Britain Versus

After the question "Which countries has Britain not been at war with?" was posed the other day by a friend, a geekiness overtook me and I attempted to create a nice map showing all the countries Britain has been at war with, coloured in red.

This meant formal war, not just colonising as that was sometimes achieved with the aid of a few fired shots, plenty of deals with local leaders, and some western germs which killed the natives in vast amounts. I am sure there are places missing from this map (the infamously short war with Zanzibar is missing cos it's too small to colour in!) so any uber-geeks out there please correct me and the map.

Note: Hawaii isn't coloured in because Britain has never been at war with it. Alaska is coloured in as, whilst it wasn't part of America during the War of Independence, it was part of Russia during the Crimean War. Which is interesting.

Holly Cruise : 13 Nov 2009 16:57 |  Tags: History |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Western Remakes

I’ve recently been told that Takeshi Kitano, the brilliant director/actor who has starred/directed/both such glorious films as the ridiculously violent Zatoichi, the gloriously violent Battle Royale, and the surreal (with big hints of violence) Hana-Bi (aka Fireworks), is also responsible for one of the best game shows ever – ‘Takeshi’s Castle’!

Is it just me or does this sound like the sort of thing which requires an unnecessary Western remake? I now live in expectation of the day it turns out Ken Loach invented ‘Countdown’.

Or an American version where Quentin Tarantino invents ‘America’s Next Top Model’.

Holly Cruise : 30 Oct 2009 18:00 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Only City

Follow-up to City vs Blackburn from Hollyzone

So with reports that Emmanuel Adebayor’s imminent and inevitable ban for his behaviour at the weekend will be fast-tracked so it starts with the Manchester derby I can’t help but join every last City fan I know in shaking my head and wondering how the club I mocked not so long ago for being able to field an entire team of strikers has managed to concoct a striking crisis just in time for the trip to Old Trafford.

Emmanuel Adebayor – £25m – possibly banned for being a silly billy.

Carlos Tevez – £25m officially, £47m according to rumours – injured whilst trying to make Diego Maradona look like a competent manager.

Robinho – £32.5m – injured somehow, although seeing as Old Trafford is an away game (heck, not even in Manchester if you listen to pedantic Citeh fans) he probably wouldn’t have made an impact even if he did play.

Roque Santa Cruz – £18m – when I contended to a City fan that we (United) also had some injuries, she said I couldn’t count Hargreaves. By that logic, I said, she couldn’t count RSC, who does seem rather fragile (although admittedly not in Hargreaves league).

So that’ll be £100.5m spent on attacking talent, and it looks like it’ll be Craig Bellamy and Benjani playing.

Only City.

Holly Cruise : 14 Sep 2009 12:32 |  Tags: Football |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Music Resolution 2009 – Ladyhawke, Manchester Academy 2, 17th May

Join me and my New Year’s Resolution to go to at least one gig every month of 2009.

The problem with gigs is that the artist isn't necessarily the master of their own fortunes, even as they stand up there in front of the audience and put on the show everyone's theoretically there to enjoy. A bad audience can cause even a good performance to fall curiously flat. This can often be the case when an artist rides a wave of hype or a big hit – audiences are dragged in on flimsier pretences than for many other gigs. Whether to be seen as the coolest kids, or to hear the one or two songs they actually know from the radio, crowds can be awkward and unmoved in the face of almost anything.

Reports of early Ladyhawke gigs suggested that this talented Kiwi wasn't the most outgoing onstage presence, partially down to shyness emanating from her Aspergers. But a long period of touring appears to have hardened and encouraged the woman known to her parents as Phillipa Brown.

In Manchester, in the upgraded Academy 2 (she was originally due to be crammed into everyone's favourite chapel of crap acoustics, the Bar Academy), she was engaging albeit in a determined and single minded way, bringing her songs to the audience from behind her fringe but with more stage banter than expected. A guitar malfunction prompted the sort of deadpan, Kiwi-accented commentary which might be more familiar to fans of those other popular New Zealanders, Flight of the Concords. “G's in tune... D's in tune... Sorry this is boring while I tune... A was very out of tune, sorry if anyone heard that... oh my god, E's so flat!”. It almost felt wrong to grin broadly as she declared the encore would begin with a cover of a song by “Petty Smath”.

