Scissor Sisters, "Ta-Dah"

The New York glamsters' second album

A review

World stardom can't be easy to juggle. For over two years, you'd look up the word ubiquity in the dictionary and read Scissor Sisters, as they shifted three million units with one of the unlikeliest debut albums of all times. Forget camp, Scissor Sisters wore their sexuality on both sleeves, turning out catchy tunes and kitsch galore. After years of greyness, Scissor Sisters brought a welcome change, miles more colourful than any bored-looking popstar who'd make you scramble for the nearest sicknote in search of life.

That was 2004-2005. How they'd handle that 'difficult second album' was anybody's guess. And what a sturdy piece did they manage. Ta-Dah arguably contains the catchiest pop songs ever known to man. Ooh, in particular, with its wah pedals and funky beats is absolutely infectious at a glance, a hymn to putting back 'guilty feelings' and 'them blues' when you 'got magic in those dancing shoes'. Not to mention the bizarrely titled Paul McCartney, it'd go down a treat on any dancefloor anywhere in the country. And no doubt you've heard first single I Don’t Feel Like Dancin' about a million times already.

But here's where the praises end. I suppose many a band would bank on what are possibly the most annoyingly catchy tunes. They won't mind getting on people's nerves as long as that happens two minutes after they've bought your record. That's exactly the marketing ploy. And the Sisters are positively gifted at that. But I swear, a week after you buy Ta-Dah there's no better way of defining it than to say it's just TOO MUCH. How many Bee Gees-like falsettos and Elton John-esque honky-tonkying can you get away with before you objectively do people's head in?

You're bound to hear them non-stop as you zip your trolley round at your local Tesco, and they're destined to sell bucket-loads again. But something tells me within five years they'll be guilty-pleasure-material, as passé and dated as Level 42, Simple Minds or Bucks Fizz. And your kids will look at their folks' CD collection, spot Ta-Dah and take the piss.

Music in your 30s. Richard Hawley

A review of Coles Corner

I don't know about yous, but to say that I've started to feel a tad out of touch with today's music is not to overstate my case. You hit 30, you watch -say- the highlights of Reading Festival or V, or X, Y, Z sponsored by some huge lager-pumping corporation, presented by some giddy-acting trollop and you don't recognise a single tune. You may have heard the bands' names, but they don't push the right buttons. Most likely, a generational thing.

And yet somebody did it for me, out of the blue. A guy of unassuming appearance, a denim-clad semi-geek with a clear penchant for vintage rock'n'roll, quite cool-looking actually. But veneer aside, it's songwriting that does the trick here.

Think of Morrissey at his most heartfelt, that wavering, impassionate cover of 50s classic Moonriver lost amidst the indifference of his rockabilly days. Think of Nick Cave's The Boatman's Call, eerie and spectral. Think of that excruciatingly psychotic plea for help (the-party's-over-and-you're-as-alone-as-ever) that was Pulp's This is Hardcore.

That's my way of describing what Richard Hawley does to you. His latest -magnificent- Coles Corner is a rubber ring chucked at a generation often too inhibited, too cool, to sing about emotions in unassuming fashion. An 'old' romantic, dareisay.

Coles Corner is a tale of lonely despair, it's a post-being-dumped walk around the park. Sparse piano, shy, shimmering, beautiful guitars, stunning arrangements. It's also the most stunning tribute to Sheffield's most anonymous yet popular corner. The place where a million souls may decide to meet up on their first date and get stood up. Hotel Room, Tonight, Born Under A Bad Sign, they should all be classics and to me they already are.

And if you'd been out on the pull and luck was on your side and they'd said yes to a date, which would your Coles Corner be in Birmingham? The Odeon in New Street? Paradise Forum? Or maybe that newly defaced bull statue outside the Bull Ring? Nominate Brum's own Coles Corner. And get hold of that CD!

"A million are socially excluded"

Oh the beauty of the Internet. You're miles away but you're still drawn to the place. And so the absurdity of it all reaches a new high with the news that newly appointed Social Exclusion Minister Hilary Armstrong reveals the astonishing truth of "a million people in the UK [being] socially excluded [while] 5% of the population are at risk of becoming so". I'm quite worried she may not fare too well at the Acute Observers' Olympics. Did any commentator dare to ask her where the Blair Government have been in the last 9 years? A report or two shows that the social gap under progressive St. Tony the evangelist has widened like never before...Still, Ms Armstrongs continues :"It's my job to pull people together across government, so that we are intervening early". Never has the concept of velocity seemed such a subjective one.

So in my bedroom from those ugly new houses

Those samey city-living apartments are sprawling everywhere.

During my time in London I remember asking the clichè question: how can people afford it?

Have a walk around. It makes you wonder who's ever gonna be able to repay those mortgages in full before they snuff it. Which explains why adults past 35 still rent and share as if perma-studentdom was to last forever. Or how about those city-living apartments that are sprawling everywhere, in each single town centre, from Cardiff to Birmingham, from Sheffield to Brighton. Monstrosities closer to hives than they are to human dwellings.

