I Am Not The Beatles

 

Click above for big pictures, click below to play me…

The lead singer of Balaam & The Angel wants to show you something special.

I bet he does.

What’s more, it is a something that measures 7 inches…

Then I fear he is about to be sorely disappointed, as in my experience 7 inches is anything but special - it takes alot more than that to take the sadness from my smile I promise you.

I think you misunderstand, as the something he is referring to isn’t his Silver Sword… but his… SILVER RECORD!

He has a SILVER RECORD! ?

Yes!

It isn’t a real SILVER RECORD! obviously - as that would imply some sort of chart success on this song’s part - but still, it’s a nice and shiny distraction away from the musical musings which are contained upon it.

Are these musings something special ?

In as much as sounding not unlike a slightly tipsy ZZ Top can be described as such, yes.

Anything else special to note ?

Yes, two somethings :

Firstly, if you hang around long enough then you are soon rewarded with a gap for you to stop dancing in momentarily - which is always a bonus - and secondly, rarely for a rock record, the something special the lead singer refers to isn’t actually remotely penis based at all… but emotional : he wants to create a mutual feeling of trust and respect between you both in the hope this may grow and develop naturally into radiant happiness and love.

The big pansy.

What’s The Best Bit ?

The end.

But only because you know that they chose to finish the recorded version of the song in this way just so when they played it live they could wait for a bit… shout “ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!”… and then haul themselves back into it all over again.

What A Special Band Name!

It is isn’t it - and, interestingly, if we decide to take as a stone cold fact that the lead singer of Balaam & The Angel’s penis most definitely really is 7 inches long, then rather ironically

a) He could never be described as being hung like a donkey, despite the fact that
b) The band name is all about donkeys. Talking donkeys.

I Find That Hard To Braylieve…

Well, here is the story - although for more sensitive readers I should probably warn that the following narrative does contain the mental image of somebody opening “the mouth of the ass”.

In the Old Testament of The Bible, Balaam was considered a poet and prophet of such high regard that people thought he was directly connected to and spoke with God. As such, it was thus believed that when Balaam blessed items or people they truly were blessed - and conversely those he cursed were truly cursed.

At some point in Balaam’s life some chap turned up, for reasons unspecified, to ask him if he wouldn’t mind popping off somewhere to spend a bit of time cursing the entire country of Israel. Balaam said that he would but only if God approved the project first, so he asked God… and lo and behold He did say it was alright - as long as Balaam only cursed things when God said he could and only with the words that God told him to use at the time.

Accepting this caveat Balaam then got on his donkey and started travelling to wherever he was going to do his cursing. However at this point The Angel Of The Lord went a bit rogue and decided to try and stop the cursey Balaam, so he made himself invisible to humans - but crucially not donkeys - and floated about a bit.

This vision of The Angel Of The Lord - which after all is a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus Christ himself - jumping around in front of her face rather unsurprisingly made the donkey stop still in sheer fucking terror… which in turn made Balaam absentmindedly start cursing it with the sort of words that would probably shock even an all knowing God, and which therefore He would never have signed off in the first place.

What happened next, according to the King James Bible, was :

“… the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?”

A slightly pissed off Angel Of The Lord then made himself visible to Balaam and in no uncertain terms told him that the only reason he wasn’t dead at this present moment was because of his Amazing Talking Ass.

Balaam was thus allowed to get to wherever he was going and tried to start all that railing against Israel which he had been asked to do previously (a process which must surely be known as Israiling), only to then find that God had tricked him a bit and would actually only let him say nice things about the place - such as praising the cleanliness of the beaches and what a nice place it was to go on holiday.

The moral of this tale is apparently that we should always heed God’s word - although it could also admittedly be that if you want to write a moralistic story which people take remotely seriously, you should probably never have the words ‘mouth’ and ‘ass’ in anything approaching a close proximity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaam

http://cicministry.org/commentary/issue4.pdf

Wham! Balaam! I Am! A Man!