Pouting on tall buildings - 8/10 rockstar points.

It was a good cover too. Heck, all the songs, barring one, were well played, slightly heavier than the album, and delivered by a woman rightfully riding high on acclaim for them. Even if the superlative album opener 'Magic' fell slightly flat as the first song (its delicate, Depeche Mode-esque, electronic acoustics are presumably not the easiest to recreate, even without the Bar Academy's 'assistance'), the rest of the tracks were bashed out with suitable aplomb.

Yet the whole thing felt a bit flat. The audience just didn't seem to be engaging with the music, there was no rush of excitement for the surging album tracks like 'Professional Suicide’ (possibly one of the best tracks of the night) or the strutting ‘Manipulating Woman’. Even bone fide single ‘Dusk Till Dawn’ didn’t seem to be enough to rouse the crowd.

Having to wait for the hits of ‘Paris Is Burning’ and ‘My Delerium’ to spark the crowd was actually quite frustrating for those of us who have bothered to listen to the whole album. It had all the potential to be a brilliant gig and, ‘Magic’ apart, all the songs were rendered in a beautifully faithful way by Brown and co.

Brown has charm and tunes, she just needs fans who actually want to listen to more than just the singles. I hate to fall victim to indie snobbery tendencies, but perhaps it would have been better to leave this gig in the Bar Academy and not admit the singles-only fans…

Holly Cruise : 09 Sep 2009 18:00 |  Tags: Music Music Mission 2009 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Mercury Ranting Time Is Here Again

It’s the Mercury Prize tonight. Can you feel the excitement? Really? In fact this year there don’t even seem to be quite as many rants from newspapers and zines about how there are bands who sell well, who have gotten some coverage in the media, although reliably there are some.

I suspect the reason why there are fewer rants is because the rants themselves are just as repetitive and unoriginal as they claim the award itself is. The grumble that it gives too many spots to the mainstream at the expense of supposedly more deserving ‘low profile’ acts, who normally turn out to be just as well known as about half the list but just happen to be the preferred record of whoever is grumbling. Thus is feeds back into the repeated claims that the Mercury has moved away from its supposed beginnings as a champion of indie success.

But as the media eye and public taste expands, mostly due to the internet, innovative and unusual stuff is becoming mainstream faster than before so the Mercury looks like it follows when it actually hasn’t changed that much in terms of what is nominated.

Check out the 1999 list:
Talvin Singh – OK
Thomas Adès – Asyla
Denys Baptiste – Be Where You Are
Black Star Liner – Bengali Bantam Youth Experience!
Blur – 13
The Chemical Brothers – Surrender
Faithless – Sunday 8PM
Manic Street Preachers – This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours
Beth Orton – Central Reservation
Kate Rusby – Sleepless
Stereophonics – Performance and Cocktails
Underworld – Beaucoup Fish

For Adès, Baptiste and Black Star Liner read Led Bib, The Sweet Billy Pilgrim and The Invisible, the real unknowns to the mainstream, although Adès was a pretty big name in classical, arguably bigger than any of the class of 09 are in their areas.

Then there’s Faithless, Underworld and Chemical Brothers. Three stonking albums of the current trendy music of 1999, dance. If anything they were bigger sellers than most of the 09 list, certainly bigger than 09’s trendy trio whether you wish to argue this is BFL, Florence and La Roux representing ladies in music, or The Horrors, Friendly Fires and Glasvegas representing NME indie.

TIMTTMY and Performance and Cocktails are more mainstream records than West Pauper…, and I suspect even 13 was also.

From guardian.co.uk – Arctic Monkeys are perplexed by previous nominees as we are.

