Wednesday, October 24, 2007
What a Total Guit
Our look at Saturday’s X Factor is on its way but, as is pretty obvious and, indeed, regular, we’ve been overcome by a bout of laziness, but we have a good reason, and it’s not just that we’ve become addicted to the reruns of Whose Line is it Anyway on Dave, although that is a factor. No, instead it’s because we’ve recently got ourselves a guitar, with the sole intention of having some indie style hits. Well, we’ve heard the Enemy’s album so really, how hard can it be?
It’s a slightly bigger task than you might expect, so we’ve set ourselves the goal of learning The View‘s Same Jeans by Christmas time, after which we’ll change not a note of it, sing some slightly different words over it, claim it as an original song and we should easily get a top three hit out of it. It’s only fair, it is what they did to Cornershop‘s Brimful of Asha to get their hit, after all.
Our education is going well, though, our first song, currently entitled One Badly Played Chord is already better than anything The Pigeon Detectives have ever released. Certainly the adulation we’re receiving from our neighbours, who constantly bang on our flat’s walls in appreciation of our music, is giving us encouragement to keep going, although we do wish they’d wait until we finished playing before they offered up their applause substitute.
Giving that we now plan on living each day of our life like an international pop star, we’ve been taking an even closer interest in the charts and new release schedule than normal, and it’s safe to say that upcoming competition is pretty lacking. The biggest one is probably the new Spice Girls‘ track which is even more half arsed and unimaginative that we’d even dared to think. It’s for charity as well, so we can only feel sorry for the children in whose name this is being released.
Chico also crawled out from whatever rock he’s been lurking under to release Curvy Cola Bottle Body, a track which has caused the people behind the Oxford English Dictionary to order a mass recall of their reference work as they’re now forced to redefine the meaning of the word ‘awful’. His heart is almost in the right place, though, as this track rails against the trend towards slimming down to size 0, although it does ignore the fact that size zero doesn’t actually exist in the British sizing system, but size 4 isn’t quite as catchy a tabloid term. Unfortunately what Chico doesn’t realise is that by letting the world know that he prefers girls who are a bit curvier, every woman in the country is now desperately slimming down in the hope that they’ll never have to deal with his lecherous attentions.
We’re also not too sure about the new Girls Aloud track. But we’re sure it’ll prove to be a grower. Right? Right.
It’s a slightly bigger task than you might expect, so we’ve set ourselves the goal of learning The View‘s Same Jeans by Christmas time, after which we’ll change not a note of it, sing some slightly different words over it, claim it as an original song and we should easily get a top three hit out of it. It’s only fair, it is what they did to Cornershop‘s Brimful of Asha to get their hit, after all.
Our education is going well, though, our first song, currently entitled One Badly Played Chord is already better than anything The Pigeon Detectives have ever released. Certainly the adulation we’re receiving from our neighbours, who constantly bang on our flat’s walls in appreciation of our music, is giving us encouragement to keep going, although we do wish they’d wait until we finished playing before they offered up their applause substitute.
Giving that we now plan on living each day of our life like an international pop star, we’ve been taking an even closer interest in the charts and new release schedule than normal, and it’s safe to say that upcoming competition is pretty lacking. The biggest one is probably the new Spice Girls‘ track which is even more half arsed and unimaginative that we’d even dared to think. It’s for charity as well, so we can only feel sorry for the children in whose name this is being released.
Chico also crawled out from whatever rock he’s been lurking under to release Curvy Cola Bottle Body, a track which has caused the people behind the Oxford English Dictionary to order a mass recall of their reference work as they’re now forced to redefine the meaning of the word ‘awful’. His heart is almost in the right place, though, as this track rails against the trend towards slimming down to size 0, although it does ignore the fact that size zero doesn’t actually exist in the British sizing system, but size 4 isn’t quite as catchy a tabloid term. Unfortunately what Chico doesn’t realise is that by letting the world know that he prefers girls who are a bit curvier, every woman in the country is now desperately slimming down in the hope that they’ll never have to deal with his lecherous attentions.
We’re also not too sure about the new Girls Aloud track. But we’re sure it’ll prove to be a grower. Right? Right.
Labels: Chico, Girls Aloud, Guitar, News, Reviews, Spice Girls
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Garden Savaged?
We went to see Darren Hayes on the first night of his tour yesterday. Here’s a pic:-
We are, of course, joking, although the potentially racist pop star probably genuinely is regretting his decision to have “fascist uniforms as designed by Mondrian” as the costumes for this tour. Mind you, the “When I say ‘heil’ you see ‘Hitler’” call and response section was probably a little misjudged, and the less said about the duet with Jo O’Meara, the better.