Unlike a young and lithe George Michael, Balaam & The Angel aren’t just one man but three - and what’s more they are all brothers : James, Mark and Des Morris originally from Motherwell in Scotland.

The band was formed in 1984, incredibly 25 years later they are still going, and they are the proud owners of one of the world’s most initially confusing websites :

http://www.balaamandtheangel.co.uk

Want to hear some more ? It’s all very pleasant - their myspace page is here :

http://www.myspace.com/balaamandtheangel

And lots of photos and other stuff is at an unofficial site, here :

http://www.balaamandtheangel.com

Interestingly it turns out the band are quite influential and very entrepreneurial in their own right, as in order to get their songs released they set up their own independent record company in Birmingham called Chapter 22 Records. They didn’t just keep it for themselves however, they also signed other bands too - which means that without them the world may never well have heard of Pop Will Eat Itself, The Mission and …errr… Scorpio Rising :

http://www.vinyltap.co.uk/shop/label/Chapter+22.aspx

And if - just like that lovely chap over at Because Midway Still Aren’t Coming Back - that is the kind of music which makes you go all wobbly with excitement, this fact alone must surely make Balaam & The Angel Something very Special indeed.

Money Update

Cost: 8 pence
Current Value: 1 special pound and 73 somethings
Current Profit: 339 pounds and 40 pence.

Supporting Cast Update : ZZ Top; Michael, George

I’ll show you Something Special :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQEm37DlsgA

 

Click above for big pictures, click below to play me…

“Desire is experienced as a gift : we privilege people with
our desire for them, though they don’t always recognise
quite what an honour they are being given.”

Adam Phillips - Terrors and Experts

Love can be many things : a battlefield, a losing game, a many splendoured thing. But - no matter what your personal opinion of love may be at this present moment - one thing it always is, is a transaction.

Taking this undeniable fact to its logical conclusion and using a bit of lateral thinking, Stylistics thus wish to make a suggestion designed to help us all during these tough financial times. Instead of giving out money to get the stuff you desire they say, why not give a little love instead?

What A Lovely Idea !

It certainly is.

Unfortunately - rather like your first visit to the prize booth after using the shoddy ticket / reward system employed by amusement arcades on many of Britain’s piers - the range of products actually available in exchange for your love is disappointingly limited.

Indeed some may suggest that the aforementioned pier system is vastly superior to this lovely suggestion, as at least with that you can walk away with something concrete you didn’t have before you went in - even if

a) it is a dusty Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles plastic key ring, which
b) cost you nigh on twenty quid - playing as you were on an endless series of shitty fruit machines in order to get enough tokens to acquire it in the first place.

Please be warned then that if you choose to use Stylistics latter method no plastic key rings are available, and that only yet more love can be traded in return for your initial little love outlay.

So I Can’t Give A Little Love For Oven Chips ?

Much though I would love to say that the freezer section in Sainsburys now recognises a little love as legal tender, I am afraid that the answer is no - which of course makes the idea behind this song less of a transaction… and more of a straight swap.

What A Shame… I’m Right Out Of Oven Chips.

On the plus side though there does seem to be an inflationary bonus attached, as you only have to give a little love to Stylistics in order to immediately have the much bigger and better bona fide full on intense why don’t we move in together love thrown right back in your face.

And although this is admittedly enough to scare just about anybody off who was only making a tentative enquiry, what with all the emotional trauma I’ve gone through with Falco recently the idea of anybody loving me these days certainly makes a nice change.

What’s The Song Like ?

Like a mobility scooter on a motorway : dangerously slow.

Indeed, so ponderously does the lead singer express himself to his beloved over the most unhurried backing track in existence, at some points you may well fear the whole thing is about to shudder to a complete halt and start playing itself backwards.

Where Are Those Lovely Stylistics Now ?

This is a tricky question to answer as first of all this seems to be the only release by the band which, presumably for some legal reasons involving people leaving, was released with no ‘The’ as part of the band name - and secondly because a bit like all that silliness which once afflicted Beggar & Co - there are now actually two bands vaguely bickering over which is the real one.

