DOUBLE DIAMOND

Gray go to Geezer and tickled his tum. Geezer guffawed and fell to the floor, Double Diamond upended, upholstery tin-frothed and soaking. The grimaces of stewardesses approached then stopped a beerstink away. A busload of biker chicks sprawled over the seats, busting out of their zipperslick leathers, their oilsump behinds oozing ever closer to Ray now that Geezer was incapacitated by the superstriker. Footballers weren't their scene, these girls. All those communal baths and I'm forever blowing bubbles. Gray loved all that, this tickle assault was straight from the towel-slapping changing room. It was a monolithic clash of backstage cultures, rock versus footy. Both were incomprehensible to Ray, who stirred a little but remained entranced.
He was from a heavy metal village. You don't get many heavy metal villages nowadays, but you did then. You couldn't leave the house if you weren't heavy metal. Heavy metal girls shunned Ray. He wasn't tough enough, his hair was the wrong kind of long, his jeans had no patches, no winged men, no fallen angels, no bastardisation of Paradise Lost imagery embroidered on his behind. And he thought the music sounded like shit, except for 'Since You Been Gone' by Richie Blackmore's Rainbow. He said as much in the youth club attic, thinking the Rainbow element would soften the blow, earn him some leniency. The youth club attic smelled of damp and desperation, a million miles from the private jet pictures he'd been gazing at in Shoot! Andy Gray with Black Sabbath. His one true idol soiling himself with Sabbath, the bane of Ray's existence, his upside-down cross to bear. So he turned his back on football, decided he'd never liked it in the first place. Metal never bothered him, not really, but he didn't see the appeal of looking at gatefold sleeves with pictures of people in coffins. Dead people, supposedly. So he waited for music that was dirtier, filthier, rougher and softer, noisy and melodic. Music for which his head had the right hair. Music that made the radio sound like it was broken and so could only be broadcast at night, when people who worried about such things were watching television. Music that put his dad's stereo in apparent danger of collpase. Guitars that had lost their voices, sun-bleached or waterlogged, depending on Ray's mood. But of course the main reason he deftly extradited himself from the land of metal and headed in the direction of this music was that the girls didn't live in his village, they lived elsewhere, though about other things, Proust and that. And they were prettier and they had fewer zips to contend with.

The Munchy Box

Ray and Lena stood behind Greg, looking over his shoulders. Greg took a deep breath, coinciding with Lena's little finger touching the bulging blue vein on the back of Ray's hand. Ray glanced over at Lena and she blew her fringe. Greg lifted the lid of the pizza box. Ray flinched and Lena did a hamster gasp. Greg didn't move. Ray stared, first at the doner meat, then at the naan bread, then at the chips. Ray's canyon-leaping eyes took in the two tubs of sauce, toxicity unknown. He spied a trace of salad, yellow and grey, beneath the huge pounding slab of naanplop. Greg lifted the doner meat with a fork, delicately as a pedal steel picker. He revealed a pile of pakora and a shove ha'penny formation of greasy onion rings, the batter a deep mahogany. So this was it - the munchy box from the multi-ethnic takeaway on Great Western Road. Ray and Lena telepathically moved apart and glided to their seats at the table, sci-fi silent. Greg sat staring at the food until Lena fired off the fizz of the Irn Bru bottle. Ray got up and fetched three plates.
“We're going to need some music to go with this,” said Greg. “Something really fucking heavy. Something to go with blocked arteries. A heavy heavy monster sound.” He got up and ricocheted into their room. Johnny Cash came on. Not an old Sun Records track, but something more elaborate and impossibly right-wing, portly growling about an old flag and how the hippy kids should respect it.
Greg tried to arrange the food on the plates to look like record labels. Sun was easy, the first rays of the new rising doner, Meteor was OK, a pakora star trailing clouds of doner, but the Shreveport Ram, using every ingredient, just looked like a horrible big pile of inedible crap. Greg slid it over to Ray with a mean and meaningful stare, very Man in Black.

PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

I am going to get a “Let England Shake” tattoo just as soon as there's no chance of it taking itself literally. In the meantime I'm going to worry about this album being one of those albums that are just too good to listen to. I was reduced to a sobbing wreck (in my head, just a bit glassy-eyed on the outside) by the time the song 'England' came around (the Eddie Cochran bit, if you're interested). I love the way this album incorporates other songs into its own compositions: Eddie Cochran, Niney the Observer, whoever came up with 'Constantinople'(The Four Lads, it now transpires) in a way that pumps up the originals with new meaning, or rather, it returns them to their literal meaning, picking away at the metaphor, the beautiful bouncing joke, until a bright shiny bone appears. In short, I think this is the best war album since Scott Walker's Tilt. All we need now is a war film that is its equal, a role fulfilled in 1995 by Ulysses' Gaze (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses'_Gaze ) by Theòdoros Angelòpoulos. The video for the title track has a Museum of Everything feel to it, but it's this performance in front of Gordon Brown on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show that best expresses the strangeness and wonder of this album:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0M5MFryU3c

Here is the (ahem) official video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2Qlb0qFLFE

Side 2!

Here is side 2 of my February C90. Quite a few rap singers on this one:

PJM C90 FEB 2011 SIDE 2

01)I Should Have Known Better - The Skatalites
02)The First Picture Of You - The Lotus Eaters
03)Rock The Bells - LL Cool J
04)I Wanna Go To A Disco - Ricky Wilde
05)Happy Birthday - Stevie Wonder
06)Listening To Marmalade - Go Kart Mozart
07)Power [Explicit] - Kanye West
08)Os Grilos - Marcos Valle
09)Crazy For You - Best Coast
10)Let's Try To Build A Love Affair - The Exotics
11)Keep It Goin' On - Blade
12)Saturday's Father - Four Seasons
13)Lil' Ghetto Boy - Dr. Dre
14)Ruination Day (Part 2) - Gillian Welch
15)Thoughts Of You - Dennis Wilson
16)Lady Friend [Mono] - The Byrds

I Made Side One...

..of a tape. You can download it, if you like, and then you will be able to listen to it, if you want to. I will make side two when I get the time. It is a bit longer than a C90 really. This side, side one, lasts from Maidenhead Station to Picadilly Circus. Three instrumentals, one demo recording, not enough women (sorry), my favourite papal punk track from Scotland (where else?), The Monkees doing Antonio Carlos Jobim in the country style, a dancehall version of Lisa Stansfield's legendary number one record, a Michael Nyman track from everyone's favourite film, Wonderland, and one rousing tribute to those still besieging the embattled regime of Hosni Mubarak. Let's hope it does the trick:

01) Nick Drake - Horn
02) The Human Beinz - April 15th
03) Bob Dylan - If You See Her, Say Hello
04) Liliput - Hitch-Hike
05) The Ramones - I Want You Around
06) Jackie DeShannon - When You Walk In The Room
07) The Runaways - Cherry Bomb
08) Michael Nyman - Molly
09) Krystal - All Around The World
10) The Prats - Disco Pope
11) The Monkees - How Insensitive
12) The Undertones - Get Over You (Demo)
13) Baby Huey - Hard Times
14) ELO - Mr Blue Sky
15) Jenny and Johnny - Scissor Runner
16) Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - Egyptian Reggae

C90 SIDE ONE

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