All the Lego’s gone up the Dyson

I’ll freely admit that a good number of my posts on this blog are just extended annotations to things that I’ve sung about. Either that, or the posts prove to be the germ of a song. But sometimes little bits of information are fed back to me from the real world, making me realise that what I’m singing about has a semblance of contemporary relevance, which I might otherwise have been unaware of.

Anyway, I make no apologies for blogging such extensive footnotes. If you’re going to be a self-made artist, god knows you have to also put a lot of work into inventing a critical context for yourself (no-one else is going to do it for you).

So, my forthcoming song Treat Me Like A Fairy is for the most part a period song — to be precise it’s set in 1917, and involves the Bradfordian electro-folklore tale of the Cottingley Fairies. The incomparable Anne Marie Varrella sings most of the song, but in “my” part, in the middle, I insert a little anachronism:

“All the Lego’s gone up the Dyson —
Hey ho! Little men!
My friends are in the television
Messing about again.”

Actually, “all the Lego’s gone up the Dyson” was something I overheard (overread?) my cousin telling my other cousin on Facebook. The phrase caught my eye because effortlessly it name-checked two brands (which seem to share a similar aesthetic, in terms of colour and design) in one taut sentence. God knows what my cousin meant by this sentence, but to me it conjured images of primary-coloured technology gone mad against itself, and therefore proved an anachronistic complement to the song’s main subject of cultural havoc wreaked through through a child’s abuse of technology.

Anyway, apparently this month marked the 50th birthday of the Lego brick. I had loads of Lego as a child. Playing with Lego didn’t turn me into a builder, an architect, or anything involving much hands-on design. But I wonder whether Lego — let’s say Lego aesthetics — have influenced the way we create stuff in a more subtle way. For example, my music is recorded using Apple Garageband program. Below is a sample picture from Apple of a Garageband screen — am I right to detect an influence from Lego on the way in which sound design has been visualised (via the scores of composers like Stockhausen, also below) as building blocks of sound?

And if we’re going to play cultural history, then Lego is surely somewhere between the Bauhaus and nu-rave, as well as forming a fruitful early connection between technology and near-idiocy.

So, for Lego’s 50th birthday, here’s a Lego questionnaire. Answer as many of the following as you like:

How much Lego did you have, really?

What was the biggest thing you ever made from Lego?

What was the rudest thing you ever made?

Could a fairy be made from Lego?

Did your Lego ever go up the Hoover / Dyson / any other type of vacuum cleaner and if so, how did you react?

I once got the arm of a Lego man (thankfully, not the one pictured below) stuck up my nose, and had to go to hospital. What on earth was I trying to do? Did this ever happen to you?

Thankyou.