Access All Areas

There I was, sipping on a glass of red, munching away on some little patry thing, when George Clinton wandered past, heading to join the rest of his Parliament Funkadelic. He glanced at me, I nodded, he didn't notice (that's what I choose to believe anyway, in my own little bubble world). So I shamble over to the bar for a top up and to rub shoulders with Earth, Wind & Fire just as Broken Social Scene appear from the stairs, fresh from the stage. At least they saw me and returned the friendly nod. Shy as I am I couldn't manage to strike up a conversation with any of them (all of whom are undoubtedly my musical superiors) and was contenting myself with chatting to Miles from Sinless City based act The Disclaimers when along come The Great Spy Experiment, another local act but one destined for international semi-stardom at the very least. Playing on the local scene myself I knew the guys (and gal) well enough to exchange greetings and complement them on their earlier set, in the process inviting them along to mine (this evening, incidentally. Not that any of you will be there). And then I helped myself to some more free wine and food and set about seeing who else I could spot. Unfortunately Jools Holland hadn't flown in yet... well, there's always the wrap party! It's a hard life sometimes...

Incidentally, do check out The Great Spy Experiment... they are fucking awesome!

Cheers m'dears!

One for the Roadie...

You may remember that a month ago I wrote about the Iggy Pop rider... No? Fair enough, I'd forgotten about it myself until today when I received an e-mail notifying me of a new comment made on that post. Not that it's anything unusual to receive comments on old posts... it's just that this time the comment was from Jos Grain, the architect of said rider and roadie for Iggy and The Stooges. Which was a surprise...

Anyway, he provided me a link for his own site where a fresher version of the rider can be found (I think there are one or two additional laughs in there too)... If you haven't read the rider yet, do - it's well worth it! If you have then may I advise you to check out his site anyway... hell, it amuses me! I particularly like his weird artwork, most especially the statuette entitled "Uzi Godmother" which he apparently gave to Spider from the Pogues as a wedding present last month...

There's nothing like a crazy Dutch guy to brighten your day. Apparently.

Cheers m'dears!

Musical Interludes...

Can someone please tell me what the point is of all those television dramas now shoe-horning bands or musicians into their scripts for apparently little or no reason? Because I for one find it at best distracting, other times frankly tedious and nauseating. Okay, I know that comedy shows have a history of this, The Young Ones being a classic example, but that was the kind of bizarre and surreal programme where Dexy's Midnight Runners playing in the bathroom could actually be considered the norm. But The Killers playing the local bar in The O.C.?

Look, before you start, I absolutely do not watch that twattery. I was channel-hopping, okay? The point is, I know that the programme is supposed to be about a load of jumped up little rich shits who could probably hold a 'small party' with music provided by an entire Glastonbury lineup, but having The Killers play a couple of songs whilst the cast look at them dreamily and say nothing to each other just comes across as an exercise in time-wasting. You can't even blame it on the scriptwriters running out of imagination since the small bit of dialogue I did see demonstrated they didn't have any in the first place.

Unfortunately The O.C. and The Killers are not alone in this. The West Wing has once or twice managed to save themselves five minutes or so of actual drama by drafting in a past music legend, although I admit that since the U.S. Prez probably has to attend functions where these things happen the writers do have a degree of legitimacy. But he also takes a leak occasionally and possibly even takes it up the wrong 'un from Condie and her strap-on from time to time, but I don't need to see either of those either. Well, maybe the second one. Just for a laugh.

Add to the list Entourage, who did an entire storyline where one of the guys was desperate for tickets to see U2 and, sure enough, gets hold of them in the last reel. But why did I then have to sit through about 8 minutes (of a programme that only lasts about 25 without ad breaks anyway) of Bono? It's not like I don't appreciate the music but I already have it on CD. And if I wanted to see them live I would buy a fucking ticket myself and soak up the atmosphere. To cap it all Bono does a birthday shout out at the end to the character in question - I wonder how much he got paid for all that, the hoor!