What’s interesting is that many of the journalists and bloggers now commenting on the Mercury were quite young in 1990s, thus names like The Auteurs, PJ Harvey (‘93), Therapy? (‘94), Elastica (‘95), Asian Dub Foundation (‘98) might have seemed exciting and exotic to a teenager at the time, but they were actually pretty well known. Certain early years, like 1995 are startling for how mainstream they are, 1995 and 1996 in particular were packed with Britpop and associated acts.

The last overt mainstream pop act nominated was arguably Jamelia (although it could equally be argued she doesn’t fit this description) in 2004, but the 90s saw Robbie Williams, Take That, Spice Girls, U2 and Simply Red nominated. If anything the Mercuries are now more insular, there has not been a mention of Girls Aloud, for instance, never mind the reincarnated Take That.

“The Mercury isn’t indie or obscure enough”/”Mercury is veering from its original intentions” line gets trotted out every year, but increasingly there’s a lack of appreciation of what went before in these awards, and a lack of appreciation of the changing nature of music consumption and reportage which alters how the Mercury are perceived.

From bbc.co.uk – Elbow win, Hollyzone approves.

Let’s face it, when people say they believe the Mercury should be for low key but innovative music, or music which is regarded as brilliant in its genre but overlooked by the mainstream, what they actually mean is whichever indie band they were listening to last week. They would recoil in horror at the suggestion that it go to Darren Styles (http://open.spotify.com/track/7s923ZIFRdJEV0YzYPXMff) who perfectly represents the genre (Scouse House/Hard House) pinnacle who gets overlooked by the mainstream, or N Dubz who struggled against major label attempts to change them before going with an independent and realising their vision their way. Heck, where are Girls Aloud and the Sugababes who both shifted the pop spectrum?

Taking the Mercury too seriously is the same as taking the Brits too seriously, people need to accept their complaints with it come when people they don’t like are nominated, not necessarily because it has betrayed some original purpose.

Fercrissakes, M People have won it, y’know!

Holly Cruise : 08 Sep 2009 18:00 |  Tags: Music |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

When Agendas Destroy All Logic

Writing about web page http://lornakismet.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/how-house-bill-runs-over-grandma-%E2%80%9Cits-time-for-you-to-die-granny-%E2%80%9D/

I’ve just read a right wing American blog in which the author says:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
Pesky Emotional Repubican

I really hate the stereotype of Americans as being stupid or moronic because the ones I’ve met, both in Europe and in a month long jaunt in Chicago seemed intelligent, if occasionally a little ill-informed about things from outside their area (which could be anything from their home state to the boundaries of the USA, or even North America and Mexico). All the ones I met were open minded and able to grasp the basic concept of fact checking.

But that quote above, that one single sentence has made me despair. It’s one person’s opinion, but it’s so staggeringly, breathtakingly, mindblowingly stupid on every single imaginable level that it has crippled my ability to be objective. I mean, the rest of the blog piece is pretty stupid too (failure to understand what NICE does, general lies about the NHS) but really if you’re going to claim the NHS causes the deaths of disabled people because it doesn’t care about them then try not to talk about a man who has lived his entire life (decades beyond his original life expectancy) within the NHS system is the worst rhetorical device of all time.

Stephen Hawking = well clever.
Pesky Emotional Republican = monumentally stupid.

We need to get Dr Hawking an English accented talking voice box.

Holly Cruise : 12 Aug 2009 00:26 |  Tags: Politics And Other Things No One Cares About |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

City vs Blackburn

The Manchester City lineup (probable) for the first game of the season against Blackburn at Ewood Park.

Given

Richards - Onouha - Dunne - Bridge

De Jong - Barry

SWP - Ireland - Petrov

Bellamy - Caceido - Bojinov

Benjani - Evans

Robinho - Adebayor - Tevez

Santa Cruz

The innovative 4-2-3-3-2-3-1 line up will surely overwhelm Blackburn Rovers who will probably revert to their preferred lineup of 9-0-1 where the one up front is defender Christoper Samba. Either way, City are leading the line in the Premiership this year for tactical innovation. With the vast wealth of the oily owners City should have no trouble persuading the FA to accept their brave new approach to the game of association football.