Potentially libellous jokes aside, it was, all things considered - and we include the fact that we were seemingly never more than two songs away from another ballad - a pretty good gig. Darren has a fair set of pipes on him and his newer, more electro poppy stuff is really rather ace and most of the Savage Garden stuff hasn’t dated too badly. Certainly age hasn’t dimmed the passion of much of the audience for him, many of whom took every opportunity possible to declare their love for the man by the not exactly verbose form of unintelligible screaming. This was probably for the best though, as when it did become intelligible, well, ‘intelligible’ doesn’t really cover it. One girl seemed convinced that by informing Darren that “I want to have your babies”, he would readily acquiesce. Perhaps she never got the memo.
Despite being a relatively small scale tour, the stage show was quite impressive, although in most arena settings there aren’t usually problems where the set gets snagged awkwardly as the roadies attempt to move it by hand, but there were lots of pseudo deep images flashing behind him, including a bookcase - we looked but couldn’t see if a copy of Mein Kampf was lurking there - and lots of images of origami birds, which were presumably there to represent, childhood, innocence and the simple desire to fly away from the stresses and strains of modern life. Either that or he just really likes folding paper. Most of these stemmed from the ‘theme’ of the show, the Time Machine tour, although theme is perhaps putting it a bit strongly, as it mainly consisted of two brief speeches to the audience, one where Darren told us that he’d quite like to have a time machine so he could sort out all the mistakes in his life, and the other where he told us “The thing they don’t tell you about time travel, is that it’s all the mistakes you make that make you who you are, and if you undo them you unravel your self”. Darren has clearly never ever seen a single film about time travel as everyone knows that by changing the past you screw up your present. It’s the only plot time travel films have! Someone going back to the past, having a pleasant time and then going back to an undisturbed present doesn’t really provide a lot of dramatic tension and ticking plot style plot driving.
Anyway, it was all good fun and, after a storming discofied version of Pop!ular - the lyrics of which may or may not have been changed to “My friends are all Caucasian”, we could be wrong, we could be right. Arf - the whole thing came to an end and the audience all goose-stepped out. In summary then, electropopness good, ballady nonsense bad. And all Animal Songs are equal, although some are more equal than others.
We are, of course, joking, although the potentially racist pop star probably genuinely is regretting his decision to have “fascist uniforms as designed by Mondrian” as the costumes for this tour. Mind you, the “When I say ‘heil’ you see ‘Hitler’” call and response section was probably a little misjudged, and the less said about the duet with Jo O’Meara, the better.
Potentially libellous jokes aside, it was, all things considered - and we include the fact that we were seemingly never more than two songs away from another ballad - a pretty good gig. Darren has a fair set of pipes on him and his newer, more electro poppy stuff is really rather ace and most of the Savage Garden stuff hasn’t dated too badly. Certainly age hasn’t dimmed the passion of much of the audience for him, many of whom took every opportunity possible to declare their love for the man by the not exactly verbose form of unintelligible screaming. This was probably for the best though, as when it did become intelligible, well, ‘intelligible’ doesn’t really cover it. One girl seemed convinced that by informing Darren that “I want to have your babies”, he would readily acquiesce. Perhaps she never got the memo.
Despite being a relatively small scale tour, the stage show was quite impressive, although in most arena settings there aren’t usually problems where the set gets snagged awkwardly as the roadies attempt to move it by hand, but there were lots of pseudo deep images flashing behind him, including a bookcase - we looked but couldn’t see if a copy of Mein Kampf was lurking there - and lots of images of origami birds, which were presumably there to represent, childhood, innocence and the simple desire to fly away from the stresses and strains of modern life. Either that or he just really likes folding paper. Most of these stemmed from the ‘theme’ of the show, the Time Machine tour, although theme is perhaps putting it a bit strongly, as it mainly consisted of two brief speeches to the audience, one where Darren told us that he’d quite like to have a time machine so he could sort out all the mistakes in his life, and the other where he told us “The thing they don’t tell you about time travel, is that it’s all the mistakes you make that make you who you are, and if you undo them you unravel your self”. Darren has clearly never ever seen a single film about time travel as everyone knows that by changing the past you screw up your present. It’s the only plot time travel films have! Someone going back to the past, having a pleasant time and then going back to an undisturbed present doesn’t really provide a lot of dramatic tension and ticking plot style plot driving.
Anyway, it was all good fun and, after a storming discofied version of Pop!ular - the lyrics of which may or may not have been changed to “My friends are all Caucasian”, we could be wrong, we could be right. Arf - the whole thing came to an end and the audience all goose-stepped out. In summary then, electropopness good, ballady nonsense bad. And all Animal Songs are equal, although some are more equal than others.
Labels: Darren Hayes, Live, Reviews, Savage Garden