The worst example I ever saw, though, was on that short lived science fiction version of Dawson's Creek (No, I never used to watch that either. Why the fuck are you raising your eyebrows at me?), the Dido-theme-songed Roswell (Okay, I admit to that one. But not religiously or anything!). Future scriptwriters, read on and learn how NOT to wriggle a musical performance into your storyline...

Imagine, if you will... something has gone terribly wrong and our heroes must find some random chick who may have the answers they are looking for. Off they head to some University a couple of hours out of town somewhere on a single-minded mission to locate her. She's not in her dorm? Bugger! Oh well, lets run around the campus frantically, with no real clue to where she may be. But wait, what's that tucked away over there in some random badly-lit corner? Why, it's a stage, with a couple of dozen studenty-folk milling about it looking mildly impressed. And who is that on the stage? Cue one of the heroes piping up... "It's Nelly Furtado!".

I shit you not.

Mission forgotten, for the duration of one song anyway, whilst they stand there dreamily watching old Nel', who (bless her!) is trying her best not to look too stupidly out of place. Of course, right at the end of the song one of the heroes turns and sees in the crowd... the girl they were looking for! Huzzah!

So there you have it. Nelly Furtado is secretly an undercover Alien using her music to assist her brethren here on earth. They don't write 'em like they used to!

Cheers m'dears!

Lust for riders...

Okay, I hold my hands up and admit that I am wilfully stealing from a fellow blogger here... but I just found this too fucking funny not to share. A few days back Flying Rodent posted a rider list for Iggy Pop and the Stooges... anyone out there not knowing what a rider is, let me explain -

Riders usually have two parts: the tech rider is all the PA gear the band need (and in some cases drums) and is fairly standard, unless you're only playing Damien Rice covers on a battered Spanish guitar in the Fuckwit and Firkin on a Sunday afternoon. The other half of the rider is all the stuff you can ask for to keep yourself sustained and entertained backstage. This usually starts from 'a couple of bottles of water and maybe some tea-making equipment' if you're a random chancer who has only managed to score a gig in a proper venue by dint of someone else dropping out, but can eventually rise through the inevitable alcohol requests to the likes of 11-course banquets, hookers, coke (not the fizzy), livestock and pretty much anything else a warped mind-blown megalomaniac rock star might want...

...which is kind of the position that Mr Pop and his band occupy.The thing that makes their rider list, however, is not simply the demands (of which, in truth, only one or two might appear over the top) but the way in which it is written. If I hadn't been assured by the faeries at the bottom of my garden that the Stooges and all their road crew were clean-living spiritual souls I might have suspected the influence of some illegal substance...

Below I give you a selection of the very few moments from this 18 page stream-of-consciousness epic that can actually be reproduced in short sentence format, but many of the best bits are longer paragraphs that take you off on random tangents here, there and everywhere. So if you have the time I truly recommend that you read the whole damn thing!

"...AMPLIFIERS that have been tested recently. And when I say "recently", I don't mean "Sometime in the three weeks preceding the occasion when it fell 5 meters off the top shelf in the warehouse"..."

"...TOM-TOM WITH MOUNTING. And if you can't bring the mounting to us, we'll have to send a bloke called Mohammed to the mounting..."

"...By the way our guitar roadie, Chris, assures me that the panda is not of the genus "Bear", but is actually a part of the "Pig" family. Could this possibly be true?..."

"...GUITAR (Clear and bright like the sound of jackboots on wet cobblestones)..."

"...NO TOY ROBOTS, TELEVISION EVANGELISTS, or TELEVISION CAMERAMEN..."

"...We had a lighting designer once, but he went mad so we shot him..."


I tell thee, it's fucking genius... and speaking of fucking geniuses (geni-i? geniuse?) and of stream of consciousness, it's nice to see Brewski making one of his sporadic posts...

Cheers m'dears!

Who is B.U.M. Tosser 2006?

The results of the music quiz are finally in! And, in reverse order, they are as follows...