However it is widely believed that City have a backup plan if the FA gets a bit clingy to the outmoded notion of 11-a-side football, and have designed the following lineup to accommodate their recently acquired talents:

Given

Caceido - Evans - Benjani - Bojinov

Bellamy - Jo (recalled) - Tevez - Robinho

Adebayor - Santa Cruz

This will allow for City's vast array of attacking talent to thrive whilst eliminating the possibility of any, or indeed all, of them getting major strops about the splinters in their arses from the most overstuffed attacking bench in the entire history of history.

Naturally if city ever need tips they should only look across the city to their neighbours Manchester United, who will be approaching this season with the equally intriguing tactical innovation of a strike force made up of two foetuses, a man who doesn't do very much, and a man who does too much like shout at refs, defend and assault corner flags.

Full season guide coming soon.

Holly Cruise : 23 Jul 2009 12:00 |  Tags: Football |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

Chimp Escape

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/8135603.stm

Read the one about the thirty chimps who escaped from their pen at Chester Zoo causing the whole thing to be evacuated? Guess who was there? Ya, twas Hollyzone. Me and five thousand other punters were evacuated from the zoo at about lunchtime yesterday in an incident that can only be described as “becoming a theme” after I managed to get evacuated from Birmingham New Street station two weeks ago. Coming up this week I will get evacuated from a concert, a game of ten pin bowling, a pub and a nuclear submarine.

And what was learnt from the chimpery?

• Chester Zoo practises for animal escapes a lot, but there hasn’t been one for at least four years according to the zookeeper I spoke to.
• Chimps are one of the worst animals to escape because they are big, strong, clever and have opposable thumbs.
• However, even when they do escape, they are only really after tasty things, hence why they didn’t even make it out of monkey house, only into the kitchen. According to the keeper “they’re in the right building, just not where we want them”.
• People don’t like it very much if you joke that it’s the jaguars which have escaped.
• People are worse than animals in a lot of ways – all the chimps wanted was nuts from the kitchen. When it became apparent that this meant the zoo was closed for the day several humans got loud and aggressive, so much so the tills which had been opened to give refunds had to close, and some remained badly behaved as they tried to leave. There was much honking of horns and general impatience despite the fact even a chimp could work out that five thousand people cannot leave a place at once without a queue forming.
• As part of the entry fee one can donate a small amount to Chester Zoo via gift aid as a donation. It’s optional but often taken up. In the queue Hollyzone was in to get refunds there were probably several hundred people. Hollyzone was the only one to enquire as to whether it was possible to have only the entry fee refunded, and not the donation which was, after all, a donation. Apparently due to paying on card this was not possible. It’s a bit sad that no one else thought to ask. Sure, claim the entry fee back, but a donation’s a donation, surely?
• The BBC News website reported the whole thing under it’s Merseyside News banner. Chester ain’t in Merseyside. The clue’s in the title, it’s in Cheshire. This is very annoying. All that effort I went to growing up there and the BBC (paid for by my license fee) can’t even be bothered to say the place exists. Typical. Bet the chimps would care.

Holly Cruise : 06 Jul 2009 23:27 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Music Resolution 2009 – Metric, Manchester Academy 3, 11th May

Join me and my New Year’s Resolution to go to at least one gig every month of 2009.

Does going to a gig on your own make you a loser? No, of course not. It is a pure declaration of love for music that one is willing to be that Billy No Mates. Of course, it is instantly more respectable if one makes random gig friends in the course of one’s solo adventure, and where is better to make friends that the queue for the merch stall? After all, in an era where downloads and the nature of record deals mean only a tiny, and usually Bono-shaped, minority of bands make any money from something so vulgar as CDs, buying merch is one of the best declarations of intent towards a band. Yes, it says, I will wear your shameless advertising to show my love. Your face, my chest. They were meant to be together.