In one corner we have Russell Thompkins Jr. - an original member of The Stylistics who formed in 1968 and had massive hits such as You Make Me Feel Brand New - now singing alongside three other chaps who were also in The Stylistics and Stylistics at some point (although not necessarily at the same time as Russell) who call themselves The New Stylistics.

Whilst elsewhere we also have another original member called Airrion Love singing alongside three other chaps who may or may not have been in The Stylistics or indeed Stylistics at any point at all… yet performing in a band called The Stylistics.

Confused ? You will be :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stylistics

Do Stylistics Give Love A Bad Name ?

No.

The same cannot be said for the website below however - as it is asking you to share the most intimate private moments of your utterly personal emotional and spiritual experiences of love… in exchange for a sample of some shitty perfume :

http://www.philosophygiveslove.com

Does Anyone Give Oven Chips A Bad Name ?

Yes - Jamie Oliver.

As apparently, when he was doing all that DON’T KILL THE CHILDREN nonsense a few years back, the sales of oven chips in supermarkets plummeted as a direct result. Luckily however, a company called Elmwood were on hand to charge McCain a pretty healthy £40,000 in order to draw some new pictures onto a plastic bag and thus - theoretically - save their frozen arses from collapsing :

http://tinyurl.com/psw8b4

http://www.elmwood.com/flash/?#/home/

Yes, it seems they utterly transformed the product - but only… stylistically.

Money Update

Cost : I give a little 8 pence
Current Value : for 2 pounds and 23 pence in return.
Current Profit : Gosh - 335 pounds and 75 pence. Which has made me rather chippy.

Want to hear You Make Me Feel Brand New - which apparently uniquely for a (The) Stylistics record has both Russell and Airrion singing on it - with the addition of some words scrolling annoyingly along the bottom ?

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

Like the annoying scrolling words but can’t stand the voices ?

http://ronansonlinekaraoke.com/sing.php?id=190

Supporting Cast Update: Oliver, Jamie; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

 

Click above for big pictures, click below to play me…

” And this song is considered a perfect gem,
And as to the meaning, it’s what you please. “
 

C.S. Calverley - Ballad

If - like me - the prospect of a good Boing is the kind of thing likely to get you more than just a little excited, then you’re going to love this record. For here is a song with you for the long haul, one which realises that although an accomplished Boingking may be enough to gain your initial attention - only by following such a thing up with some seriously intelligent pillowtalk can any hope of a long term relationship be established.

Thus for every hardworking Boing which is expertly tossed off in your general direction, a roughly equal number of similarly industrious Pings, Booms and Tschaks quickly make themselves known to alchemise any embarrassingly premature overexcitement into the gold of an intellectualised discourse.

This is a brave tactic certainly but also very successful as although, just like any marriage, the Boings do eventually stop, this slowly turns a song which may appear to be an empty soulless void into something rather more interesting - a process not unlike when a new colleague starts work in the office who you find a bit vacant and bland… only to discover two years later that you now inexplicably fancy the pants off them.

For Kraftwerk’s Booms, unlike Will Smith’s much more blokey Boom!s, are not here to do anything as mundane as shake the room but instead exist to help you deconstruct the medium of pop music itself and thus create a veritable Love Tschak : a little old place where we can get together and make sweet Musique… Non Stop.

Brilliant.

Aren’t Kraftwerk More Than Just A Little Bit Famous ?

They certainly are and the story of this track is utterly fascinating - as a song called Technopop, which allegedly contained bits of this one, was originally recorded in 1981 for an album of the same name.

That album was never released however as one member of Kraftwerk had become rather oddly obsessed with the mechanics of bicycles at the time and, whilst riding one and presumably ruminating upon the exciting sound the gear change made rather than actually looking where he was bloody well going, he then rather sadly nearly killed himself upon it - putting the entire Technopop project on hold whilst he recovered from his injuries.