In joint 3rd place we have Flying Rodent and Monstee, on a very respectable 6 points each.

Just pipping them with 7 points, in 2nd place is Gabs (send me a link and I'll add it in...)

And the winner, on a magnificent 11 points, is FMC (with a little bit of help from the paramour and her sister!). A banner for you to display proudly will be sent to you in due time, so you can let everyone know that you are officially B.U.M. Tosser 2006!

Well done to all, and thanks to everyone who took part - a full list of scores and all the answers (including those that went unsolved) can be found on the original post.


Right, now that's over with... check this out! It makes me laugh! You can't Hassle the Hoff!

And a brief message to Clairwil, who has had a spot of bother recently with some arseholes being cuntish on her site... did wonders for the hit-count, apparently... but remember this, Clairwil - Never argue with an idiot. They will only drag you down to their level and then beat you on experience...!

Cheers m'dears!

Six Degrees of Alienation

As Mick Jagger once sang, "Tah-ah-ah-ime is on my side, yes it i-is!" - and, no... that is not an answer to the still-ongoing quiz. No, today I have answered all my e-mails, paid my bills, read all the blogs I link to (and I had a fair bit of catching up, I have to say!) and... well, run out of shit to do. So I decided to try out an idea I had a while back, a numbered blog-crawl. The idea is, you choose any of the links you have on your blog, work out what number link that is, and visit it. You read it (if you haven't already) and then count down the exact same number on that blogs links. And so on, and so forth... the idea hopefully being that you might find some fun new places to visit. After all, I like all the blogs I list, and most of them like me... it should stand to reason that I will like a lot of what they like, etc... shouldn't it?

The one thing I decided was that I wasn't going to count banner links or any self referencing ones (ie, older posts)... just your average 'blogs I like to visit' shit. So, let's start at the very begining, as Julie Andrews once warbled... it's a fucking good place to start. Okay, that wouldn't quite have been her words but they work well for my Numero Uno link...

1) Hotrocks, home of the sporadic Mr Brewski... his first link is to the Curmudgeon, Philip Chalinor, who I also already link to... Mr C then links first to Robert Aickman - an appreciation. All very nice, but it's a dead end with no further links. Great start, McShae! Let's try from link number 2 instead...

2) Dr Maroon's Cape to Rio... link 2 to Anti-Barney, another mutual chum... link 2 to... Google News? WTF? Back to square one, and link number 3...

3) ...which is, again, Anti Barney... his link number 3 is to Kim Ayres (how incestuous is this community!?)... link 3 to The Quiet Storm and a slightly scary yet fascinating post about coping with migraines by tying zip-locked bags of ice to your head. This is more like it! Now I'm getting out and about! Link 3 from here is... "This Page Cannot Be Found". Bollocks.

4) Straight back into the arms of Kim, whose link number 4 takes us this time to Callum and Kieran and a mildly diverting post about a missing crayon that, whilst potentially in the hands of a 2-year old, retains all the panic-power of Iran going nuclear. Nice enough... 4th link from here is I Thought I Was Driving, whose post 'Failure to Blog' looked like it was written by someone totally exhausted, and had the same power on me... There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, it just didn't grab me. But then it's all horses for courses, right?

5) On to Foot Eater's gaff, The Fishwhacker Swindle?, and his number 5, another familiar link... Bogol, by the incomprehensible Arlington Hynes. His number 5? another old sidebar-pal, Dr Evil... and a perhaps unsurprising link to Dangerous Laboratories. Unfortunately from here the trail once more goes cold.

6) El Barbudo is my link number 6, and from there... well, it was always a possibility I suppose. The mutual arse-lick fest reaches a peak when I discover that his link number 6 takes me right back here to Random Drivel. I'm begining to wonder if any of us actually know anyone else outside our own corner of the blog-iverse...

7) Horses Ass Pub, landlady one Ms Andraste (who's real name shall not be revealed... snigger!). She's doing a nice line in educating us heathens in the world of fine art at the moment, but I've already been here today and seen the picture, so time to move on to her link number 7 - Dead Pan Ann. A post about buying CD's , something close to my heart! Never heard of the first band she mentions (must be losing my touch) but I will take her recommendation on the Dylan album. I like him anyway. We're going to have to disagree about The Killers though. I'm a big fan...

But I digress... from there I get to Ramblings of a Redneck Diva, who talks about a school shooting - this is news to me, the first I have heard about it. Have these things become so commonplace in the States now that no-one bothers to report them anywhere else? It does strike me as unusual when on most days, even here in Asia, I can read in the Daily Propoganda whet Dubya had for breakfast. Saying that, her post doesn't dwell on that one incident and is instead a by turns chilling and heart-wrenching look into parents nightmare scenarios. Which made my visit to her link number 7 all the more of a surprise.

Initially I was struck by the title, Scotland of the Soul, wondering just how we Jocks had managed to become so prolific at this end of blog-land. But as soon as the blog opened my eyes were instantly drawn to one thing... the "I Stand With Israel" banner in the top right corner. Screw not counting banners. Screw only clicking the 7th link. I had to check... and I got here. My views on that are a whole other post just waiting to explode... I read the comments on the Jack Lewis site with interest, especially where it notes that Israel's enemies are killing innocent Israelis. Yes, they are. But to stand with Israel when it commits the exact same crime, killing the innocents on the other side of the fence. That's fucking blind, man. Fucking warped.

When you get used to blogging to all your online mates it's often easy to forget that you're only 6 degrees of seperation from shit like this.

Somone make me a fucking banner. I want it to say "I Stand With The Innocent Victims".

...as for the blogging by numbers thing? I lost the taste for it after that...

Cheers m'dears!

Boom! Shake, shake, shake the room / train / lift / etc...

TSsss TSsss TSsss TSsss...

Annoying, isn't it...?

TSsss TSsss TSsss TSsss...

The tinny drumbeat that emanates from the headphones of that inconsiderate bastard next to you on the bus / train / merry-go-round...

TSsss TSsss TSsss TSsss...

Still, at least it drastically reduced the number of arseholes who would parade down the street with a boom-box on their shoulders, blasting out their favoured musical genre to the whole world whether we liked it or not. And for that I choose to be thankful.

Oh, I know how off-putting it can be whilst trying to do your suduko / crossword / join-the-dots, and how even more annoying it can be when you half-recognise the song being played and just can't quite figure it out. Personally, however, I would rather that than having your whole world drowned out by music rendered unlistenable by having been played so loud on a crappy battery-powered player that the speakers have blown and the whole sound is distorted.

But wait... now we have a new menace... the dreaded MP3 'phone! Of course, at first this was no different than your average MP3 or personal CD player in that it came equipped with headphones and all you got was the same tinny beat. But then people realised that if the earpiece on your 'phone is loud enough to for you to speak on 'loudspeaker', then...

No, you motherfuckers! No, No, No, No, NO! Sitting opposite me on the tube, ambling behind me down the street, even walking into my school office (Try that one more time, boy, and you'll be scrubbing the bastard toilets in detention!)... If I wanted to hear the music you are listening to I would have bought the bloody CD or downloaded it onto my computer, where I can listen to it properly. And when I say 'properly' I mean 'being able to actually hear and understand the fucking thing'! Because that crappy little speaker in your 'phone? it is just as distorted and useless for music as the aforementioned overpowered boom-box.

The thing comes with fucking headphones, for Christ's sake! Why make me hear your (often lousy) choice of music when I would be content with just...

TSsss TSsss TSsss TSsss...

Cheers m'dears!

Binty's Ulitimate Music Tosser Quiz

Over the last couple of days I have enjoyed racking my brains over at the Ill Man and Clairwil blogs where quotation and lyric quizzes have sprung up. Never being one to let a good bandwagon pass me by (and being generally too fucking lazy to come up with anything original) I am proud to present Binty's Ultimate Music Tosser Quiz!