I’m talking about teeshirts, right?!

A Metric teeshirt.

And it was as witness to the unusual sight of the male half of a couple dilly-dallying over a garment, whilst the female half held onto a beer for dear life, I met my random gig buddies. It turned out Mr GB was the Metric fan, Miss GB had come along because, well, it was something to do and Mr GB really wanted to go. Neither of them expected to make a random gig buddy (why would they when they had each other?) but when I turn on my waif and stray look, I can get adopted by even the flintiest hearted gig goer (this theory has not been tested at an Oasis gig, and hopefully never ever will).

Now the second stage of the plan was less succesful. Granted, the second stage of the plan was not fully formed until halfway through the gig, but it was a simple idea with a not-so-simple execution, to wit, run away and join Metric.

It’s entirely possible to love a band and not want to run away and join them. The list of bands I’ve wanted to run away and join is very small. There are always practicalities. I wouldn’t run away and join Muse because I am not good enough at any instrument. I wouldn’t run away and join Crystal Castles because I value my personal safety. I wouldn’t run away and join Elastica because they split up eight years ago, and besides, heroin just isn’t as appealing as Toberlone. So there remains a tiny rump of bands I would join. Prior to this gig I had a year long desire to learn Portugese and sod off to join those masters of the not-quite-proficient instrument playing, CSS. But no longer.

Nope, nowadays I plot my journey to Metric, like a loser with six inch ruler, dreaming of 15cm.

But why? Well, why not? And besides, Emily Haines, Metric’s vocalist and sometime keyboardist, probably managed to persuade most if not all of the audience to share this dream with me. When she introduced ‘Gimme Sympathy’, the highlight of new album Fantasies, she opted to highlight the choruses query “Who’d you rather be/The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?” before answering that she’d say neither, she wanted to be in Metric. It was only about 55% vomit inducing, a much lower percentage than you would expect.

A crap photo of Metric, showing the sun shining out of their… places where sun shines normally. Ahem.

Haines is a top class front woman. She has charisma, a tendency to waffle the most endearing crap (including, but not limited to, a hilarious meandering rumination on taking magic mushrooms, punctuated regularly be completely unconvincing denials of ever having touched said fungi or having encouraged anyone to use them) and doesn’t seem to realise that sometimes a singer can stay still. Neck threatening headbanging on ‘Hand$hakes’, jumping around on multiple tracks (risky, the Academy 3 has a very low ceiling), stalking the stage endlessly. The set was very very heavy on the new album, all bar four tacks coming from this sleek but engaging lesson in classy indie. The occasional addition guitar solo or extended outro give the crowd something new, but a Metric gig these days is a masterclass in making the efficient exciting.

Starting on a slowie is something only a band full of confidence would do, so its a good thing it is justified. The slow start builds expectation, rather than testing the audience’s patience. As does the decision to make the set Fantasies-heavy. For Miss GB it didn’t matter that she barely knew the band at all, by the end she was insisting to Mr GB and myself that we were heading back to where it all began between us, the merch stall, to buy her a copy of Fantasies for her car. She also agreed that if we hadn’t had jobs to go to the next day we would be spending the rest of the night trying to smuggle ourselves aboard Metric’s tourbus.

And why not. You’ll only end up a Billy No Mates if you don’t go out there and meet people. Book me a spot on the bus, Emily!

Holly Cruise : 03 Jul 2009 17:00 |  Tags: Music Music Mission 2009 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Music Resolution 2009 – Bat For Lashes/School Of Seven Bells, Manchester Ritz, 7th April

Join me and my New Year’s Resolution to go to at least one gig every month of 2009.

Nothing like a grand and slightly out-of-time venue for the slightly unworldly and grand world of Bat For Lashes. There aren’t many venues in the Manchester area with chandeliers and golden decorations adorning the wall. And there aren’t many pop stars who turn up in a shower of gold paint and curious kitsch stage decorations.

