through a lack of sufficient suitable sounds than anything else - invested a good deal of time and energy into mining the past for new pop favourites; not just the expected likes of The Who, Northern Soul and Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity but also further-afield esoterica culled from European pop exotica, Swinging Sixties film soundtracks and the groovier excursions of Light Entertainment superstars. Known as 'Loungecore' to its devotees, and 'a sort of Easy Listening revival thing' to the world at large, whatever it was, it had picked up its pace and started to find its way into the charts and onto the TV, with The Mike Flowers Pops' much-better-than-the-original cover of Wonderwall only narrowly missing out on the Christmas Number One slot late in 1995.

Of course, people would eventually miss the point with all this just as they did with Britpop, ignoring the fact that it was originally about the music first and foremost and indulging in all manner of ghastly 'irony' with crooners and safari suits, and the age of Funtastian Retrololz was upon us. Before that happened, though, a couple of pre-ironists managed to get in there with some pretty dazzling pre-irony compilations of music that had previously been obscurer than obscure; Martin Green's definitive library music trawl The Sound Gallery and its more cerebral spinoff The Sound Spectrum (which you can hear more about here); London-based DJ team The Karminsky Experience and their globe-spanning mock-soundtrack In-Flight Entertainment (and its sequel that took the 'flight' into space); The Easy Project which looked more towards the groovy Marine Offences Act-contravening sound of Pirate Radio; and, less impressively, the sound of a point starting to be missed on K-Tel's Nice'n'Easy. And then, with impeccable timing, came the one that would show them all how it's done - This Is Easy.

The first thing that you notice from a look back at This Is Easy is that, contrary to popular belief, it didn't quite perform a total musical volte-face on the first volume in the series and the more Speeding On The Needlebliss-inclined percentage of its potential audience need not have felt any more alienated than they routinely pretended to in an attempt to show that they 'got' their favoured films. With a whole extra disc to play around with, there's plenty of room for movie and TV themes that are, for the most part, at the very least distant relatives of the ones that ended up on This Is Cult Fiction. Indeed, Midnight Cowboy puts in a return appearance here, albeit in a carefully chosen schmaltz-tastic orchestral reworking of the title theme by John Barry himself, and there's a cunning redeployment of Misirlou as almost unrecognisably reimagined by birdsong-bonkers 'exotica' bandleader Martin Denny, while the not-that-'easy' electric harpsichord jangles of more recent (and, at least compared to a lot of films that ended up on the first album, more deserving) sneaker-in-through-the-back-door-of-cult Get Carter turn up for the first but by no means last time in the series (though more about that - you guessed it - later), albeit most likely more than a little 'influenced' by its recent appearance on The Sound Spectrum, and if we're bending the rules to accomodate 'gritty' Westerns (as opposed to all those ones set in antiseptically clean municipal boroughs) there's the chant-tastic chart-troubling cover of the theme from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly by Hugo Montenegro, and for a touch of King Cone-scoffing authenticity the original Pearl & Dean jingle is thrown in for good measure. Even the Burt Bacharach number chosen to open the set, Bond Street, originates from the soundtrack of the original - and some would say only scientifically recognised - Casino Royale.

In fact there's a lot of Bacharach & David to be found on This Is Easy - hardly surprising really, given that Noel Gallagher was at that point continually dropping the former's name as an 'inspiration' in the hope that it would deflect attention away from the fact that he was actually just purloining old Milltown Brothers songs and replacing the lyrics with something even more clumsy (and that's no mean feat) - but that's not actually as much of a good thing as you might reasonably assume. For while Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head shows up as the definitive BJ Thomas original, complete with the weird jerky Stereolab-inspiring stop-start outro, and Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin and Matt Monro are on hand to handle Walk On By, I Say A Little Prayer and (They Long To Be) Close To You respectively (as, regrettably, is Jack Jones for Wives And Lovers), and light music maestro Ron Goodwin at least has a charming melting-trumpet whirl through Do You Know The Way To San Jose? and What The World Needs Now Is Love, several other key compositions are drawn from an album where Bacharach himself elected to recast them in drippy orchestral instrumental arrangements with just the odd random line sung here and there, which wasn't what anyone wanted or needed. Probably not even Noel Gallagher.

Meanwhile, hailing somewhat slightly less from the same genre universe as the movie-skewed contents of This Is Cult Fiction come Un Homme Et Une Femme (the lift-door-opening-alike title theme AND the Panorama-purloined Aujourd'hui, C'est Toi, both in their rarely heard vocal versions), the maudlin, self-repeating and misleadingly tagged variance-free 'Theme And Variations For Two Pianos And Orchestra' from The Go-Between, and perhaps inevitably The Windmills Of Your Mind from The Thomas Crown Affair, upon which the jury will forever be out as to whether it's really good or a little bit annoying. But just before those groups of seven individuals (including the token 'girl one') dressed as Mr. Pink larking around in the foyer before a late-night cinema showing of the still-banned-on-video Reservoir Dogs start to feel so utterly left out of proceedings that they briefly consider purchasing The Cult Files: Reopened instead, a fair smattering of faintly hip-to-the-zeitgeist TV themes come screeching up in their E-Types. The Champions, Strange Report, The New Avengers, Man In A Suitcase, Tony Christie's earwax-shifting yodelling from the end credits of The Protectors, and of course The Pink Panther, who makes his way onto this list by virtue of having a snazzy car in the opening titles. No? How about because The Inspector was sort of like a jetsetting sixties detective if you bend the rules a bit, then bend the rules a lot, then just pretend that he was? Oh alright, please yourselves then.

Joining everyone's favourite anthropomorphic feline antagonist of Man With The Triangle Nose on an equally sizeable list of TV themes that (mostly) fit the bill musically, but pose something of an image problem for someone attempting to recast themselves as Patrick Mower on a spacehopper, are a couple of sporting-themed selections that at least evoke the image of retro Adidas gear, namely soccer-heralding Hammond undisciplinedness The Big Match, and the none-more-loungetastic Superstars, that bizarre BBC effort that strove to determine which sporting giant was best at standing on a school assembly bench over a paddling pool. And sounding great but presenting logistical headaches for all but the most 'ironic' of easy scenesters there's The New Adventures Of Black Beauty, Crossroads, Animal Magic and This Is Your Life, the latter two in heavily if barely perceptibly truncated space-saving edits, which is something that as we shall see would later become the lone blot in the copybook for the This Is... series.

Elsewhere, popular bandleader Ray Conniff is given the chance to show off some of his stereo test disc-ready instrumental readings of seventies MOR pop hits, and actual literal sixties non-MOR pop hits come courtesy of Aretha Franklin (I Say A Little Prayer), Dionne Warwick (Walk On By), Chris Montez (Call Me), Sergio Mendes (Chelsea Morning), Honeybus (I Can't Let Maggie Go), Fifth Dimension (Up Up And Away), Nancy Sinatra (As Tears Go By) and Sandie Shaw (There Is Always Something There To Remind Me, unfortunately in 're-recorded by the original artists' form), and a couple of full-on lounge legends show up to show everyone who's boss; everyone's favourite pal of Bear Asking For 'Cookies' Andy Williams with the Blur-purloined ode to Music To Watch Girls By, Bert Kaempfert's naggingly catchy Daktari-goes-mod silliness A Swingin' Safari, and best of all the wonky whistling and outer space backing vocal effects that make up Esquivel's interpretation of something that may at one point have vaguely resembled Sentimental Journey.

In acknowledgement of The Sound Gallery's library-scouring efforts there's also room for The Riviera Affair and Girl In A Sportscar, two tunes that are probably stuck in your head already if you ever watched any post-Loaded BBC2 magazine show, and there's that trademark This Is... touch of where-the-fuck-did-that-come-from? courtesy of Mason Williams' Classical Gas (a tune that had probably previously been mainly associated with those damn crazy hippies, or at the very least with Lord Winstanley urging you to claim that thirty seven and a half pence water rates rebate on This Is Your Right), some Herb Alpert numbers as hurriedly reworked for cash by 'The Mexicans' for the long-lost Decca album The World Of Tijuana, and modern-day walking embodiment of all things lounge Count Indigo, whose My Unknown Love as recorded in cahoots with The Mike Flowers Pops is probably the second greatest track to be found on here.

So, you're no doubt wondering, what IS the greatest? Well, that honour has to go to one of the few artists to appear on both this and the first volume - Isaac Hayes, whose brilliantly yet hilariously elongated take on The Look Of Love frankly ticks off every last item on the list of what a good 'loungecore' track should be; funky, schmaltzy, Bacharach-penned (with an extra point for having been originally penned for Casino Royale), full of extemporising flutey nonsense, virtually unrecognisable as the song it's supposed to be, positioned somewhere between Easy Listening and 'proper' music, and actually genuinely really, really good. So, um, a bit like Theme From Shaft, then.

As a whole, This Is Easy more than meets all of those criteria too. Trying to define a genuine subculture for the purposes of raking in the megabucks is a risky and rarely-attempted gambit - for a comparison, consider how nobody dared to do a Hey Hey It's Yer Grunge Rock Superpals! type compilation only a couple of years earlier - but this impressively broad and knowledgeable sweep of the sounds that were being frugged to by the big-trainered girls and boys in clubs that they thought only they knew about pulled it off in style, and there's probably some truth to the suggestion that its success led directly to the genre-led actually-quite-good compilation market as we know it today. The compilers weren't about to start resting - or indeed lounging - on their laurels, though. There was a complete change of direction to be getting on with...

Well Firstly The House Of Lords, Then On To The Brit Awards...

It's safe to say that I've never exactly got on with the Brit Awards. To an ordinary music-buying member of the public, it's never looked like anything other than a shallow, empty excuse for the people who sell the music to get together and show off about how great they think they are for selling it, under the pretence of celebrating the artistic achievements of musicians they clearly couldn't give a flying fuck about. If you're reading this and fuming in disagreement, well then, do something about it. It's your bloody ceremony.

In fairness, bombastic television presentation and bewildering levels of tabloid excitement aside, the actual ceremony itself is something that it's always been easy to avoid. As indeed have the actual awards and accolades that it doles out; any victory-related excitement and braggadocio soon fades and it's a fair bet that even fans of Brit recipients would be hard pushed to tell you how many they've won and what for. Meanwhile in some cases - naming no Simply Reds - the presence of that pompous stuffy emblem and a flash proudly proclaiming an album to be the work of a 'Brits Nominee' only seems to amplify the waves of tedium and laughability pulsating outwards from the rapidly Charity Shop-bound CD. It's a bit like, well, all of those other high-profile media awards which grab endless acres of column inches without ever having the slightest impact on your own personal reading, viewing or listening habits.

What's harder to avoid, however, is the constant nagging awareness at the back of your mind that The Brits exists. True, it's hardly The Great Satan, or even The Big Victor, and it's not even really the lingering bastion of Thatcherism that some try to make it out to be, but in symbolic and totemistic terms it's a troubling reminder that there's an entire industry out there that if it had its way would happily do away with anything you're remotely interested in, and churn out kerching-friendly bland music for bland people for ever more. Let us not forget that the Brits-approved music world is something that X Factor and its ilk are actually an alternative to.

It's hardly surprising, then, that over the years there have been a couple of high profile attempts at rocking the Brits boat, but even that has now been effectively streamlined and locked-down into a managed, controllable, headline-friendly and 100% safe form of 'controversy' that doesn't reflect badly on anyone involved with the ceremony itself. Adele got a bit mardy! Liam Gallagher was drunk! A dance music DJ had 'words' with an old rocker! And other entirely surprising things you weren't expecting at all! None of which - conveniently - involve anything other than a surly malcontent refusing to play along and spoiling it all for everyone who works very hard behind the scenes to make the Brit Awards the great success story that it is. Even as far back as the Mick Fleetwood/Samantha Fox-hosting debacle in 1989, there was a conscious attempt to blame it on the two admittedly ill-suited hosts (and it's worth pointing out here that La Fox had been doing live TV and radio for several years by that point without any comparable disasters; Fleetwood however should have stuck to being remixed by Arthur Baker) rather than whoever cued in the wrong guests, set up the stage back to front, or gave the green light to the whole thing in the first place. Only the year before, of course, production shortcomings had led to Andrew Lloyd Weber's meaningless speech about nothing (or at least nothing to do with anything or anyone apart from himself) overrunning so badly that there wasn't time for Rick Astley to collect his 'gong' for Single Of The Year, with a mysterious hair-mousse bloke in an expensive suit virtually snatching it away from the presenters before a sharp cut to The Who doing a not particularly exciting show-closer. Doesn't get mentioned quite so often, that.

Even the few brief but incendiary moments of subversion that did get through have been deftly swept under the carpet and are kept as far apart from official Brits history as possible. If you want evidence of this, look no further than the fact that no less than three attempts to upload videos to go with this post to YouTube have resulted in an immediate takedown due to a 'Copyright Claim' from the BPI, whereas endless clips of fucking Dido et al graciously accepting awards remain online ad infinitum. Well, yah boo sucks to that. We're going to be celebrating the incidents that The Brits would rather forget, but which are the only moments anyone else remembers, whether the BPI likes it or not. This, in a very real sense, is Television Freedom...