Until recently the consensus was that never again the fiasco of post-war social housing was to be repeated. Those high-rise blocks -the script reads out- had been the hard way of learning how you don’t do urban planning. Ugly, alienating, anonymous. But at least the post-war social housing drive was a positive one. It was the government taking on board the task of allowing everybody modern and affordable living in some shape or form. The UK had taken on the noble task of mammoth slum-clearance. And modernist post-war housing was seen as the quickest, most affordable and most effective solution.

But now? What’s all this? At the turn of the 21st century you cannot believe the rate at which humongous apartment blocks are mushrooming throughout the UK. Housing it may be, but this time it’s no social we’re talking about. No cheap, affordable, “homes for heroes”. They are all invariably high-rent, glossy, “city-living”, “south-side”, “west-side”, “urban- splash” dens. Not even that glossy, to tell you the truth. But certainly re-mortageable, if you don't fancy repossession.

I’m sitting outside a bar in Hurst Street, on a rare April sunny afternoon, sipping rose wine, what else. The building opposite us must have been assembled in less than five minutes. Lego for giants. For a second I express bewilderment. I didn’t know the new A&E department was being built in Hurst Street. Not quite.

A pink banner sheds some light “City Living- Show Room- Southside”. “Enjoy life at the heart of the business district”. You really should take a look at the building. Had it been a guessing game, chances are the A&E speculation would have been followed by a) school, b) prison, c) police HQ. Scratch beneath the surface of extortionate prices and…but that's another story.

Blighted in Blighty

It’s been three weeks since I first trotted around the streets of this town in Portugal. Afternoons are a notoriously quiet affair here. The place is industrious but unhurried. The region was described as one of the richest of the EU and “typical Calvinist spirit, a far cry from the stereotype of lazy Poland” by a Yale University research. None of that frenzied English clone-town centre vestige. Since legging it, a few weeks ago, it didn’t take long to register that the perception of Britain abroad is a far cry from reality, a testing concoction of misconceptions and distorted myths of a green and pleasant land stuck in aspic.

People here come up with all sorts of ideas suggesting that Britain may find itself a mere step short from being a heavenly kingdom, were it not for inclement weather and stodgy food.

How many times do I have to repost that, no, drive-by shooting does exist in the UK. That their lovely new cultural phenomenon called “happy-slapping” isn’t quite in the league of mini-skirts, Britpop and all those slightly more constructive old British exports. That no, music people do get a hard time too, outside London you’d easily get a beating for sporting a Mohawk or looking like an ‘indie-kid’, a poofter, or a goth. That schools are blighted by bullying.

That men don’t all prance about speaking like Hugh Grant and rarely spend more than a minute in front of the mirror. That a look at a beer bellies and football-geezers wouldn’t go amiss to have an idea. That timber-frame homes ended their reign quite a while back and haven’t they heard of clone-towns, that whether you hurry with your shopping down Dudley high street or Southampton town centre, chances are the plastic bags you’re carrying sport the same logos.

That pubs have long ceased to be cosy pretty social hideaways and bring your earplugs along as you try the Actress &Bishop on a weekend. That vomit on pavements on a Friday night is run of the mill. That, no, I don’t live in London and I haven’t met the queen. And that, yes, corruption is endemic in the UK, too.

And when they look at its “model of democracy” they’d better take notice of that kick in the eye that answers the moniker of the House of Lords, the peer- selection backhander scandal, or at the one-man band that has been Tony Blair’s government in the past few years.

And when the Latvians whinge about their manic political system, they may want to take a peek at the United Kingdom of Apathy and the lowest electoral turnout in Europe, perhaps explained by the non-existent choice between two incredibly similar and unrepresentative political parties.

And that –for goodness’ sake- the next time you give me that look when I tell you that trains in Greece are actually cheaper and NOT more inefficient that those in Britain, I’ll take you for a ride on that packed overpriced Birmingham-Brighton Virgin Trains service and the bill is on you. But here, in Slovakia, on a sunny, sultry afternoon, with a heat that you don’t get in Brum were it not for the first two weeks of July when you’re working your arse out and wait for that evening drink in the pub, something finally hits home.

The bank guy –Mehmet, his name is- isn’t taking the piss nor having me on. A tinge of embarrassment twists his face for a split second. You’d want to cuddle him if it wasn’t for my now endemic suspicion that he may be after something. A **********, maybe. The request for a signature that would tie me for life to an insurance scheme, arguably. Oh haven’t years of Blighty turned me into a conspiratorial watchdog type.

No, all he utters timidly, as he squeezes an English preposition or two within his lovely Serbo Croat, is: “This one I’d really love to know. It’s been bugging me for a while. Erm...do...do people in England really walk around carrying a suitcase and wear a bowler hat?”. Oh dear, where do I begin. This time I could write a book about it.

Amazing, amazing, Fern, it's amazing

She must have "fey-ver-it bands" in the thousands. In fact, they're all her favourites. They're all brilliant and they're all a-m-a-z-i-n-g. She hangs around with them all and they're lovely people. Hooray! Cheers! Hooraahh!

