Monster Momus Musical?

Sometimes a piece of news makes such good sense that it takes quite a while to mentally process the information. The word from Momus’s Tumblr site is that a “cinematic Momus musical” is being planned. Peter Webber, director of Girl With a Pearl Earring is involved, and the provisional title is Monsters of Love. (Personally I’d have gone with Hippopotamomuses of Love, but that’s OK.) Furthermore, it’s hoped that Leo Chadburn a.k.a. Simon Bookish will be doing clever arrangements of highlights from the massive Momus book of songs.

I think we can all agree that that’s a good idea.

These ought to be our pop stars (part 1)

In the finest possible way, Vulnavia Vanity makes me feel like I’m sixteen again.

Animated Sound: Norman McLaren, Neighbours

Listen to the soundtrack to Scottish-Canadian Norman McLaren’s Oscar-winning short film Neighbours, from 1952 — if that’s not nice, then what is? McLaren made the soundtrack (and that for other films too) by monkeying about with the physical film, drawing and scratching shapes that is then “played” on the projector. The video below explains this process.

Nobody cares for me… pieces about work and crime

I’m making a collection of music about work and crime. There are some downloadable mp3s on my newly-made Soundcloud page (link below): including me doing an uncover version of G-Man Hoover – a song previously uncovered by Van Dyke Parks on his Discover America album – accompanied by a circuit-bent toy Casio. Who remembers circuit-bending? It’s like 2002 in here! There’s also a piano song about a miserable tea boy, a very confident job application, the aftermath of a dinner party, and me singing VDP singing Roaring Lion singing about the Mills Brothers.

Link: Superintendent Idle Tiger

I’m also on Twitter, but don’t expect me to say anything important.

The Jonny Opinion Memorial Podcast

Don’t worry, he’s still with us. He’s just decided to start doing some podcasts. The first episode is up, and very thrilling it is too. Click here to listen to him selecting some music, talking about it, and passing on a thoroughly disgusting-sounding recipe.

“It’s all happening!”

Here’s Julie Christie in Billy Liar, skipping through early-1960s Bradford (though the town hall is borrowed from Manchester). As the smitten Tom Courtenay puts it: “she’s crazy, she just enjoys herself.” He’s not wrong — I mean, she’s just got back from Doncaster of all places.

The odd thing about watching this film now is that the shots of modern Bradford under construction (there’s lots of talk throughout the film about ongoing “planners’ meetings”) look remarkably similarly to Bradford, after the destruction of the modern town centre. It’s old but pathetically ongoing news that the supposed reconstruction of the city centre is an ongoing farce showing no signs of conclusion. As someone has reasonable asked in the picture below: Good times – when?

It’s quite eerie seeing on film the construction of what has since been destroyed. The latter part of the clip above shows the opening of a new department store — as the catchphrase of the camp southern comedian goes: “It’s all happening!” Modernity has arrived to the postwar northern city. Fifty years later, there are very few shops standing in Bradford’s centre. It isn’t all happening any more. It’s easy to suppose, as some Youtube commenters seem to have done, that the modernisation that the blame for Bradford’s current sorry state is directly traceable to the moment captured here, the moment of construction. In retrospect, the cranes and diggers look ominous: the kind of people who instinctively recoil at the idea of “planning” would probably suppose that modernisation should never have happened.

I don’t think that’s the film’s point at all, though. All the grumbling about “planners” and lamenting the loss of open fields comes from a fusty old Councillor who is firmly aligned with the past, with the undertakers where Billy works and the overbearing Undercliffe cemetery (where I went on several school trips) where Billy wriggles out of marriage proposals. Councillor Duxbury – note the appropriately feudal surname – is soundly mocked and mimicked by the modernised Billy, though Duxbury, functioning as a kind of overseeing lord of the land, has his revenge by reporting Billy’s attempts to discard some stolen workplace calendars on the moors.

Of course, there are plenty of impressive Victorian buildings still standing in Bradford. And let’s at least thank Owen Hatherley for reminding us that although there were some clangers (most of them soon demolished), some of Bradford’s postwar buildings are rather good. He’s absolutely right about High Point, and I also like the Arndale Centre and the Library. Let’s hope they last, though others have fallen.

Come On In My Kitchen (part seven)

‘Oh, I thought it was your todger that was trapped’, Constable Grimbold remarked on witnessing Delroy’s spot of bother first-hand. Delroy had a right mork on and declined to reply.

Grimbold took the train seat next to Delroy, just like an old pal. Delroy winced in an unfriendly fashion. By habit he was impolite to lawyers and policemen.

Had he been working with a partner, Grimbold might have fancied a bit of the old Good Cop / Bad Cop fun and games. As things stood, he was stuck in the role of Crap Cop. He told Delroy that he’d just need to take down a few details (though he hadn’t even a pen, the wanker) and then we’d see about getting this little circumstance solved so we could all get to where we’re trying to go.

‘Piss off, Plod’, said Delroy. Grimbold took the remark in good nature and grimaced like a sock puppet. It was supposed to be a smile.

Oh, so he smiles does he? Just remember that the cheerful jingles you hear on the adverts on your jolly television were all recorded by some character in a bedroom feeling incredibly ashamed of what he’s up to. It’s to be hoped so, anyway.

Grimbold, who had often been ashamed of what he’d been up to in his bedroom, conjured a packet of Monster Munch from his coat pocket. This livened up the picture considerably.

He offered Delroy a Monster Munch and Delroy, like a donkey that’s gradually learning to love again, accepted one with a reluctant hand.

His father came to England in the 50s. He worked in the car plant in Coventry but by night he was a calypso singer known as King Cant. He made a record or two that sold well enough – his big hit was a calypso about how long the queues at his local post office were since a neighbouring post office closed down and the local one had to serve almost twice the number of customers. Of course he had the situation down much snappier than that on the record.

