Another Spotify mixtape. Does anyone bother with these? Anyhoo. this one is called “While the boys played football in the yard, the girls were innoculated“.

For non-UK readers this refers to a time-honoured tradition in British Schools.

There’ll be a lot of this so I thought I’d get mine in first. Then you can argue with me as to whether you agree or not (Some people may argue that we’re not actually at the end of the decade in 2009 – to be honest I couldn’t care less).

Where was I? Oh yes, my albums of the decade. This is a personal choice, consider it a meme if you like and tell the world what your top five records may be…

1. Melt Banana - Bambi’s Dilemma (2007, AZAP records)
This is a surprisingly poppy and melodic offering for MB.  If pop music can be delivered at light speed. I love every track here. It is perfection.

2. The White Stripes – White Blood Cells (2001, Sympathy records)
This is White Stripes’ third album but the first one I got.  They’re rock ‘n’ roll royalty now but at the time one drummer and one guitarist bands were limited to the pub.

3. Burial – Burial (2006, Hyperdub records)
I found Burial’s debut album utterly compelling – dark, urban, unsettling. With minimal fuss he completely puts his finger on everything about modern Britain in the noughties.

4. Sonic Youth – Murray Street (2002, DGC / Interscope records)
John Peel once described albums by his favourite band The Fall as ‘always different, yet always the same”. I feel much the same about Sonic Youth. Yes, they can be self-indulgent at times, but you can’t ignore the fragile beauty of Murray Street. Timeless.

5. Fantomas – Suspended Animation (2005, Ipecac recordings)
This is a high concept album from one of Mike Patton’s side-projects. There’s one song here for each day of April 2005. Well I use the word ’song’ loosely. Imagine you put the Looney Tunes cartoons into a blender with Napalm Death. Imagine harder. There, that’s about right. It’s a truly unique, unfathomable, head nuke. I hear Jedward are going to cover it.

Of course there are those that didn’t quite make the top five, so honourable mentions must go to:

Queens of the Stone Age Songs for the Deaf, This is a phenomenally good album, I can’t praise it’s worth high enough. Why isn’t it an album of the decade? That’s because the decade it really belongs to is the 1970s. Radiohead Kid A, a leap into electronic waters which was ground-breaking for this band at the time.  Kate Bush Aerial, come-back album for one of music’s most enigmatic performers.  Not entirely a success, but not entirely a failure either – but always interesting. The Mars Volta Frances The Mute Hmm, Santana meets Anthrax and takes acid. A winning combination. Metallica Death Magnetic, surprisingly funky and anything is better than St Anger. The Boards of Canada The Campfire Head Phase, a deliriously wonderful album. Finally, not forgetting Amadou & Mariam Welcome to Mali for infectious, brilliant African pop.

They do it once they’ll do it again the world is ruled by business men.

The Subhumans’ albums were re-released a little while ago. I finally managed to get round to getting a copy of Worlds Apart.  While some of the subject matter seems to have dated (eg war with the Soviet Union), much of the material still stands the test of time.  Here was a band – from Wiltshire if I’m right – who could punch their weight with the best of the anarcho-punks that America could offer (Dead Kennedys, Misfits, and later Black Flag).

The albums have all be remastered from the original tapes, the cleaned up sound is excellent. Time hasn’t dimmed the vitriol.  The quote that opens this post is from Businessman, you could apply that quote to bankers in the present climate.  Overdraft charges? Well you could tell they’d always win that one couldn’t you.  Banks in trouble? Let’s give them OUR money: He takes your money, you take his word /He tells you things you’ve never heard.

But other songs on the album speak directly to us in 2009. Apathy could be about watching the X-Factor:

The Public watches ITV
Reads The Sun drinks cups of tea
Two-star family stay content
Their lives controlled by parliament
Well daddy’s lost his job again
Because he never had no brain
He only lives to watch TV
His life controlled by apathy

‘Nuff said.  Of course the more things change, the more they stay the same.  When this album was released we were at the height of the Thatcher government.  A different world you say.

Think again.

A while ago, I wrote about how Borders in Swindon was closing. Now it seems like that was the thin end of the wedge as the entire chain of bookshops is about to close (cf Dillons, Ottakars, etc).

