Heathen Chemistry

Whether the product of the Gallagher brothers actually sitting down to a quiet Sunday dinner and patching things up privately, or the lucrative machinations of their respective agents meeting “secretly” in upmarket London restaurants, Oasis are, rather unsurprisingly, back together and touring.

Meh.

We’ve had promises like this before in recent years, from The Stone Roses to The Verve to Supergrass, with things eventually falling apart once everybody remembers why they fell out in the first place. Saying that, Supergrass appear to still be going. I just think they’re nervous about entering a confined and stressful studio space.

In the 90s, you couldn’t avoid the sound of Oasis even if you tried. They were the prophesied-return of The Beatles (even though Oasis’ sound is more 1970s glam rock), in that their edgy rock songs crossed over into pop hysteria.

Good grief it was annoying, with even the band’s official logo looking like something you’d see printed on the side of a pair of cheap trainers.

(What’s the Story) Morning Glory was the album that really hit the wider audio and visual media hard. At one point, you could walk down the high street and pretty much hear the entire album played out from shop to shop. I actually hadn’t heard a single track from their Definitely Maybe debut until I finally sat down to get into the band in 2004.

But let’s back up a bit.

Apart from the odd tease here and there, for the first two decades of my life I’d been mostly listening to film scores and classical music. Little me would gleefully sit there with compilation tapes lost in his own messed-up world. Good times. But things were destined to change. After my parents had a messy break-up and divorce around the 2001-02 period, suddenly I felt safe listening to something slightly more mainstream than Elliot Goldenthal and Richard Wagner. My conservative mother had moved out in order to return to her Merseyside roots and dad was busy shagging his new girlfriend, so nobody was around to mock my burgeoning change in musical tastes.

And they usually would have done.

Now earning a living in offices, where radios pierced the deafening silence of bureaucracy hard at work, I started to notice the tunes I kept hearing over and over again. Who knows whether it was because of what was going on at home or just the music of the time resonating with me, but I gently entered the shallow end of the, erm, rock pool. Beginning with Travis and Stereophonics and Coldplay, I soon waded in deeper with Radiohead and The Smashing Pumpkins.

But not Oasis. I had been bludgeoned over the head with them too much over the years, so they were on the back-burner until I felt ready.

Right, let’s jump forward now…

Yes, I eventually bought up all of Oasis’ albums at once and went through them one-by-one, in a very workman-like fashion, as I still do with artists to this day. It’s the one thing I’m formal and organised about. While I found the ambition and petulant whine of their first two albums memorable, I warmed more to the obscene decadence of Be Here Now. Which still, to this very day, remains a tragically under-appreciated album. I mean, I just don’t hear what everyone else seems to have a problem with. “Too many guitars”?! What?! Have you actually listened to Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?! Move along if that’s your problem with Be Here Now. Let’s face it, people don’t like it because the band were just generally overplayed on the airwaves anyway and the press turned against the Manchester five-piece.

Be Here Now is a fine album, full of great songs that are lusciously produced.

But we’re not here today to talk about that release, are we? No. You see, general opinion was/is that Don’t Believe the Truth was the band’s big comeback after the dreary and uninspired Standing on the Shoulder [sic] of Giants, but it wasn’t. Heathen Chemistry was. It’s a record that revealed the band’s joyful sound as having returned, being brim-full of passion and colour, without outstaying its welcome. Which is what music in the late-90s had been thoroughly lambasted for.

Opening with the greatest wake-up call in modern rock history, “The Hindu Times”, this album became the start to my Saturday/Sunday mornings for quite a few years. How one can listen to this bombastic introduction and not punch the air and pogo dance as they brew their morning coffee, as I would do, is beyond me. I am a morning person though, so perhaps I am alone there.

I just know I’ll never feel as fresh and full of energy as I do in those first few hours. I’m simply no good to anyone after midday.

I would argue “Force of Nature” is something of a minor early misstep, as I really believe you should keep the pace going after your opening track. “Force of Nature” just grinds things momentarily to a halt. “Hung in a Bad Place” or closer “Better Man” would have been wiser choices, but hey-ho. “Force of Nature”’s bouncing percussion is just off-putting, as is the pinky-plonk piano part and raspy lead guitar riff. Not that I’m complaining or anything. It’s a fine song, with attitude to spare and certainly should have made the cut. It’s really the production of it that mildly bothers me.

So, yes, “Hung in a Bad Place” picks up the pace wonderfully, leading us into the delightful “Songbird”. This one feels like a sketch scribbled on a cool summer evening in a picturesque garden. Ahhh. Like the album as a whole, it gets in and out without upsetting the professional music press with too much instrumentation or runtime. They do have other things to be getting on with, after all.