You’ll hear different stories about how this King Cant got his name. Some say that when he’d been on the drink he would moralize at length about not very much – he was descended from a disgraced Anglican minister in Trinidad, and sermon-giving was in his blood. It was said that he’d be up on his feet in the pubs speaking a lot of cant – and that his less successful records were marred by this tendency also.

Others insist that ‘Cant’ is really ‘Can’t’, and that Delroy’s dad came to be called King Can’t by his friend since he tended – the mornings after his drinking, mostly – to be a total misery, full of negative feelings about life’s daily challenges. His boss would ask him to hurry over with a new set of parts. ‘Boss, I can’t’, he’d whimper.

As a matter of fact, King Cant was named when he was still a schoolboy at a church school near Port-of-Spain. The teachers were giving the kids plenty of English history, providing them with a full and proper sense of the mother country and all its bewildering comings and goings. Handed a brutalised old history primer to work with, Delroy’s dad was told to give a report about an English king of his own choosing. He was a bright boy and the only obstacle to his completing this simple assignment was a dash of what’s now known as dyslexia. So he stood there in front of his class, in front of his teacher – at public speaking he was a smasher – and delivered a meticulously-researched account of one King Cunt attempting to halt the tides of the ocean. His delighted classmates applied the name to him immediately and it was only in his adulthood, when he began releasing records, that the name was cleaned up for public broadcasting.

And if you believe all of that, you must be as silly as you look.

Come On In My Kitchen (part six)

Six

Constable Grimbold shambled up to the station in all his finery. He was hungry and he was not on duty. He achieved an egg mayonnaise sandwich from the café at a cost of £1.60 in money.

The trouble with Constable Grimbold was that he looked like Peter Beardsley as sketched by Aubrey Beardsley. He browsed the day’s paper at the newsstand, which he had not been able to read that morning because he was busy observing and reviewing the official interrogation of a violent criminal.

The newspaper was full of information. A supermarket had banned schoolchildren from taking bags into its store. A woman was distressed after receiving an email from her recently deceased husband urging her to look at a new website for downloading mobile phone ringtones. A man from Jamaica had been given a gold medal for running a distance of one hundred metres at remarkable speed. It was not thought that the man would attempt to use the gold medal as currency in exchange for food or accommodation; more likely he would keep it in a cabinet with his other ones and think about it fondly.

He fell into a reverie by the newsstand with an expression like an off-duty tiger shark. You can see with this Constable Grimbold that I’m having merry hell getting the ambling bastard from A to B.

His prompt and proper arrival at B (wherever that may B) must seem even less probable when I tell you that the train he tried to board was quickly confirmed by its conductor to be going nowhere at all in the immediate future.

‘Under no circumstances will I permit you to board the train’, asserted the conductor, a decent and enthusiastic Hungarian.

‘What’s the meaning of this, then?’, asked Grimbold.

‘This is not a matter for the public to have knowledge of.’

‘And what if I were to give you five pounds?’

‘I will accept the bribe under no circumstances. But I will tell you in confidence that part of a man’s anatomy is trapped in the seats, and under no circumstances will we set the train in locomotion.’

Constable Grimbold’s eyes widened (the effect was repulsive). This was clearly an horrific event, and as an officer of the law he thought that he might go and have a nosey. Brandishing his badge he barged through the train door, weirdshaped, full-blooded and – under these circumstances – off-duty no longer.

Come On In My Kitchen (part five)

[This was Delroy’s message.]

Scrap, my old manpal. You’ll’ve seen that I couldn’t make it. Did that lady tell it you on the phone like I asked her to? I’ve had a bloody real do. I’m just there having a nod on the train – then I wake up because there’s a load of youngsters having their fun down at the arse end of the carriage, you know, listening to music and stabbing each other with fountain pens [they did it in rhythm, at the end of every stanza] and no I don’t think there’s anything wrong with society, I think they’re absolutely wonderful. But I’ve tried to get up and the old tail’s trapped between the seats. Well you can imagine – no I’ll save you the graft of it, I’ll tell you straight that I screamed like a bastard. I think the kiddies were starting to get wind of the situation. There’s this young madame sitting next to me, a bit of alright, and she goes to tell the conductor. I’m sat there thinking about just chopping all the seats up so I can get away, or if I can bend down far enough to just bite my way out, but then there were transport police having a look through the window and if I’m ever going to get apprehended by Her Majesty’s finest it’ll be for having a much nicer time than eating half a sodding train seat.

[Here Delroy began to sing a few verses of a song, in the northern music hall style.]

Bloody nora. So in comes the christlike conductor with the gang of little scrotes behind him, tells me that he can get me out but I’ll have to undergo a few indignities. I told him that I’d undergo no such thing and that I’d I stay exactly where I was thank you very much. I says to him I’m terribly sorry mate but you’ve fuck all sense of decorum.

[As Delroy finished the last sentence a mechanized lady’s voice speaking a strange relation of the English language could be heard explaining to the miseryguts passengers that “the train is not currently moving at this time”. Delroy, gallant, paused to let her finish.]

So to cut a long story short – shut up you sad wazzock – I’ve been captured here for donkey’s and I’m not going to be turning up at your do any time soon. Pass on my apologies to her majesty Mrs. Nosebridge. I was planning on giving her the benefit of my experience tonight if you know what I mean.

[That was Delroy all over, that was.]

Come On In My Kitchen (part four)

Three hours later the party in Scrap’s kitchen was raging out of all control. A beefburger slid down the wall leaving a trail of mixed yellow and red. Unable to get quite into the swing of things, Scrap was under the table, curled up like a broken toe.

He did not hear the telephone ring. He did not hear Delroy’s voice unreeling a long message on Scrap’s answering machine.