1992, and unlikely million-selling dance music duo The KLF are named Best British Group - albeit jointly with the depressingly inevitable Simply Red - and are booked to open The Brits at the exact moment they decide to jack in the musical project that's got out of their control and return to their quieter former existence as artists and writers. Instead of the expected pyrotechnic-laden big production number of the sort the band have become known for, the 'suits' get a lone flashing police light and a frantic thrash-metal version of 3am Eternal, ending with Bill Drummond firing some very loud blanks at an audience who probably considered U2 to be a little on the raucuous and unkempt side. Confused silence and close-ups of sour-faced women in expensive dresses ensue.


The following year, a rare outbreak of criticism over the event's predictabler-than-predictable beige-hued line-up from traditionally supportive tabloid pop columnists sees up and coming indie sexuality-straddlers Suede added to the bill at the last minute. Realising they are not going to win any friends at the event whatever they do, Brett and company up the musical abrasiveness and discomfort-occasioning homo-hetero-erotic posturing to a truly remarkable degree, scaring the audience into even less applause than you'd find at a Rebekah Brooks-led Pro-Horsemeat Rally with an address about the future of libraries from Terry Deary. Still, it's not like anyone remembers Tasmin Archer's performance, is it?



1996, and the one you've all been waiting for, as Jarvis Cocker famously pulls the rug from under Michael Jackson's innocence-proving-beyond-all-doubt Christ allegory spectacular through the medium of walking briskly across the stage whilst dressed as the 'Bionic' one off The Boy Who Won The Pools. To be honest, despite being more exciting, hilarious, and generally part of the all-too-brief Brass Eye-era 'something might change because of this' feeling that people were actually trying to start a quiet revolution from the inside, in a way it's not quite as subversive as the other two, as pretty much everyone who wasn't an insanity-fuelled Jackson fan came down heavily on Jarvis' side and applauded it as A Good Thing. Still, it was a truly thrilling moment, and without question Britpop's single greatest achievement, made all the more surreally enjoyable by the crowd cheering wildly when Jarvis appears as though they thought he was about to launch into a duet with Jacko, and by the ensuing press statement which claimed "Michael Jackson respects Pulp as artists". I'd love to know what his favourite track off Freaks was.

Meanwhile, we won't be mentioning Chumbawumba throwing a bucket of water over John Prescott, as it was a feeble and inappropriately-targeted publicity-courting gesture seemingly undertaken to prove that great revolutionary Chris Tarrant did not die in vain.

Why, you may be wondering, did all of these incidents take place so close to each other in the early nineties? Well, that was a time when the Brit-orientated side of the music industry thought that it could bring the troublesome 'alternative' sector's house into some sort of order and get it to play by their rules - anyone else remember the hideous British Music Weekend events? - but found that it still had enough fire in its heart to resent and reject such moves. Even Kingmaker, who were hardly ideological firebrands, released a single expressing their desire to 'bomb' the Brit Awards, admittedly in the days before the authorities would take such a statement too seriously and the right-on brigade would take it literally. A couple of years later, of course, Noel Gallagher and company were only too happy to play along with the mainstream's overtures, which led us into the even bigger mess we're in today.

So when James Corden hosts this year's bash on the 19th, instead of watching it go and listen to whatever you actually want to listen to. Something. Anything. Even Something/Anything, if you fancy a bit of seventies AOR. After all, in the words of another early nineties Brit-snubber, "don't be told who to like/it's your right/it's your choice to choose who to listen to..."

Just as long as you don't choose Kula Shaker.

How To Irritate People

Some musings from the archives about a couple of occasions on which I managed to really, really annoy people by writing something throwaway, inconsequential and trivial that you'd never have predicted that anyone would possibly take exception to, whilst deliberate attempts to provoke and rabble-rouse usually went by without any reaction at all. And this was all before THAT Stewart Lee review as well... incidentally I won't be re-running the 'Diana and IT Crowd pieces' mentioned below, because they were both rubbish.

"I wish to protest most strongly about everything" - Henry Root, Park Walk, West Brompton

If you're going to write stuff then sometimes - as recent less-than overjoyed reactions to the Diana and IT Crowd pieces on here have testified - you're going to upset people. Whether you mean to or not. Over the years I have accidentally managed to enrage TV's Dave Gorman, a mad American who owns the supposed 'literary rights' to Graham Chapman, some jerk out of an early nineties pop duo who lasted for about five minutes and had literally half a hit, any number of ruralist pluralists, and countless 'man in the street' readers besides.