Below are 30 quotes from different songs - the first 10 are all opening lines, the second 10 are closing lines, and the final 10 are plucked from somewhere in the middle of a song... this should make things progressively harder!

Post your guesses (song title and artist) in the comments, first to get each one will be credited accordingly - and the person with the most correct answers will be bestowed with the magnificent title "Binty's Ultimate Music Tosser 2006" - or BUM Tosser '06 for short.

Finally - and this should not need saying, but I will anyway - we all know how to use search engines. If you want to do so to satisfy your own curiosity, fine, but if you are 'googling' simply to look knowledgeable or to win a frankly meaningless quiz then you are nothing but a sad, shallow cunt!

Let battle commence...

Round 1 - Opening lines

1) Once I had a love and it was a gas...

(Heart of Glass by Blondie - solved by Flying Rodent / Kim Ayres)

2) Oh, she dressed in the dark and she whispered 'Amen'...

(Galway to Graceland by Richard Thompson - solved by Monstee / Ion)

3) Men reading fashion magazines; Oh what a world it seems we live in...

(Oh What a World by Rufus Wainwright - solved by Monstee / Gabs)

4) Paint my face in your magazines; Make it look whiter than it seems...

(Powerless (Say What You Want) by Nelly Furtado - solved by FMC)

5) People on the street now; Faces long and grim...

(How Come by Ray Lamontagne - remained unsolved)

6) I see the clouds that move across the sky; I see the wind that moves the clouds away...

(Don't Worry About The Government by Talking Heads - solved by Thirteenth Monkey)

7) Who gave you permission to rearrange me?

(Certainly by Erykah Badu - remained unsolved)

8) Rioja, rioja; Reverend Al Green; Deep blue morocco; The water on stone...
(Pearl's Girl by Underworld - solved by Flying Rodent / Rat)

9) We were at a party; His ear lobe fell in the deep...

(Rock Lobster by The B-52's - solved by Monstee)

10) We passed upon the stair; We spoke of was and when...
(The Man Who Sold the World by David Bowie - solved by Flying Rodent / Rat)

Round 2 - Closing Lines

11) ...My mind... My mind... 'Til I find somebody else.

(Blowers Daughter by Damien Rice - solved by Gabs)

12) ...and I'll stand over your grave 'til I'm sure that you're dead.

(Master's of War by Bob Dylan - solved by Clairwil)

13) ...You can't go home, the night is young; I'm blacking out but it's been fun.

(The Scene Is Dead by We Are Scientists - solved by Gabs)

14) ...Take it slow, oh-oh; This time we'll take it slow.

(Ordinary People by John Legend - remained unsolved)

15) ...Who's responsible? You fucking are! Who's responsible?

(Of Walking Abortion by The Manic Street Preachers - solved by Ill Man)

16) ...And we can't turn back; 'Cause it's too late, too late, too late, too late, too late.
(I Looked at You by The Doors - solved by Gabs / FMC's paramour)

17) ...Goin' out tonight, goin' out tonight; Baby, you and I, goin' out tonight.

(Living for the Weekend by Hard-Fi - remained unsolved)

18) ...Same old game, same old thing; Always rappin' 'bout the same old thing.

(Funkier than a Mosquito's Tweeter by Nina Simone - solved by FMC and her sis!)

19) ...Creation baby has failed again; Creation baby has failed again.
(This Wicked Tongue by P J Harvey - solved by Clairwil)

20) ...Wherever men are fightin' for their rights; That's where I'm gonna be, Ma; That's where I'm a gonna be.

(Tom Joad by Woody Guthrie - solved by Annie's fiance)

Round 3 - Randomly plucked lines

21) ...Butterflies and zebras; And moonbeams and fairy tales...
(Little Wing by Jimi Hendrix - solved by Ion)

22) ...You work in a shirt with your name tag on it; Drifting apart like a plate tectonic...
(Oh My God by The Kaiser Chiefs - solved by Flying Rodent)

23) ...Water is my eye; Most faithful mirror...