And it was during his recovery time that some exciting new digital technologies coincidentally came to the commercial fore and - not wanting their futuristic band to suddenly be consigned to a part of the past - Kraftwerk thus ditched the entire album they had just recorded and recreated it all again in the digital environment instead :

http://www.kraftwerkfaq.com/recordings.html#technopop

As such Musique Non Stop is a place where the band changed, and was therefore mildly controversial in Kraftwerk circles at the time, as it is a song that stands at the crossroads between two worlds - originally created in the analogue world like all their previous music had been, but now recreated and existing in the digital world like all of their (and just about everybody else’s) music from now on surely would.

In an irony some oh so futuristic Kraftwerk fans didn’t seem to spot however, alot of them were a bit scared of change - with them being downright suspicious of digitalness generally and therefore this record specifically - with the upshot being that not many people bought this pariah of a record even if it is now considered, for very good reason, to be a bit of a classic.

Want to hear the album which was renamed Electric Cafe ? The first three tracks are minimilistic magnificence personified… and terrifyingly prescient of the music that was about to occur :

http://tinyurl.com/cfjvgg

A Digital Universe In An Analogue World

” If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces
The age to come would say, This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’ “
 

William Shakespeare - Sonnet 17

And the importance of the crossroads where this song stands cannot be underestimated.

After all, man’s ability to manipulate his own environment is what makes him inherently human and is one thing which separates us from being purely animal. In the past however our manipulation had always been within the analogue environment - ie on The Earth, constructing things like stone circles and cathedrals to make our mark upon the land and mould it to our cultural expectations.

The digital domain though is of course entirely different - as here Man has seemingly done the impossible and created what is essentially a totally new universe within the world itself which We are the God of.  This new digital universe, unlike our analogue one, can have no actual meaning as part of it’s make up however as it is constructed purely out of binary numbers (or, to put it another way, any human beauty of any human eyes when placed into it is digitally turned into fresh numbers) :

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=187488

“…a piece of music has meaning for us… but when we take these things across the boundary, they are stripped of their meaning. They just become numbers, their human associations lost. If their meaning is to be regained, they must be transported back from the digital to the human world.”

As such meaning must thus be plastered onto whatever objects we put in the digital domain and are now transporting back. But the problem with plastering meaning onto objects rather than just having feelings about them is that you end up objectifying them ie your feelings about them become exaggerated - something that Lara Croft can more than attest to.

In Kraftwerk’s case the transporting back process is just a question of performing the songs they put there, and they thus gain whatever exaggerated meaning we perceive about them at the time. In other words, although “such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces” they do touch objectified unearthly ones.

And this is presumably why Kraftwerk inspire such huge devotion, and also why a total of seven spoken words put over a sparse electronic beat with no discernible bassline can feel curiously and oddly emotional - as the meaning of Musique Non Stop is quite literally… what you please :

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1306

http://www.kraftwerk.com/

Money Update

Cost : 8 pence
Current Value : 3 pounds and 37 pence. Gosh, this wasn’t just not a hit in the UK but anywhere. Every single country it was released in… it totally stopped.
Current Profit : 332 pounds and 55 pence. You, like me, probably ignore this bit these days. But hey, it’s musique to my ears.

Want to hear some cover versions of this song? Make the most of them, this has never happened before. Click here.

Want to hear Karl Bartos’ (a Kraftwerk founder member but now ex-Kraftwerk) fantabulous version of Baby Come Back ? It is almost precisely like Musique Non Stop - but on much stronger drugs :

Supporting Cast Update : Smith, Will

 

Click above for big pictures, click below to play me…

Barrington Levy is having a bit of a struggle.

With what ?

His complaints are many and various, but he appears to be mostly struggling with being able to find enough relevant words to pad out 4 minutes and 42 seconds of music. Indeed, so much of a struggle is it that - despite his numerous claims that he’ll never give up - he soon does exactly this when he resorts to enunciating a series of Wop Diddle Dee Doo Bops within just 45 seconds of the song starting, and then repeating them with increasingly alarming regularity throughout.