It’s a shame as when they first opened I was very pr0-Borders. The combination of coffee, cake, and books was a winner as far as I was concerned.  However, the selection of materials was eroded away, the in-house coffee replaced by a chain who produced a gawd-awful brew, and a once – truly impressive – music selection was reduced to a couple of rows of shelves in nearly all the stores.

Who is to blame – The internet you cry! Well if you don’t have choice you do go to the internet. I don’t listen to mainstream music so I have no choice. But that’s not the point, the point is you make a business model that incorporates the internet, and ignores it at its peril.

We in libraries understand this, we salute Borders and mark its passing. and we think to  ourselves “There but for the grace of God go I…”

With some regularity it seems there is some survey or other about road layouts that cause fear and consternation (but, one assumes, relieve constipation) in drivers. In this latest one commissioned by Britannia Rescue the “scariest” junctions were, in order of horror:

Gravelly Hill (Spaghetti Junction), Birmingham
M8 junctions through central Glasgow
Marble Arch, London
Magic Roundabout, Swindon, Wiltshire
Hanger Lane Gyratory, west London
M5/M6 intersection, Birmingham
Piccadilly Circus, London
Five Ways junction, Birmingham
Magic Roundabout, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire
Kingston Bridge, Glasgow

So Swindon’s Magic Roundabout is more alarming than Hanger Lane? Hmm, but then again I cross the Magic Roundabout nearly every day so it holds no fear, being so familiar to me. Not on this list but equally confusing is the new road layout on the A419 Swindon by-pass, also worth adding the M4/M5 Southbound interchange at Bristol.

While I wouldn’t use the word ’scary’ myself, these roads are complex to understand quickly, especially when you – and everybody else – are travelling them at high speeds. I’m sure planning ahead and driving sensibly are advisible things to do on some of these roads but often they way they are laid out doesn’t always make that easy. Neither do the attitudes of other drivers, although many do gesticulate helpfully and enthusiastically as I drive obliviously through.

My latest Spotify mixtape. You’ll need Spotify to listen, yadda, yadda, yadda.  Meanwhile, sit back and ‘enjoy’ Noise Is A Condition Of Silence.

It looks like this, if you try CILIP’s Guidelines on public library provision in England for portfolio holders in local Councils.  The guidelines are mercifully short - two and a half pages by my reckoning - but are slightly disappointing for me by not mentioning ‘professional librarians’ once. In particular see the section staffing and activities, but I do notice that staff can be supported by ’specialists’. 

That said I’m broadly supportive of the document, it puts ‘Investment is crucial’ at the fore afterall and reminds councils of their statutory duty.  I’d be interested to see how candidates in the forthcoming CILIP elections turn these guidelines into action, and stop Local Government movers and shakers merely dismissing it out of hand.  (See this, and this, from the Bookseller).

Of interest to me as a non-public librarian are the 10 questions posed on the final page of the guidelines, which are universally applicable to any library service if you replace ‘local community’, ‘local people’, or ‘local council’, with ‘user community’.

I somehow thought that would grab your attention.  Far be it from me to suggest that we live in a junta dictatorship with summary and brutal justice, indeed what the title actually refers to is the UK Government Website Deathlist.  The culling of defunct UK Government sites is now halfway through, according to a report by Tim Buckley Owen in Information World Review, I quote:

By the start of this year, 458 of the 717 redundant government department websites had gone (67%), as had 238 of the 902 quango sites due for the chop (32%). By the end of 2010, 95% of the condemned sites are expected to have disappeared.

I’ve had to use Government websites a lot in my 12 years plus as a librarian, an experience which has been – at times - woeful.  Indeed my main bug-bear with Government sites is the number of broken links that I seem to attract (I’m sure it’s not just me).  DirectGov has made things a little easier.  Perhaps some of that money from the UK tax-payer can be spent on decent UK Government web applications instead of, say, duck houses.

Is this one, left on this site by hotdiscomix.de which I in no way recommend:

BEIJING (Reuters) – China, Japan and South Korea vowed to be after an original restart to talks aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons ambitions, and also presented a coalesced vanguard on regional solvent help at kaufen viagra online a culmination on Saturday.

As I have no wish to perpetuate spam I’ve broken the link and replaced it with bold type. Those of you bolder than I may wish to Google it.  As an aside I’ve always wondered what went on at these nuclear weapons meetings.  It appears that  missiles aren’t the only thing being, ahem, raised.