People scoff at how TOTP presenters in the 1980s were bigging everything up and it was all OTT, ego, baloons and cheers, Mike Read, Steve Wright, Bruno Brookes. But how is Fern Cotton any different? As Top of The Pops ratings keep plummeting, there must be someone, somewhere at the BBC able to grasp how much that bloodless, fake, sycophantic egomaniac annoys the hell out of people.

One day, in 2020, there'll be a Top 50 cringeworthy list about the noughties and Fern "Amazing" Cotton will be well in it, along with Jo "it's such a good band" Whiley and Davina "Awww" McCall.

casualties.org

The arrogant US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is sneering at the simmering suggestions from military high ranks that he should quit. And in the meantime, sottovoce, an average of two US soldiers a day are killed in Iraq. One wonders if the Americans have subconsciously become accustomed to and immune from the heaps of military fatalities. In 2003 and 2004 George W Bush was speaking a different language. A plethora of "bring them on", "we've won the war" and all the rest of it. To get an idea of what "We" are supposed to have won, take a peek.

Morrissey, "Ringleader of the Tormentors"

"Your songs are not as good as they once were".

A review of Morrissey's new album

I bet he knows it. Ok, what a joy when your new album is strutting triumphantly at no.1. But what an odd state of affairs, to reach your commercial peak when your inspiration's gone to the dogs. If you think that Morrissey endured years and years of stick right when he was putting out some seriously inspired good stuff. He was pilloried while, for better or for worse, each of his 90s albums had some real depth, a specific tinge, some experimentation. Yes, even the clumsy stammer that was Kill Uncle, the rockabilly hooks of 1992's Your Arsenal, not to mention the heart-rending Vauxhall and I which, while the NME was busy issuing its anti-Moz fatwa, was hailed by his fans as up there along with the best of The Smiths. Those were the days when Britain was in awe of the flash in the pan of Oasis, Blur & co. Yet Mozzer seemed on a one-man mission, a release after the other, Boxers and Southpaw Grammar sporting some of his most daring music to date, brutal and violent, the guy clearly with a score to settle against bucketloads of nasty, nasty press. Put simply, if you liked Morrissey solo in the 90s you were considered a freak. It's only with the unimaginative Maladjusted (1997) that some cracks finally showed, even though Morrissey could still pen gems like 'Trouble Loves Me'.

What follows is well documented. The tale of a massive comeback after seven years in the wilderness without a record deal, Morrissey finally being paid his dues with a place in history. Were it not for the old law of pendulum-swings and revivals due every 20 years, the change of heart would be all but inexplicable. In 2004, you had to like Morrissey. His new label invested on him and did so heavily. He was the flavour of the year, TV, radio and magazines, namechecked by the new hordes of 80s revivalists. Yet it was obvious that You Are The Quarry sucked, as simple as that. Just one big clump of MoR, and ten more listens down the road you still wouldn't remember a single tune (except...maybe... 'First of The Gang To Die'). Which is why many long term fans hoped for a reprieve when the release of Ringleader of the Tormentors was announced. His move to Rome was seen as a promising change of scenery for a man in desperate need of new ideas. And yes, his interviews are still the most interesting ever. In a music-scene epitomised by the cerebral death of stuff akin to Channel 4's Popworld, it's always refreshing to read Morrissey telling it like it is.

But the music? Ringleader of the Tormentors is Quarry-part 2, just a touch better. Mostly, another clump of unremarkable MoR starved of hooks and brilliance, stifled by those trademark- alas- mildly dull distorted guitars. Little sticks in your mind. In a word, bland. You can even sing the tune of You Are The Quarry's 'I Like You', on top of the new single 'You Have Killed Me'. It just goes nowhere. And it's the usual collection of "i-forgive-you, please-god-help-me, I-live-longer-than-intended", none of the genius social observation of Your Arsenal, the wit of Bona Drag, and only glimpses of the passion of Vauxhall And I. It's only when the trite and tiresome tangle of sapid guitars keeps quiet that the music and vocals do have a chance to shine, like in the gorgeous, stunningly wholehearted 'Dear God Please Help Me' (featuring arrangements by Ennio Morricone). In fact, the whole album is gagging for those dreary guitars to shut up. As such, the few moments with new ideas are indeed quite brilliant: Tony Visconti's laudable production is tangible on the 'Panic'-like choir of 'The Youngest Was The Most Loved', or tracks that don't rely on the usual MoR formula (the glam-stomp of 'The Father Who Must Be Killed', the eastern swirl of the touchingly anti-Bush 'I Will See You In Far Off Places', the drums and trombone of ‘I Just Want To See The Boy Happy’ and the eerie piano of 'Life Is A Pigsty').

In 1990 Morrissey wrote a b-side called 'Get Off The Stage', a scathing attack on ageing rockstars who just can't jack it in. How ironic, how foretelling. In the meantime I'll stick the title 'Your songs are not as good as they once were' on this review. It sounds, would you believe it, almost Morrissey-esque.