This is an overcompensation from which Barrington sadly never quite recovers, as around the 3 minute mark he even starts struggling with his ability to be able to that successfully and starts to trip over his own Diddles - which is a messy experience at the best of times.

Maybe he is just a bit stressed ?

He is certainly that alright and for very good reason - as he woke up this morning to make the frankly disturbing discovery that he had run out of tea.

Bloody Hell.

And terrifying though this thought is for just about anybody to contemplate, Barrington has an added complication…

I get the feeling I am going to struggle to believe this…

… and this is that Barrington is capable of perceiving both the past and the future simultaneously - thus making his present moment a rather uncertain one.

Unbelevyable!

This is evidenced in the first verse where he claims that he is currently able to recall both waking up this morning and waking up tomorrow - and this confusion makes any presumptions about any perceived tea or lack thereof laughably difficult to pinpoint. After all he may not have any tea right now, but what if he has already bought some in the future thus making any quick trip to the shops wholly redundant?

Faced with such a chronological conundrum Barrington thus chooses the only sensible solution available to him… and very wisely struggles back to bed to moan about some other things instead.

What Else Does Barrington Moan About ?

Shitloads.

Everything from the fact that he is currently the owner of only one half of a pair of shoes, to the rather strange complaint that he considers himself morally incapable of being a thief. Odd though this latter moan is, the one I must take issue with is where he states that he finds it impossible to make love on a hungry belly.

This must surely be very much in doubt - as I can promise you that if there is one thing men are most definitely capable of if they are given even the merest hint of any action, it is attempting to have sex with just about anybody… hungry belly or not.

Any Major Levylations As A Result Of This Record ?

Yes.

This song is an example of the dancehall genre which originated in the 1970’s in Jamaica.

Now, dancehall is, by its very nature, in existence to make you dance - very possibly in a hall if you’re lucky enough to be in one at the time - but some people take it very seriously indeed and blame it for both social deterioration and increased violence in the place of its birth.

Despite the fact that just about every musical genre has been accused of this at some point in its life so the answer is already blindingly obvious - ie it’s probably a bit more complicated than that - why not read this essay called “So wha, mi nuh fi live to?”: Interpreting Violence in Jamaica through the Dancehall Culture. It essentially argues that, if you are Jamaican, then both you and dancehall are products of the same culture and therefore both you and it are going to exhibit many of the same characteristics of each other.

With this in mind if you dislike dancehall for the reasons stated above, it suggests this is only because you recognise secreted parts of yourself within it and it is thus probably a good idea if you swallow your pride, initiate some sort of group hug, chuck some on the stereo anyway and have a bloody good dance to forget about it all.

A bit like the plot to Footloose then, but with longer words :

http://www.ragashanti.com/articles/Ideaz.pdf

Anyway Barrington himself, like Jean Beauvoir before him, was an early musical developer - releasing his first single under the pseudonym Mighty Multitide when he was just 13 years old. It would then take him just another 7 years or so to become the biggest star in the country at a stupidly young age, is still huge today and is seen as a massive influence to many :

http://www.barringtonlevy.com/

http://springlinejamaica.blogspot.com/2008/09/barrington-levy.html

Interestingly, the second link above tells us a tale about the way record companies view their relevant markets and how this naivety can directly impact upon what becomes popular - as at one point Barrington recorded an album where he collaborated with other people. In the UK this was released with the slightly edgy title of ‘Barrington Levy’s DJ Counteraction’ and it did reasonably well. In the US however they took one at at, didn’t really understand the title, then panicked a bit before finally deciding to tamely downgrade it to … ‘Duets’.

And how did it do there ?

Yep : It struggled.

Can Barrington Levy Really See Into The Future ?

Yes.

