I Am Not The Beatles

 

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…

” Is this a Mel Smith which I see before me ? “
It certainly is.

” Love handles toward my hand ? “
It is quite hard to tell with any real certainty as he is wearing a particularly all encompassing spacesuit – but yes, I suppose it’s possible.

” Come let me clutch thee… “
I wouldn’t really recommend that – spacesuits can be notoriously sweaty so, love handles or not, any attempt to clutch any part of Mel’s naked anatomy once he extricates himself from his suit will probably see him wobbling from your grasp as if you were trying to give a massage to a half melted block of Stork margarine.

” I have thee not, and yet I see thee still… “
I know. It is an image that rather burns into the retina isn’t it ?

Indeed, viewers of a particularly nervous disposition may well want to start looking away now as – if you click one small click for you but one giant click for mankind and take a look at the back cover - it seems that quizzical Spaceman Mel is joined not only by a bespectacled Griff Rhys Jones who has the shifty look of a man who is both on the phone and simultaneously having a piss at the same time, but also by a strangely bewigged Jimmy Nail looking over his shoulder from the bathroom door as he tries to convey his utter contempt at the very idea of such a dual activity.

“But then…” his world weary face seems to be saying, “…we’ve all done it haven’t we ?”

” Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A Mel Smith of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppress’d brain? “
If I wanted to have a hallucination I would hope my subconscious would conjure up something a little racier than Mel Smith in a spacesuit.

What’s more, no matter how much of a fatal vision your heat opress’d brain may want this record to be, it seems that Morons From Outer Space - and you may want to whisper this - actually isn’t a pile of poo.

This does come with the rather large health warning that it took me 25 listens on autorepeat before I realised this was anything approaching the case - but luckily for you all the hard work has now been done on your behalf and you can reach the same realisation in just one quick and easy listen… but only if you follow these handy guidelines :

1) Shake off your totally understandable preconceptions of awfulness, and actually expect this song to be quite good. I found chanting ‘This song is utterly brilliant’ out loud quite alot whilst flagellating myself with a stinging nettle before pressing the play button worked for me.

2) Do your absolute best to ignore all those really bloody annoying orchestra hits that keep popping up to the surface like wet farts in a bath. And,

3) Most importantly and most definitively, listen to the song… as if it is written by and being performed by Blur.

” Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest. “
The preconceptions we feed our senses are an odd thing and - in much the same way that Macbeth may never have hauled himself up the ever blood stained monarchical pole if the three witches hadn’t pointed out to him that such a thing were actually possible - once you notice Morons From Outer Space really is a Blur song it is impossible to listen to it in any other way and, luckily for everyone involved I feel, you don’t have to murder anybody called Duncan to hear the immediate positive result.

” I go, and it is done; the bell invites me…
It is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell. “
The morons of this song are aliens who crash land on another planet and then immerse themselves in the inanities of every day living and finding themselves enjoying every single bloody second of it.

And this is, of course, also the plotline miniaturised by Damon Albarn and shoehorned into his sexually adventurous Girls and Boys who all follow the herd down to Greece. Where else, insinuates Girls and Boys, is this drunken anglicised Greece they end up copulating banally with each other in… except another planet ?

Indeed, it could be argued that Morons From Outer Space isn’t just a more expansive original version of that story, but that it is also a tad more honest - as it does at least make clear that the writer believes the subjects are morons from the outset - whilst Damon very naughtily pretends otherwise whilst simultaneously sniggering at his subjects from inside the panic room hidden in the basement of his very big house in the country.

When you finally add to all of the above that the groove of the song was obviously plundered in There’s No Other Way, that the first two lines of each verse sound almost identical to the same bit in The Universal, that the idea of using Jimmy Nail as a slightly shouty bloke in it was copied with the addition of Phil Daniels in Parklife, and that the overall lyrical styling which cleverly places the commonplace centre stage in an attempt to make our everyday lives somehow transformative - a trick Damon still uses to this day - we are left with the very big and terrifying possibility that Mel Smith actually is Damon Albarn.

After all, have you seen Mel Smith recently ?

Errr… Has Anybody Seen Mel Smith Recently ?

Luckily, yes - he is in a film alongside Derek Jacobi which is about to be released called The Riddle. Although the name of it sadly doesn’t appear to be based on the Nik Kershaw song of the same name, this does probably means he isn’t actually Damon Albarn after all :

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790741/

Which is a relief.

Oooh, I’m Glad You Mentioned That Song By Nik Kershaw. I Have Always Wondered What The Riddle Was All About..

Well, wonder no more… as according to Nik himself, quoted in a forum :

“…we started recording and I threw a rough guide vocal down using jibberish lyrics. As the album progressed, I tried various different lyric ideas but nothing seemed to fit as well as the guide lyric. So we decided to stick with what we had. “Let’s call it the Riddle”, I thought. Then people would think it was actually about something. In short, “The Riddle” is nonsense, rubbish, bollocks. “

So there you go - a confession that it was all a silly load of old nonsense… but what was the first response ?

