In veneration of Talcy Malcy, we dedicate all of the worryingly
occasional Five For Friday to the eminence grise of UK pop culture.
1 Buffalo Gals McLaren joined forces with Trevor Horn and Anne Dudley to
create the proto-Art Of Noise project Folk Dances Of The World that eventually
became his debut solo album Duck Rock. It was led by Malc’s extraordinary
Buffalo Gals which teetered on that thin line between novelty and visionary,
bringing hip hop to the masses in the guise of a cub scout square dance. That’s
one way of sugaring the pill. A deranged way.
2 Double Dutch Improbably, giddily
joyful stuff. A No.3 smash full of found music, late night radio chatter, African
guitar, skip-chanting and Malcolm's somehow-not-creepy narration about the gals
from New York City.
An amalgam of all sorts of strands of what the hipsters in febrile downtown
Manhattan were digging, and another early taste of hip hop for the hip hop
generation on this side of the Atlantic. The video makes you wish you were
still spry enough to get to skipping. Or commission one of those
dance-against-the-odds movies set in The Bronx in 1982 about a chick who skips
her way to glory, overcoming doubting parents, bullying classmates, and helped
along the whole time by that crazy redhead Briddish guy who never stops
believing in her.
3 Madam Butterfly (Un Bel Di Vedremo) Heartbreaking electro hip popera, this. Rarely one for the small gesture,
McLaren used his 1984 set Fans and classic single Madam Butterfly to realise
the chart potential in the aria. This bears the whiff of grand folly, but
succeeds through clarity of vision and pop sensibility.
4 Something’s Jumpin’ In Your Shirt By 1989, our Malc seemed pretty convinced he could pull off any dunderheaded splicing
of form, and this time he fashioned Strauss-house. The Waltz Darling album felt
a bit like Italo Hooked On Classics, but no less loveable for that, and
Something’s Jumpin’ was its silliest, most charming single.
5 Magic’s Back Prompts the question,
“Whatever happened to Alison Limerick?” while suggesting no one could ever come
back from this – or from an anthem like Where Love Lives. The latter could
sustain a career through occasional trend-dictated remixes, but Magic’s Back is
the kind of recklessness to kill your livelihood stone dead. From the mad
Ghosts Of Oxford Street concept album/TV movie (also featuring Happy Mondays
dirtying up Stayin’ Alive), it’s a Yazz/Italo-house stormer tainted by its very
setting and arrangement. Still, at least they were having a go.
Our favourite things today, and possibly for the weekend too.
1 Steely Dan/70s Beach Boys/Gentlemen's Agreement Having witnessed the mighty
Gentlemen's Agreement a few weeks ago supporting the New Royal Family's
triumphant exit from the World Stage (aka the Islington Buffalo Bar), Shabby
Culture has developed an unquenchable thirst for immaculately produced 70s
rock. Two sides to this coin. There’s the pure and unironic beauty of the Beach
Boys’ Brother Years, where honed and immaculate harmonies came together with
the warm, smooth production of the best studios and made the finest music of
their career - The Trader being the pick of a phenomenal bunch. The flip is the
uber-obsessive Walter Becker and Donald Fagen's Steely Dan - ironic jazz rock
blues intricacy anyone? Anyone? Oh go on. They are also enormously funny men,
as their imbroglio with Wes Anderson shows.
Gentlemen's Agreement are in concert tonight at the Wilmington Arms, if you
want your funked-out smoothness within walking distance of Farringdon tube.
2 Vincent Delerm’s Cosmopolitan Pretentious?
Nous? God though, Vincent Delerm is great. There are so many songs we could
have chosen, but this is belle beyond belief. For those non-French speakers,
it's written by a man re-reading Cosmopolitan as a cup of tea goes cold,
filling in the love quiz and failing to answer the question, “Have you cheated
on your lover?”
3 Duke Special’s Our Love Goes Deeper Than
This Vincent worked on Favourite Song with Neil Hannon, which reminded us
of this video, where Neil Hannon enters the room as he starts singing in an
extremely satisfying manner. Duke Special has an album out, which one member of
the Shabby office is travelling around with.
4 Andrey Arshavin answers your questions By day (and some evenings from around 7.45 to about 9.51), Andrey Arshavin is a
prodigiously skilled, scurrying little attacking midfielder for Arsenal and Russia.
The rest of the time he is an agony aunt, philosopher and raconteur, addressing
fans' questions on his website with a healthy mix of direct and gnomic replies.
Nothing flummoxes this fox in the box.
5 Arguments About Music Online Shabby
Culture has been busy working at work recently. This is a terrible state of
affairs. But this afternoon we've been engaged in THREE simultaneous arguments
on three different sites about the relative value of Lady Gaga and Grizzly
Bear. This is an argument no one can win, that means nothing to anyone, and
will be as anachronistic as a Hummer spray-painted with a triptych of Nixon,
Bush and W. Bush in about three weeks. But the ancient siren call of a good old
barney about music on a Friday afternoon when Shabby should be working? It's
too much to resist.
Our
thereotically weekly round-up of the best things of now.
1 Marina And The Diamonds' Hollywood Now, we're fairly sure
Marina was in all those hot tip lists last year, but everyone's pretending she
wasn't and tipping her for success in 2010. Her 20th (at LEAST) single
Hollywood is the one to do it, coming on like ABBA trying to break America and
throwing in some "what? Little old me?" lines about looking like
Catherine Zeta Jones and Shakira. Album The Family Jewels in all good stores on
Monday.
2 Jarvis Cocker's Sunday Service Jarvis continues his campaign to become the next great national treasure and
does his best Bob Harris for us all on a Sunday Afternoon. If Ver Tories do get
rid of 6 Music along with anything else on BBC that isn't Murdoch/Mail-approved,
we will personally walk into 25 Victoria Street, SW1 and start shooting, like a
John Woo flick with a Wes Anderson soundtrack.