But only because, if Professor Mark Changizi is to be believed, then we all do this all the time - as we are all forever seeing about one tenth of a second into the future and predicting what will happen. This is, he claims, where hallucinations (such as ghosts) come from where our predicted future doesn’t match up with the reality of it :

http://www.impactlab.com/2008/05/18/humans-can-see-into-the-future/

Fascinating though that is, others believe they will soon be able to prove beyond all doubt that we all most definitely have a fully developed sixth sense that can do so so much more.

Important I Am Not The Beatles Warning

The following article contains the potentially deadly cocktail of words ‘paranormal researchers’ and ‘The Daily Mail’ :

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-452833/Is-REALLY-proof-man-future.html

Money Update

Cost : 8 pence
Current Value : Barrington may well be struggling with lots of stuff, but his second hand market is certainly buoyant - 5 pounds and 35 pence - which puts him in 9th place and sandwiches him between Sudden Sway and Luba value-wise.
Current Profit : 232 pounds and 26 pence. Want to hear a bit more Barrington ? Here is the very lovely You Have Caught Me :

And if you like that, why not pop off to Amazon to buy his Greatest Hits ?

http://www.amazon.com/Too-Experienced-Best-Barrington-Levy/dp/B00000E9KP

 

Click above for big pictures, click below to play me…

Band names are notoriously tricky things to get right.

If, for example, four people from Liverpool didn’t happen to chance upon a way to write what some people believe to be the best songs of all creation - thus making the name of their band an integral part of our cultural landscape - we wouldn’t be spending every 5 years sitting around yetafuckingain disecting the somewhat overstated merits of Sergeant Bloody Pepper, I can tell you.

Nope, instead the elephant in the room would become suddenly apparent as it became blindingly obvious what a dreadful band name The Beatles actually is. ie Merely the genre of the music the group chose to play - what was referred to at the time as beat music - with the letters l, e and s rather lazily crammed in after it.

So used are we to encountering the name The Beatles, and in an attempt to appreciate how awful it would have sounded in its historical context, let us take a look at what would happen if a few hitherto not yet formed bands of the modern era followed the same idea :

The Krunkles -  more breakfast cereal than street

The Raples - socially unacceptable

The Emoles -  a fey indie band that should have both formed and split in 1997.

Using the agreed standardised format for band names - the usage of the word The followed by whatever Something you like the sound of which hasn’t yet previously been taken - is also incredibly arrogant.

“I am not any old something,” it says to anyone who cares to listen, “I am The Something. The Definitive Something.”

Whilst The Smiths tried to vaguely subvert this by making their Something after the The something incredibly commonplace, if they were half as clever as they thought they were then they would have taken a leaf out of A House’s book… and called themselves A Smith instead.

For the usage of the prefix A is one which immediately bristles excitedly with the idea of equal community. “Come on! Why not form your own band and call it, oh I don’t know, Another House,” this bandname suggests in comparison to the The ones, “You could then move in next door, we could all strum our jangly guitars together in the communal garden in a vaguely angry way and then pop down the pub every now and again for a pint. It would make us all truly… Heart Happy.”

What Do They Mean By Heart Happy ?

Heart Happy is that incredible fluttery feeling which seems to emerge from your heart and uncontrollably spread around the rest of your body, your very world view and overall demeanor during those first moments where you sense the possibility of falling stupidly in love. It is your brain and body expressed as feeling - a recognition that an interaction with another individual of which you currently know very little, seems to offer the chance of taking the currently sad and broken you and transforming it into some sort of cohesive happy whole.

If you are coincidentally lucky/unlucky (delete according to personal preference) enough to currently be experiencing such a sensation as you are reading this then beware, as this song comes with a warning : when a person you don’t know very well speaks their language and the words they choose to impart to you are ones which drool endlessly on about what a truly incredible person / kisser / shag you are, it is all too easy to start believing their overdressed mouth and end up tripping on vanity’s floor.

I Didn’t Even Know Vanity Had A Floor.

Well it does, and I’ve been there - and if you ever find yourself lying prostrate in this position having just made a total tit of yourself and cocked pretty much everything up, then I would recommend doing what the lead singer of A House does in the outro and endlessly repeat

“I’m happy. I’m happy. I’m happy. I’m happy…”

in an attempt to try and convince yourself of this fact.