(Teardrop by Massive Attack - solved by Tubthumper)

24) ...I wanna speak louder than Ritalin; For all the children who think that they've got a disease...

(Oxygen by Willie Mason - solved by FMC / Gabs)

25) ...Kiss me, please kiss me; Kiss me out of desire, baby, not consolation...
(Last Goodbye by Jeff Buckley - solved by FMC)

26) ...I know you like to think your shit don't stink; But lean a little bit closer...
(Roses by Outkast - solved by FMC)

27) ...Love forever, love is free; Let's turn forever, you and me...
(Feelgood Inc. by Gorillaz- solved by Flying Rodent / FMC)

28) ...You're a slut, you're a bitch, you're a whore...

(Blue Flashing Light by Travis - remained unsolved)

29) ...Majordomo Billy Bojangles; Sit down and have a drink with me...

(Alabama Getaway by The Grateful Dead - solved by Monstee)

30) ...Or that everybody's on the stage; And it seems like you're the only person sitting in the audience...

(Skating Away by Jethro Tull - solved by Annie)

[Final Scores: 1st place - FMC (et al) with 11 points ; 2nd place - Gabs on 7 ; Joint 3rd place - Flying rodent and Monstee, both on 6... well done to you all! Honourable mentions for bothering to take part go to: Clairwil and Annie (and fiance), both on 4 points; Ion with 3 ; Ill Man, Rat, Tubthumper and Thirteenth Monkey, all on 2 ; and last but by no means least, Kim Ayres with 1 - the remaining 10 points went unclaimed.]

Cheers m'dears!

Irony, Schmirony!

Sitting in the boozer and a female friend (let's call her Flo, just for the hell of it) ambles in, plonks herself down on the stool next to me and then sighs loudly... I know I'm just asking for it, but...

"What's up, hen?"

Now, I'm not going to give you the full drawn out ramblings of what, indeed, was up - I like most of the people who read this blog too much to inflict that - so here is the edit...

"I met the love of my life. Turns out he's married. It's just like in that Alanis song, innit? Y'know, 'Ironic'"

Okay... red rag to a bull time. Ironic? Is it fuck! That's life, for fuck's sake! Of course I don't put it quite like that... instead I try to find out more about the situation, maybe to put Flo at ease. And the first thing I ask is "What is this wife like, exactly?"

"Oh, y'know... typical tall, slim beautiful blonde."

Now, I'm not a cruel man but I feel obliged to point out that this 'love of her life' being already married to a virtual supermodel, whilst obviously upsetting, hardly counts as 'ironic'. If this wife had been roughly 5'6", a little more curvacious, with short dark hair and a slighly wonky nose... now that might have been bordering on ironic purely by virtue of the wife then being a clone of Flo herself.

This observation doesn't go down incredibly well, so when Flo tells me the story of how 'dream-hubby' and his wife met at some event in Monte Carlo I opt for another approach...

Let's imagine for a second, going back say 4 years... a friend invites Flo to a dinner party where everyone will be in couples, but knowing Flo to be single she invites another gentleman to act as her blind date. This is a good friend, who manages to choose the perfect match for Flo, but unfortunately Flo (in the midst of her depression about being single) decides to drop out at the last minute. In desperation her friend, the host, calls up another girl to take her place... another girl with looks and interests very similar to Flo. The two strangers hit it off straight away and are married within a couple of years. Then, further down the line, Flo meets the 'love of her life'... who just happens to be the man she stood up four years ago and who has, in the meantime, married her doppelganger....

Now THAT's fucking ironic!

Flo chewed on this for a while before turning to me, her eyes curiously blazing.

"Do me a favour, Binty. Never take a job in Counselling."

Cheers m'dears!

Oops, they did it again!

In my Churchill Statue post from a couple of weeks ago I asked for suggestions of what other unusual statues we might see... the last thing I expected was to find this sculpture so soon afterwards. With thanks to Clairwil for drawing my attention thither.

Cheers m'dears!