There was, for example, the person who took bile-spitting objection to a few throwaway observations about amusingly shoddy lyrics, fuming "have you never heard of POETRY or METAPHOR?". Or the cheerful and obviously well-balanced individual who took exception to some slightly frivolous (and, erm, patently appreciative) stuff about the glam-rocking likes of Flintlock and Sailor and sent in the following charming missive:

"You are a bitchy frilly little venting sod aren't you? Your site is more a rubbish bin with a used tampon in it than a paintbox. Angry at everyone because you've never achieved anything in life? Besides all the femme hysteria you get your facts all wrong, and that's the most disturbing and misleading aspect of your website. Don't write about the seventies without consulting facts. Disgusted with you"

What's more, the piece that instigated such ire appeared on a site that once provoked someone to send a terse email reading simply "more paragraphs, less green". Disgusted with myself.

So disgusted in fact that as an act of atonement, I will now outline a five-point plan of how to avoid recieving furious and badly-punctuated borderline threats in response to absolutely nothing from the sort of people who shouldn't even be trusted with the ability to read, let alone to hand out the scissors:


1. Don't Say Anything Less Than Complimentary About Silent Cinema

Lord alone knows why, but claiming nothing more provocative than a complete lack of interest in the soundless antics of Charlie Chaplin and his slow-laugh chums always provokes a flood of extremely long and irritated emails; striking back in their hundreds, albeit very slowly. You have to feel sorry for these people though - after all, it's no wonder they're angry when they're so regularly whacked on the head by unwittingly-rotated planks of shoulder-mounted wood that they've seen being carried towards them five minutes in advance of the impact.


2. Don't Play Devil's Advocate About Doctor Who

The majority of fans of Doctor Who are sensitive souls, and don't particularly appreciate any boat-rocking over widely-held majority opinions on the series. Suggest that The Underwater Menace is good and not rubbish like you thought, speak up for the Sylvester McCoy era, or point out that Tom Baker was occasionally phoning in his performance, and they'll come down on you like a ton of falling bits of scenery from a Colin Baker story. Worse still, the days when fans would have to spend several months typing out their own fanzine in order to argue back are long gone, and The Great Disgruntled can be online and calling you a 'congenital idiot' within minutes.


3. Don't Make Any Criticisms Of Chris Morris

To dispense with the witticisms for a second (much like Chris Morris has done himself for the past decade, ho ho), there are too many people out there who see Chris Morris not as a rather funny bloke who has made plenty of worthwhile 'points' with his humour and a couple of meandering and on occasion dangerous and stupid ones besides, but as some kind of religious visionary whose every utterance must be accepted as law. So if you're out to argue that you didn't enjoy one of his works, you're on to a loser from the outset. Considered expressions of genuine dismay at the hateful and poorly-focused Brass Eye Special, for example, were brushed aside with comments like "it was the satire that had to be made!", "you just didn't get it!", "what are you, a Daily Mail reader?", and, of course, "Morris is a godlike genius, I think you'll find, and essentially what he was trying to do was...". Similarly, lukewarm reviews of My Wrongs #Ohwhogivesaflyingfuck found themselves dismissed 'invalid' on account of containing a sentence calling the Brass Eye Special 'poor', or worse still, getting two numbers in the title the wrong way round. Pointing out that Nathan Barley was relevant to about three people in London and had no sodding jokes in anyway met with cries of "too close to home eh? ;) u just dont like it because u ARE nathan barley!! :)" and what have you. That said, when the same review causes perrennial indie no-hoper Momus to sneer at you for mentioning The Housemartins, you're clearly doing something right.


4. Don't Mention Britpop

Do you remember Britpop? That period between roughly 1992-1996 when Blur, Suede, Pulp and Elastica made some genuinely thrilling records, Paul Weller made some records, and just for the tiniest fraction of a second, it really did feel like so-called 'alternative' culture was about to take on the mainstream and win? Well, whatever you do, never mention this anywhere. Because if you do, you will be inundated by communications from angry shouting individuals pointing out how there were other people making records too you know, how it was all a load of media hype and never actually happened, and how grunge remained really really really popular despite what the weedy girly indie kid geeks might try to tell you with their short washed hair and (spit) trainers. This goes beyond mere expressions of personal distaste for the bands themselves (despite the fact that an expression of distaste for Elastica is pretty much a scientific paradox), and into a risible insistence that because someone didn't experience an era or subculture a certain way, nobody else in the world could possibly have done so, almost like some kind of Stalinist attempt to rewrite history to ensure that Eddie Vedder was victorious. In other words it's like, erm, Britpop never happened!


5. Don't Say You Liked Doctor Who And The Idiot's Lantern

Because you'll never hear the end of it.