Saturday September 23rd 2000

I’ve decided to make a New School Year Resolution. No more being nasty to other bands. Partly because when I was interviewed recently, my unkind thoughts on other groups dominated the interview, when really I would have much rather talked about, well, Fosca. Partly also because there’s a wonderful website / online diary in existence called I Hate Music which does it so much better than me.

This is possibly as its writer, Tanya Headon, doesn’t have my somewhat mitigating status of being a Frustrated Rock Star to taint the credence of her relentless vitriol. She is not personally envious of the airplay, TV play, press space, chart space and shop space being taken up by whichever undeserving whelks feature on this week’s dartboard. Quite simply, she hates everything musical ever. Unfortunately for her, she actually knows an awful lot about music, thanks to having dated record collectors in the past and picked it up by osmosis, whether she wanted to or not. When one breaks up with a normal person, there’s often a particular record or two that can never be enjoyed again. If said former beau (and they are always male) is a record collector with wide tastes, whole reams of musical genres may become indelibly despised for the rest of time. It’s the other side of the High Fidelity coin. Read her separate article on the plight of “vinyl widows” here, and weep.

I wouldn’t see myself as an intentional record collector: my room is only crammed with large amounts of CDs and LPs because I simply can’t bear to throw anything away. I don’t like most of them. I do however, confess to making compilation tapes for others (the Spearmint tour bus, in particular) out of some kind of innate territorial grasping, and pathetic attempts at aligning those I’d like to be better acquainted with to my own ridiculous taste. I’ll never learn. It’s a cry for help!

Wednesday September 20th 2000

And now, Celebrity Ansaphone Messages. This week: Jamie Theakston:

“Hi, this is Jamie. I’m not in right now, but whatever it is, I’ll do it. BEEP.”

Maybe I should just watch less TV. Clearly it’s getting to me. Mr Theakston seems to be on everything. Except the phenomenally successful Big Brother. Which reminds me of “The Living Soap” palaver of yesteryear.

“The Living Soap”, unlike Big Brother, was not at all successful. In fact, it was an unmitigated disaster, meeting a new pitfall every week. Which made it all the more interesting to watch. It appeared on BBC2 in the early 90s and was inspired by the success of the US show “The Real World”, where a houseful of young people would be filmed as they went about their lives, and the results were broadcast weekly to the nation.

But for reasons presumably to do with national differences in character, innate exhibitionism and attitudes towards being on TV between Americans and the British (see also Jerry Springer), The Living Soap proved somewhat more short-lived than its US counterpart. In America, everyone is on TV, indeed prefers to discuss their life-changing marital disputes on air, and no one bats an eyelid when a camera crew follows someone in a supermarket. In Britain, we have a much more complicated attitude to television and the art of being on it. We are both resentful of other people being more famous than us, while obsessed with celebrity gossip and still secretly dying to be on TV ourselves, if only to shout “hello mum” (and nothing else… no TV-as-confessional fans, us). If the events shown on a docusoap have already happened sometime ago, (as in “Paddington Green, “Airport” etc), things tend to be straightforward; reality stays fairly real. If it’s ongoing, though, and not sealed hermetically from the outside world like Big Brother, disaster is guaranteed.

So once the first edition of The Living Soap’s Manchester house full of first-year students appeared on the box, the occupants’ “real world” was turned into a farcical contrivance of reality. People did turn a hair when a housemate and their attendant camera crew walked into their local pub. The house’s location was quickly discovered and besieged: a brick thrown through a window proved particularly memorable. One of the show’s “stars”, an Asian girl called Spider, thought that the missile was a racist attack on herself. That might have been true, but no less likely was the possible reason that, thanks to the programme’s mercilessly edited portrayal of her, everyone in the country thought she was a bit thick.

In fact, all the students quickly became aware that the country saw them as self-deluding, naive stereotypes (it’s difficult to be a teenage student on TV and not look a naive idiot), and the numbers in the house started to dwindle. The inital lure to a student of living rent-free and poverty-free for a year in exchange for being filmed had lost its appeal. Even starvation and homelessness seemed more attractive than being on TV, if it had to be on such terms. Dan, the “Nasty Nick” of the house, was a wily and charismatic middle-class Tory boy who saw what was happening, and got out fast. His place was taken by Colin, a camp opportunist who knew exactly what was going on, and allegedly signed secret sponsorship deals with various firms to product-place their pizzas or trainers to the cameras as much as possible. Previously the show had been no fun for the housemates, but great TV for the rest of us. Once Colin moved in, it just wasn’t fun for the viewer either. The jig was up. The housemates moved out, few wanted to move in, the series spluttered and died months ahead of its intended one-year time span, finally reduced to a couple of late-night “highlight” specials narrated by that student nostalgia icon, Brian Cant.

Since then, British docusoaps (with the exception of Big Brother), are filmed in blocks of entire series before being broadcast. The main subjects also tend to be at least 29 and hence have worked out who they exactly are and how to present that persona to the cameras, so it will survive even the most brutal editing. “Nasty” Nick knew exactly who he was and what he was doing. And unlike Colin, he had the decency to be in his early 30s. British TV viewers prefer to love-to-hate someone who’s not too young, rather than someone who’s actually young, who they just hate. For being young. Still, the joy of watching young adults being beastly to each other in their formative years on TV has turned up again on Channel 4’s “Shipwrecked” programme, earlier on this year. It was a kind of updated version of “Minipops”… As far as TV exploitation goes, you’re a child until you’re the wrong side of 25. After that, don’t fret, you can still go on nostalgia programmes and talk about how great Space Dust was.

Saturday September 16th 2000

October 2nd sees the release of at least three Decent British Pop Albums. Oh yes! Aside from the Fosca debut long-player (from which John Peel has already played “The Millionaire Of Your Own Hair”) , there’s the latest offering from Spearmint, “Oklahoma”. A few of the songs on “Oklahoma” were previewed on the tours I played with the group in my role as Other Guitar, not least an electrifying ditty called “The Locomotion” (no, not the Kylie-covered one), plus “Oklahoma” itself (no, not the Rogers & Hammerstein one) . I’m agog to find out if the recorded version of the title track will use the sample from a late 70s disco hit whose name escapes me, as said hit seems to keep cropping up on TV shows such as “I Love the 70s”. I now always associate it with my time in Spearmint.

The other recommended release, out the same day, is “The Handy Wah Whole” – 2 CDs of the best of Pete Wylie, covering all his singles from the early 80s till the present. A testament to one of the most criminally unsuccessful pop stars ever. My unplayably scratchy 7″ copy of “The Story Of The Blues” can finally be replaced. Thank you, Mr Record Company, whoever you are.

The current Top 40 in this futuristic year 2000 has to date featured versions of A-Ha’s “Take On Me”, Cyndi Laupers’ “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, one song sampling Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax” , another sampling the same band’s “Two Tribes”, one remixing Gary Numan’s “Cars”, one new dance version of Madonna’s “Dear Jessie”, one dance version of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World”, a girl group created by OMD (Atomic Kitten)… There have been times where I’ve been criticised by lazy, myopic fools for being “too 80s”. Clearly I’m not nearly 80s enough, or I’d be at Number One by now. If only for one week, like nearly every other Number One this year. Make room! Make room!

Still, the new Teenage Fanclub single reminds me that the 60s will never end. And why should they? If your band uses guitars, you’re drawing on something from the 60s or 70s. If your band uses synths and sequencers, you’re drawing on something from the 80s or 90s. It’s that simple. The only original factor that you CAN bring to your songs is your own splendid, unique persona. Which is why I’m constantly surprised so many current bands insist on being quite so very persona non grata…