3 Saint Etienne's Like A Motorway Sometimes
it can take you ages to work something out. HP stands for Houses of Parliament,
Team Bath is a joke as well as a team name, and the arrow in Amazon's brand
goes from A to Z.ALSO that Like A
Motorway is based around Kraftwerk's Autobahn. The hints are all there. The
chord pattern, the bass and yes THE TITLE. But for some reason it was only just
this morning that the penny dropped. And it's such a lovely song that, like
whenever we hear Harlem Shuffle, we regret ever so slightly that it is not Jump
Around, we'll always rue the fact that Autobahn doesn't feature Cracknell.
4 Ben Frost's By The Throat VICIOUS
avant garde noise, cinematic and grand and as big as architecture. Australian
via Finland noisemaker Ben Frost has made a soundtrack to lose your mind to.
Reminds us of David Thewlis in Mike Leigh's Naked. That good.
5 The Besnard Lakes' Albatross Don't
be alarmed, it's not an alt.country take on Fleetwood Mac's bluesy noodle;
instead this teaser for the Montreal crew's third album is a shinier MBV,
dusted with soaring vocals, shivering guitars and hooks to warm the spine. And
you can download it for free now or get it on 12" on Monday. Choose a side
in the digital/analogue war.
1 Girls’ Morning Light Never ones to shy away from a hot ticket – even if it’s
probably getting a bit lukewarm by now – we’d like to big up San Fran’s Girls
and their fuzzy, scuzzy surf pop. Morning Light’s out next month, but don’t
fret! You can get it on their studiedly unarsedly titled album Album. Album.
2 L'Homme Du Train People quite
often take the piss out of Johnny Hallyday. And to be fair, he is quite
ridiculous. An ageing lion-faced French rocker (though he's actually Belgian),
who has never made a decent song during a 40-year highly successful career. And
yet his performance as an ageing bank robber in L’Homme Du Train is breathtaking,
exuding charisma. And that's only one part of this superbly paced,
beautiful-looking always ignored film. It's just lovely.
3 Jon Ronson On... Anyone who is
capable of writing amusingly about family life without being twee must be
especially gifted. But it takes longer to warm to Jon Ronson as a broadcaster,
perhaps because of his voice. But his new series has been superb. This week's
interview with a man who invented a wife for an internet forum then killed her
off is cringy, sad and hilarious.
4 Field Music (Measure) The Brewis
Brothers, David and Peter, are well-loved in some muso circles – not commercial
ones, of course, but who wants to see them in expensive clothes? Anyway, after
solo-ish projects School Of Language and The Week That Was, they’re back in
harness with a revamped band and a new album of their strangely lovely Wings-meets-incidental-music
hybrid on 15 February.
5 John Harris’s Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’
Roll Well, this book is as “inventive, untamed and adorable as a John
Squire guitar solo” according to Tony Parsons, who has clearly never heard any
music ever. If the book was plodding, sludgy and derivative (and rare), he
might have a point. Instead it’s a fun font of trivia and anecdote, which you
probably got for Christmas. We did, and we are most diverted.
Our theoretically weekly
selection of things to hear, see, read and think about as we put on our shoes
and get ready for the weekend.
1 A Camp - Love Has Left The Room One day someone is going to come along and give
Nina Persson a present of - not a cardigan, you clever scamps - a big box of
recognition. She's been churning out wide-eyed catchy songs of Neil Finn-like
artistry for some time. This is one of them.
"I'll let go if you just let me/I will forget you if you will forget
me/I'll slip your mind/I will slip your mind".
2 Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting The
Pyramid A football book free of tedious inter-tribe point-scoring or glum
stories of turds in socks written by turds in socks. Wilson's book is a super-readable
history of shape shape shape, starting with the heads-down dribbling at football’s
birth then moving through decades of remoulding by various squat, shell-suited masterminds
to arrive at what we recognise as Soccerball today. Wilson also updates the
book once a month or so in his excellent Guardian column.
3 The 11th Doctor There are only so
many times a man can save the universe, so Russell T Davies has left the TARDIS
– oh, and so has David Tennant. While sci-fi dilettantes the world over can thank
Davies for doing a sterling job bringing Doctor Who back, each “IT’S THE END OF
THE UNIVERSE” series climax was getting hard to stomach. Great things are
expected of new showrunner Steven Moffat and kindergarten timelord Matt Smith,
but can those “great things” be on a more subtle level, please? The trailer shows
promise.
4 Ed McBain All the young people
with their Wires, Shields, Juliet Bravos may be aware that in the past - before
watching murders on laser discs - people used to read crime novels. All of your
Hill Street Blues, Homicides etc began with Ed McBain's Cop Hater in 1956. The
first of the 87th Precinct books and the first realistic police
procedural.As well as writing about 100
brilliant novels, McBain (real name Evan Hunter but born Salvatore Lombino)
also worked as PG Wodehouse's editor and wrote 76 scripts including A Blackbird
Jungle and Hitchcock's The Birds. In short, a genius.
5 E.R. (The Whole Bloody Thing) Snowbound
and with a severe, erm, intestinal complaint, we have been subjected this week
to three full seasons of classic horror-soap E.R. by a life partner with a DVD
controller. No matter how bad you may be feeling, this parade of cradled dead
kids, serial granny-rapists and long and protracted deaths of firemen,
unleavened by any exciting ladies or any happiness at all, is making everything
else seem so much more bearable. CBC! Chem 7! Lytes! Utter Despair! Stat!
In veneration of Talcy Malcy, we dedicate all of the worryingly
occasional Five For Friday to the eminence grise of 
Our favourite things today, and possibly for the weekend too.