 

I recently obtained a copy of Dynamite with a Laserbeam: Queen as Heard Through The Meat Grinder of Three One G (Various Artists). Three One G is an alternative record label that operates out of San Diego, and as you would expect, is the stable to many of the artists on this record.  As the title suggests, it features covers of Queen songs by various artists (16 of ‘em).

 

Now, I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about cover versions. I’m of the school of thought that a cover version should sound nothing like the original, otherwise, all you’re really doing is high-class karaoke. You’ll be pleased to know then, gentle reader, that your intrepid writer can report that many of these songs sound nothing like the originals or at least twist them into grotesque mirror images. 

The Blood Brothers set things off with a surf -punk version of Under Pressure, before Get Hustle’s drunken jazz take on Another One Bites the Dust.  From here on in, things get a little more interesting and extreme. Indeed, one thing that’s apparently obvious from a quick scan of the tracks, is that the obvious choices of Queen hits are eschewed in favour of more obscure album tracks. Thus Asterisk* give us their take on Ogre Battle, which very much sounds as if the ogres gave up battling, ate the band, and decided to play the instruments themselves.

The Oath provide a nihilistic version of We Are The Champions and do for it, what Sid Vicious did for My Way, but with considerably more aplomb. Go Go Go Air Heart give Death on Two Legs a suitably lo-fi rendition, while Upsilon Acrux treat Bicycle Race to a curious, instrumental experiment.  Sinking Body provide the first of many tracks which are completely unrecognisable in their wholly original industrial interpretation of Who Needs You, which ticks all the boxes for me by being almost as far from the original as you might want to get.

The Freddie Mercury penned The Fairy Feller’s Master Strokemay seem little more than pastoral whimsy, all be it with a gay subtext, however Glass Candy’s version is a superior one, and one of the best tracks found here. The fairy glade is replaced by the altogether shabbier, rain-drenched backstreet of an unknown city, where pimps, prostitutes, and drug-dealers lie in wait for the unwary providing escapes into darker fantasies.  Next up are the excellent The Locust who deal with Flash’s Theme in around 56 or so seconds running time and do so with considerably more attack, urgency and excitement than in the original.

Now, those of you still paying attention will probably agree that it takes some balls to attack the operatic bombast of Bohemian Rhapsody.  Weasel Water makes a game attempt, however the awfulness of the original still shines through. The Spacewurm fare better with Vutan’s Theme (sic). Indeed the sound effects of the original are married to a grungy, electronic reworking that evokes a bio-chemical attack rather than Brian Blessed in a pair of speedos, showing off his big helmet and shouting a lot.  Continuing on an electronic theme Fast Forward offer a wholly joyous cover of Crazy Little Thing Called Love.

There’s something extremely satisfying about The Convocation Of’s version of Get Down Make Love.  While almost conventional in spirit, it embues the track with an altogether seedier atmosphere.   Of course the good thing about it is Freddie’s double-entendres which here, remain intact. Mind you, for that very reason, I’ve always wondered why The Eagles of Death Metal never covered this one.  Bastard Noise don’t so much as steam-roller Lily of the Valley so much as nuke the valley, encase the valley in concrete, and nuke it all over again.  I’m more than impressed that they heard this (well, let’s admit it) gentle love ballad and thought. “We can make over three minutes of noise here!” It’s terrific. If you are a Queen fan I would suggest that this version will be as shocking to you, as say, stepping on a cat’s tail is to a cat.

I’d not heard of Tourettes Lautrec before (they get bonus points for the name), but they do Killer Queen proud by turning a self-conciously bohemian and urbane song into something altogether more angsty and spiky.  The final word goes to my old favourites Melt Banana who provide delicate Japanese female vocals over the deep bass throb of We Will Rock You, before the song destroys itself in a blizzard of feedback and distortion. Most satisfying.

Of course, It’s very easy to take the piss out of Queen. They are rock and roll royalty after all. However I get the feeling that many of these tracks may well have been prepared with a love of the originals in mind.  And let’s not forget, certainly under the aegis of Brian May and Roger Taylor we were given the proto-punk of Modern Times Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Sheer Heart Attack.  Without doubt Dynamite with a Laserbeam breathes new life into old favourites – and there’s not a big gay moustache anywhere in sight!