“I think Nik was lying.”

And the second ?

“I also believe Kershaw is lying”

Sometimes you just can’t win can you ?

http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=6421

Where Are Griff and Jimmy ?

Griff Rhys Jones is on telly loads these days :

http://www.griff-rhysjones.co.uk/

However since 2004 - when he appeared in Auf Weidersehn, Pet - Jimmy Nail appears to have completely disappeared…

http://www.jimmynail.org/

Oh well - want to watch Ain’t No Doubt to cheer yourself up ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iF47M3YDlg

Can You Tell Me Moron ?

Yes I can, and don’t call me Ron.

The song Morons From Outer Space is from a film of the same name I’ve never seen, and was directed by a chap called Mike Hodges who was also the director of famous stuff like Get Carter and Flash Gordon. It’s central premise is to suggest that aliens do exist - but when they finally arrive it turns out we are worryingly more intelligent than they are :

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0388198

http://www.sci-fi-online.com/reviews/dvd/05-01-24_MoronsOuterSpace.htm

Want to see a real flying saucer ?

http://www.livescience.com/php/video/player.php?video_id=310707FlyingSaucer1

Don’t forget to read all of the viewers comments beneath it - that’s almost as much fun as the video itself…

Money Update

Cost : 8 pence
Current Value : I am not exactly hopeful …. errrr… 1 pound and 5 pence. Which isn’t very much at all but is just a little bit more than that randy Geoffrey Moore-on.
Current Profit : 195 pounds and 76 pence. Incidentally, the most Damon Albarny bit is a little shout of Hey!Hey! at 2 minutes and 17 seconds… so stick with it intrepid listeners…

Supporting Cast Update : Jacobi, Derek; Kershaw, Nik; Daniels, Phil; Macbeth.

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

Britpop happened a long time ago.

The first time I heard Oasis for example, was on a free cassette given away by the NME just before their first single was released. It was a demo version of Cigarettes and Alcohol - and I thought it was the biggest load of crap I had ever heard.

I was wrong of course - the biggest load of crap I had ever heard would actually be released by Oasis much later in their career - but with that fact acknowledged let us instead focus on the most important word in the previous paragraph. The first time I ever heard Oasis was on a cassette. I slotted this cassette into a non-digital Sony Walkman which contained moving parts specifically designed for playing cassettes.

It is even possible that I pressed a small button marked ‘Dolby’.

At the time I probably looked not unlike Cliff Richard on the cover of his album ‘Wired For Sound‘ - within which he excitedly informs the populace that when it comes to era defining issues such as making a choice between the classic ‘tall speakers’ and those new fangled ’small speakers’, he didn’t really have much of a preference.

Yes, Britpop really did happen quite a long time ago.

Now, we can all argue about the details of exactly what single or which band first kicked Britpop off, but one thing is certain : somewhere around the time period I slipped that cassette into my Walkman, Britpop definitely happened.

Another thing we can also say with 100% certainty is that Britpop definitely wasn’t attempting to happen in 1987, and that it definitely wasn’t being played by a band called Boys Wonder. Or can we ? One listen to this really rather excellent song may well make you change your mind.

Let us check the Important Component Britpop Parts :

Silly over the top comedy cockernee singing accent ? Check.

Gallagher style stick on eyebrows years before they were socially acceptable ? Absolutely.

A real feeling that this could have actually been written by Chas and Dave ? Oh yes.

In fact, this record is so wondrously correct in it’s recreation of future events, it brings to mind previous I Am Not the Beatler’s Wild Weekend whose only crime was to also release a totally perfect pop record - but a few years too early.

Both songs are thrillingly wonderful, neither have dated and both would be hits if they were released next week.

So why doesn’t somebody do it ?

I (ahem) Wonder Where The Boys Are Now ?

There is an excellent Boys Wonder interview from 1987 here :

http://www.chrishunt.biz/features38.html

It is interesting in many ways, but the main highlight is the Union Jack conversation - which doesn’t just pre-date Britpop, but also that whole Morrissey debacle which took place a few years later.

Beyond that, those of you with your ear to ground will of course already know that two members of Boys Wonder went on to form Corduroy, who were most mainstreamly famous for the track ‘Mini’.

But did you know that they did so with two ex-members of Dr and The Medics ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corduroy_(band)

Did you also know that the frontman in Boys Wonder was previously the guitarist in Haircut 100 ?

http://www.myspace.com/boyswonder

Or that Corduroy like many others before them have just gone and bloody well reformed ?

http://www.corduroy.co.uk/

I certainly didn’t.

So that’s two band members sorted out, where is everyone else ?

Well, Pascal the drummer has since played with an embarrassing array of people including Bjork, Sister Sledge and somebody called Chris Biggin :

http://tinyurl.com/2krj7m

Sadly that’s Chris Biggin by the way with no ’s’ in the surname, not Christopher with :

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shake-Up-Chris-Biggin/dp/B000231VRQ

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

And Pascal now runs Sublime Productions :

http://www.sublimeproductions.com/

Take a look. He’s done tons - although if you click on ‘News’ the last update to the website was 2004 so, for all we know, he might actually be a pig farmer by now.

