I Am Not The Beatles

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

 

” Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. When all the pretty blossom falls from our branches we hope to find that we are one tree and not two. ”

Louis De Bernières

I am a man and, as such, it turns out that 99.9% of all the important life decisions I have made were - in retrospect- actually made by a selfish appendage of mine which couldn’t give a toss about me either way.

No matter how much of a pull my penis has had on my overall state of wellbeing however, and no matter when and where it may have been historically tugged, it is fair to say that it has never actually tugged at my heartstrings.

The lead singer of Millions Like Us is very different, as In Love With Yourself is essentially one man’s paean to his own penis - and is sung by a chap who is so profoundly in love with his manhood you get the feeling that, if he could, he would slip a ring around it and take it up the aisle.

Musically his song jerks along in quite a nice Funky Townish sort of way, albeit this being more of an ominously onanistic SpunkyTown with the overwhelming whiff of crusty underpants forever hanging in the air, but hey at least the man’s in love with something. 

“That look in your eyes - how can you criticise this love ?” he initially croons breathlessly at his girlfriend as she apparently walks in - and then rapidly out - on him having discovered him obsessively attempting to make pretty blossom fall from his branch for the fifth time that day.

He can’t even keep his hands off his naughty nether’s when he’s trying to get to sleep - explaining that he lies beside it day and night just to get the feeling right - but once we reach the middle 8 his over indulgences seem to burn not just the skin from his palms but also the love away, as his penis starts to not play ball at all.

For it is in this middle 8 where, after spurting out a few lines suggesting that his eternal passion is causing some sort of erectile dysfunction, he finally concludes “I don’t understand it when you go elsewhere” - expressing jealousy to his own mountainous man part when, in those increasingly rare moments that both it and his right hand aren’t entwined together, it might actually get a crack at someone else.

A someone else incidentally which we can only hope there is no room for no-one else in at the time.

 

Hang On A Minute. If There’s No Room For No-One, Doesn’t That Logically Mean There Must Be Some Room For Someone ?

Errr… possibly -  but semantics aside what I can tell you is that Millions Like Us were a duo containing two nice chaps called John O’ Kane and Jeep Hook and, seeing that they were a duo and I have just listed two of  their names in the previous part of this sentence, there is absolutely definitively no room for no-one else on this record.

Or even someone else.

Did Millions Like Them ?

Apparently not - although it is worth noting that

a) someone else at Circa records really really liked John, despite the fact that

b) he seems incapable of standing up straight without some sort of external support

as Millions Like Us released a few singles and an eponymous album on the label :

http://www.amazon.com/Millions-Like-Us/dp/B00000DP39

John then released a few solo singles and an album all of his own : 

 http://tinyurl.com/yd2nyrh

before he finally guested on Julia Fordham’s single ‘Where Does The Time Go?’ as That Bloke Who Sang The Words ‘Does Anyone Know?’:

http://www.juliafordham.com/looklistenbuy.php

And no, nobody did.

 

Where Did John And Jeep Go ?

Now that I do know.

John is apparently a professional songwriter these days, writing songs for and/or with Tina Turner and Nik Kershaw among others - but whether or not he ever got around to baptising Abraham Lincoln is a bit more controversial  :

http://www.therestorationmovement.com/okane2.htm

I can only presume he is still merrily writing songs for other people by the way as he has rather dropped of the radar, with the last mention I can find of him being when he was matched up with Nanna Larsen in some sort of Songwriter Swap Shop situation in 2006 :

 http://www.prsfoundation.co.uk/news/kodapartnership.htm

 Want to hear some Nanna ? It’s all very pleasant :

 http://www.myspace.com/nannalarsen

Jeep meanwhile played with Talk Talk before joining Millions Like Us, then lived just about everywhere when they split up before finally settling in Atlanta in the USA - where he currently runs Hookhouse Studios :

www.myspace.com/hookhouse

He is also part of the Faculty at the next link where he has presumably been working closely with Marc Almond, as his main role is stated to be that he ‘masters the CDs of all camp concerts’ :

http://www.rockandbluescamp.com/faculty.html

And he also, really rather oddly, has a nifty sideline writing Really Rousing Songs for basketball teams :

http://tunes4teams.com/our_staff.htm

All of which must pass the time, as it goes.

 

So Where Does The Time Go ? Does Anyone Know ?

As I say nobody does know for sure, but if you want to believe the theory of Eternalism - which states that Time has a fully fledged dimension all to itself and isn’t therefore a state of being but contains actual physical directions - then it seems the answer is quite literally a rather large panto-ish shout of  “It’s Behind You “ :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time)

“We apparently fear death because we believe that we will no longer exist after we die. But if Eternalism is correct, death is just one of our temporal borders, and should be no more worrisome than birth.”

Unfortunately, although I initially found this to be quite a comforting idea, according to my mother at the moment of my birth I went very red and screamed and cried like a bastard whilst I simultaneously shat myself.

And - temporal borders or not - this does seem to suggest I may have been slightly worried about it at the time.

Money Update

Cost : 8 pence

Current Value : 69 pence - a suggestive figure admittedly, but not exactly orgasmic.

Current Profit : Not millions.