After all, he doesn’t sound like he remotely believes it - sounding for all the world like he is recording his vocal whilst simultaneously being forced by the record producer to walk bearfoot across the hot tin roof of the house next door - and nor will you but, hey, a sad heart wears many faces… so it certainly seems like a good place to start.

Are A House Still Standing ?

They have sadly been demolished.

Before the wrecker’s ball struck into the heart of the household however, the core residents appear to have been Dave Couse on shrieky vocals, Martin Healy on bouncy bass, and the - not remotely do I sound like a children’s TV character - Fergal Bunbury on scratchy guitar. Despite being called A House in the singular they actually had many houses, as they rather greedily got through an astounding four record labels during the twelve years of their construction before finally not really trusting their foundations anymore and classing themselves as uninhabitable.

http://www.zop.ca/discog.cfm

Alot of people really rate this band incidentally - and although Light A Big Fire may well feel that they have a decent claim also - many think they are The Great Lost Irish Band Of All Time.

They are arguably most famous for releasing a song called Endless Art which lists the names of lots of dead people. It caused a minor controversy in as much as some journalist or other noted that every single person on the list was male and, for reasons that I can’t currently fathom, this fact was apparently Very Important At The Time.

To counteract this A House then recorded another version called More Endless Art where the list of names were entirely female. This affirmative action didn’t appease the pedants however who argued that all women wanted was equal access to the original song in the first place, and not to be fobbed off with a completely different song which frankly didn’t scan quite so well. Oh well, you can’t please everyone - want to know which one you prefer ?

Male :

Female :

Want to see Dave perform an updated version with Neil Hannon ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmEvTa7Npk0

Oh, and here is someone with far too much time on their hands :

http://www.mrpayne.com/2005/08/19/endless-art/

Where Are They Now ?

The good news is that they are all still going and that they all seem tremendously nice. Dave and Fergal are currently playing in a band called The Impossible whose most recent album The World Should Know was released in 2006 :

http://www.davecouse.com/

http://www.myspace.com/davecouse

Whilst Martin is currently in a band called Pony Club, and - in an apparent fit of rage that it wasn’t him who was given the wonderful name of Fergal Bunbury - seems instead to have decided to dress like a children’s TV character in an attempt to regain the initiative :

http://www.ponyclub.tv/

http://www.myspace.com/ponyclub

I Feel Love…

If you do then it seems likely you are currently overdosing on Dopamine and Norepinephren - as these are the chemicals that apparently give us that initial Heart Happyish feeling. After they make an appearance, and you have discovered that you really rather like snogging them, Oxytocin raises its head to help create the idea that we have a connection with the individual concerned before Vassopressin finally kicks in to try and make us stay together :

http://www.essortment.com/lifestyle/relationshipadv_tukr.htm

Interestingly, some scientists claim that Dopamine is as addictive as cocaine (which some claim is completely non-addictive of course - although these people always seem to be particularly heavy users of the stuff in my experience so their judgement should not necessarily be trusted). Dodgy drug comparisons aside however, the effects of Dopamine can physiologically last up to seven years before disappearing - hence, presumably, the itch.

http://www.dimaggio.org/Eye-Openers/what_is_love.htm

So, the next time you find yourself tripping on vanity’s floor just remember: blame the Dopamine. Well, unless it is this Vanity’s floor :

http://www.clubvanity.co.uk/

In which case I would blame the cocktails.

Money Update

Cost : 8 pence
Current Value : 2 pounds and 90 pence. I’m happy.
Current Profit : 226 pounds and 99 pence.  Want to watch The Impossible performing a lovely old A House song called I Am Afraid in 2006 ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EsHWTW0qx8

Whilst we are on the subject of feeling love, why not take a listen to A House’s quite astounding version of I Feel Love ?

Supporting Cast Update : Beatles, The;  Smiths, The