Boys Wonderer Tony Barber went on to join The Buzzcocks in 1993, and toured with Nirvana amongst others :

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

Whilst the only contender for Chris Tate I can find is in a band called Trash Money. I warn you now this is tenuous, and I am more than probably incredibly wrong as my knowledge of Trash Money is… well… zero.

In fact, I only include the possibility it may be Chris Tate because

a) Every picture I can find of the band is taken in such a way that it means they could all be 18 or 80 - and this immediately made me suspicious. And,

b) One of them is called Chris Tate.

http://www.trashmoney.co.uk/trashmoney.swf

Hmmm… Look at the chap in the Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot cap on the back cover of the Boys Wonder single, and compare it to the slightly podgier bloke at the back right of the Trash Money photo …

What do you think ?

All this just leaves Graham Jones - but, alas, he has completely disappeared. Graham ? Where are you ?

Money Update

Cost : 8 pence

Current Value : Bloody Hell. Some people are charging a fortune. In fact the cheapest I can find is… 8 pounds and 86 pence. This puts it straight into 4th place valuewise - just behind lovely Sonya Grier, and just in front of manly FM’s slightly cheaty box set.

Current Profit : 131 pounds and 70 pence. Gosh. That was exciting, wasn’t it.

Supporting Cast Update : Oasis - Richard, Cliff - Chas and Dave - Beastie Boys - Dr and The Medics - Haircut 100 - Bjork - Sister Sledge - Biggin, Chris - Biggins, Christopher - The Buzzcocks - Curiosity Killed The Cat

Update Now available ! Thanks to http://www.boyswonder.co.uk, pop off to Corrections and Clarifications - we have even got a picture of Graham Jones. Gosh :

http://www.iamnotthebeatles.com/?page_id=308

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

This is an absolutely brilliant record.

The most incredible thing about it is just how quickly it wants to end. It is a record on a suicide mission that hits the ground sprinting and then throws itself around with reckless abandon positively excited about getting it all over and done with.

Everything in this song happens at a dizzying pace that leaves you breathless. Here are the highlights :

0 seconds - It starts confidentally… and with a swagger. Toe-tappiness is guaranteed.

23 seconds - Don’t be put off by these first few lines. The first verse in this song is viewed as totally unimportant and is mostly treated with disdain. The reasoning seems to be that it only lasts 20 seconds anyway, so you should probably spend this short time trying to work out if you vaguely fancy any of them instead.

32 seconds - A well annunciated ‘Aint life a bitch?’ keeps your interest.

40 seconds - The chorus.You now begin to suspect this record may be brilliant.

58 seconds - Not even a minute has passed when we hit the second verse… and we are already a third of the way through the song. Aware that they got away with the first verse a bit, Wild Weekend know that this second verse had better be both fabulous and ludricous. We are not disappointed, as over the course of the next 20 seconds the singer will :

a) Claim his ex’s soul has been left in a bank account. With love ‘in the red’.

b) Pose as a debt collector

c) For no apparent good reason, threaten to shoot a postman.

1 minute 35 seconds - Gosh, is that the time already? Must be time for a totally phenomenal middle 8. Can this record actually get any better ?

2 minutes 2 seconds - Yes. They’ve only gone and put a bloody gap in. The desire to take this record to your local nightclub and force them to play it, just so you can stop dancing at this bit ….

2 minutes 6 seconds - … and then start again here is immense.

2 minutes 19 seconds - The record strides positively into its final phase, strutting around the place knowing that if it could just be made flesh, it could sleep with anyone.

And that’s it.

It is all done and dusted by 3 minutes and 2 seconds - which, as everybody knows, is just three seconds longer than any song really needs to be.

The only slight downer about the whole thing is the fact that it fades at the end when it should have had a nice big explosion or something. But then, if that had happened, I think I may have fainted out of pure excitement - so it’s probably just as well.

Breakin’ Up

I was really interested to find out what happened next, as it appears Wild Weekend were trying to make the boyband a serious proposition, with a fab song, when Take That were still at school.

But, alas…. they have done a Steve Carlton : completely vanished from the face of the planet.

This is a genuine shame as it seems the only mistake Wild Weekend made was being a few years ahead of the game.

I bet you this song would have been an absolute smash if this had been released by 5ive, six years later.

Breakin’ Down

Cost : 8 pence

Current Value : A dreadfully disheartening 75 pence - just 15 pence per band member. Oh dear. This hasn’t totally wiped out the big smile that I’m wearing on my face having had this song on auto repeat all day, but it did make me a bit glum for a few seconds.

Current Profit : 33 pounds and 73 pence.

EDIT : Please click on the comments to read the Wild Weekend story as told by their lead singer, Al. Then pop off to ‘Corrections and Clarifications’ for extra information.