Certainly School Of Seven Bells haven’t dressed up particularly strangely for the night in the venerable old Ritz, with it’s ‘legendary’ ‘springy’ dancefloor. Instead they’ve decided that they’ll do their spookiness via their music. The swooning guitar and keyboard noises generated by Benjamin Curtis and the twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, who enticed him away from his previous band, Secret Machines, are more than sufficiently unworldly in a way which evokes a time unfamiliar to most of the audience – an early 1990s shoegaze concert. Not that they had state of the art laptops tapping away in an echo-y manner back in 1991. No, they had real drummers.

School Of Seven Bells. Bells not pictures.

But a real drummer would only ruin School Of Seven Bells’ symmetry, Curtis stood centre stage with a singing twin on either side. There should be more symmetry in music. Wonky musicians will never be as satisfying as a perfectly balance front line. It’s why the Manics needed Richey Edwards onstage, to create a neat symmetry of glam bloke-macho bloke-glam bloke rather than supply guitar heroics. School Of Seven Bells have symmetry. Conveniently they also turned out to have some gorgeous songs. Even when they were looking confused at Bat For Lashes’ distinctly asymmetrical stage props, they weren’t sounding confused. Tight and relentlessly dreamy, they were one of those pleasant surprises anyone who arrives early for the support wants. Setting the scene, drawing us in, and so beautifully symmetrical.

Bat For Lashes doesn’t do symmetry. She does trinkets, lots and lots of trinkets. Some of her trinkets are borrowed from other bands, New Young Pony Club’s drummer, ex-Ash lady Charlotte Hatherley on various instruments and nick nacks. They take their place alongside odd lamps, strange statues and a pile of musical instruments, not all of which were in a mood to function.

Miss Bat.

Natasha Khan, is a shy girl. Hiding behind her musical alter ego Bat For Lashes, and on new album Two Suns her psychic opposite, a character called Pearl who amounts to Khan in a blonde wig, Natasha herself is quite shy. Very shy. And there’s nothing worse for a shy person than watching your carefully assembled equipment throw a hissy fit. For Khan it’s her synth which refuses to play ball. Sitting at it her discomfort is quite clear but such is her shy charisma that the audience peer anxiously rather than fidget, uninterested. There’s something about her demeanour which encourages affection in her crowds, many of whom are wearing the paper masks handed out by the street team before the gig. When she nervously sighs into the mic “Can anyone make a harpsichord sound?” the audience is laughing with her and willing the roadie in attendance on to fix the bug as “harpsichord” could only mean one thing – ‘Horse And I’.

There aren’t enough harpsichords in modern music, a statement which could probably have been uttered at any stage since the reign of Elizabeth I. When Khan brings us her songs she dresses them in clothes which stand out for their inventive eccentricity. ‘Pearl’s Dream’, one of the best things released all year by anyone, marries juddering electronic noise stabs with chiming melodies. The big bass drums of ‘What’s a Girl To Do?’, the digitised outro vocals of ‘Two Suns’, the shoop-shoop backing vocals of ‘Moon And Moon’, all little doses of oddness in a time of supposed creative stagnation in many areas of the music industry. The live setting suits Bat For Lashes, even some of the weaker tracks from her debut benefit, ‘Sarah’ in particular rises from a not particularly gripping three minutes into a bass driven, sinuous creation.

Me, looking really sinister with a lovely Bat For Lashes mask.

Some in the crowd might not have appreciated the second album heavy nature of the set, especially as said album had barely been released but, as it is a more immediate collection than her debut, this appears not to matter to most.

Instead a shy, asymmetrical girl in a headdress wanders around the stage entrancing all in the faded ballroom glory of the Ritz. Even if Khan let the mask slip once or twice, the magic was still there.

Holly Cruise : 01 Jul 2009 17:00 |  Tags: Music Music Mission 2009 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem