Have started using Google Mail for the times I’m not at my laptop. Though the adverts are annoying, I have to say I rather prefer it over any other Webmail interface. It’s very clean and instant. I like how the emails sort themselves into ‘conversations’. And it seems to have the one spam filter that actually works. I get terribly embarrassed if I’m checking my mail at a public terminal, and the subject lines of obscene spam mails fill the screen. No longer. In your face, Mr Generic Viagra. Which admittedly sounds like one of those very subject lines.
Oliver Twisted in Tokyo (twisting_oliver@yahoo.co.uk) sends me this Warhol-esque sample of his artwork, based in turn on Ella Guru’s portrait:
Miss Red tells me that she’s booked a live act for Beautiful & Damned on the 24th: a barbershop quartet called Scales Of The Unexpected. They do pop cover versions in that style. I rather like a good genre cover version, such as the Puppini Sisters’ takes on Wuthering Heights or Heart Of Glass, in the style of the Andrews Sisters. Or Paul Anka’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Wonderwall in the proper big band, swing style.
I know some friends aren’t keen on such tracks, seeing them as ‘comedy’ cover versions with limited life, a bit like sketches on impersonation shows like Dead Ringers. But I disagree in some cases. I think the Puppini and Anka versions are so brilliantly done, one can enjoy them for what they are. The joke level aside, such tracks are enjoyable pieces of music, pure and simple.
Frank Sinatra’s New York New York (as in “Start spreading the news…”)is Mr Sinatra in the late 70s covering a Kander & Ebb 70s pastiche of a 50s Sinatra-style song. It’s arguably as much a pastiche on Mr Sinatra’s part as Mr Anka’s cover of Nirvana. Now, you can either rub your post-modernist beard and enjoy that level of it, and feel terribly smug in the process, or you can enjoy it for what it is, and let the levels of meaning handle themselves.
This is the spirit of Beautiful & Damned versus the proper retro clubs. Though when I DJ I do try to mix the pastiches in with the proper 20s and 50s stuff as well, in an attempt to keep everyone happy. I’ve seen Bugsy Malone tracks fill the floor at some clubs, and clear the floor at others. One just has to do one’s best, feel unafraid to make mistakes, and generally not worry about it.
When I played something by the Puppinis at the club night ‘Lost’ recently, a lady came up to thank me. It was the lead Puppini Sister herself. She said she had never heard her own stuff at a club before. So now I feel even more well-disposed towards them. Meeting the artist and finding out they’re nice shouldn’t cloud one’s judgement upon their work. But let’s face it, it does.
If playing the pastiche tracks and the crowd pleasers makes me more of a ‘Wedding DJ’, so be it. I have been booked for a few actual weddings, after all. Myself and Miss Red are off to do one in Cumbria on Saturday week. I don’t hustle for such engagements, and am DJ-ing less and less often these days. But this one in particular sounded like a bit of an adventure, so I agreed.
That said, I try to begin the B&D night with something I’ve not always heard in a club or bar before, whether it’s Kermit The Frog doing Paul Williams’s Rainbow Connection or the entire ten-minute opening of Fiddler On The Roof.
I’m still not sure how long I’ll continue to do the regular monthly Beautiful & Damned at The Boogaloo. It’s been going a year now, and I do feel the pull of other projects. This may be the last time for a while. We shall see.