And then Noel gets his ballad, in the form of “Little by Little”, which is the song from Heathen Chemistry that received the most airplay. I must’ve seen the music video floating about on television at least twice a day at the time. Remember music television? When they used to show music videos and concerts? I believe they’ve all been infested by reality bollocks now. Sigh. Progress, huh?

Instrumental side changer (if you’re listening to this on vinyl, I guess) “A Quick Peep” is the sort of thing I really want to be producing. You know, as a hobby. I have no excuse now that the weather is gloriously cold again, so I shall start literally dusting off my instruments and recording gear and get my arse into action. Oh I do so love a mid-album instrumental! I wonder if somebody has compiled a playlist of the greatest examples of this. Or perhaps I should do it. Hmmm…

I really enjoy how “(Probably) All in My Mind” bleeds gracefully into the campfire romp “She is Love”, with the former’s title displaying an unnecessary but fun use of brackets. These two songs, representing a loose medley of sorts, pre-empted Green Day’s American Idiot by a couple of years. Not that such devices hadn’t been used in the past, even the recent past, but this one certainly presents an early example of such a thing in the post-Britpop years.

I still find it amusing how, initially, retrospective articles and documentaries about 90s music attempted to downplay “Britpop” as an actual genre, claiming it was just an invention of the music press. That attempt at “Britpop denial” has given way to embracing the idea wholeheartedly, which is in everyone’s best interest.

The haunting “Born on a Different Cloud” is just a pinch too creaky to be on here, sounding more like a Standing on the Shoulder of Giants-era slog, but the piercing feedback, creating a ghostly howl, is interesting enough to warrant inclusion. And, of course, “Better Man” is a driving standard that gives us a crowd-pleasing end to things.

So, there you have it. A bit of a random post by me this morning, but my mood has lifted enough over the weekend to risk listening to something other than comforting Dutch power-pop. Which I’ve been clinging too for weeks now. I’m blaming the summer, as I will until the day I die, for sapping my will to indulge in other stuff. I’m seriously considering getting my passport sorted and disappearing off to Greenland between June and August from now on.

We shall see.

Let me know which is your favourite Oasis album, as it is a matter debated across the British Isles as regularly as the fucking weather. I’ve actually still never listened to their as-now final album, Dig Out Your Soul, so perhaps that may turn out to be my favourite. Stranger things have happened. I don’t know what I’m afraid of, so I should probably just bite the bullet and stick it on.

Do stay in touch, darlings.

Toodles!

Tom Sawyer (1973) - film review

“My! This IS big!”

“That’s nothin’, wait till you see what’s up ahead!”

Well, I guess many phrases can sound inappropriate when taken out of context.

I’ve had a song stuck in my head for a few years now. I was pretty sure it was either a movie or TV theme, as certain imagery tended to come with it. Mainly an old-fashioned steamboat. At first, I thought it might be from classics like Sons and Daughters or The Sullivans, but, considering I hadn’t heard the song since I was a child, its true origin kept eluding me. I honestly thought I’d never remember where this pesky earworm came from.

While leafing through Jodi Foster’s filmography, I can’t recall why, I noted how much work she’d actually done prior to Taxi Driver and Freaky Friday, which is where I always assumed she’d started off. Nothing was really of note, with a television episode here and there, but this musical version of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer stuck out as potentially-interesting. No hardcopies in the UK exist, of course, but it is available digitally. So, despite not being a big fan of musicals or stodgy early-American literature, I thought I’d give it a whirl, what with Foster being “family” and all that.

I would call this a very loose attempt at a musical indeed, as the songs feel rather functional, almost last-minute additions, than coming from a genuinely creative place. They’re neither memorable nor performed or shot with any kind of flourish. They’re not the worst things ever, they’re just somewhat forgettable. Mercifully, they’re also incredibly short, which also adds to my theory that this was not conceived as a musical.

Who knows, perhaps the production received extra funding or tax breaks if there was singing and dancing involved.

I’m not terribly familiar with Twain’s Tom and Huck stories, but I get the idea. They’re ingrained enough in pop culture that they filter down even to a posh English cunt like me. However, the experience of watching this film was positive enough that I now actually want to sit down and read the original novels, especially since the audiobook for Tom Sawyer is read by the fabulous Nick Offerman.

Sold.

It’s amusing watching Foster playing a girly-girl, complete with frilly dress and bonnet, especially knowing her true self is closer to her awesome tomboy persona in Freaky Friday. She doesn’t have a great deal to do here, and you don’t get a sense she’ll be going off to do impressive things, but it’s still a delight to see her climbing that career ladder at speed.

The film sure does look pretty, although it lacks generous closeups of many of its supporting actors. Well, it sort-of-does, but the widescreen is so, erm, wide that the intimate moments feel as vast as the establishing shots. In fact, I had no idea Warren Oats was in the damn thing until the very end. There’s one really jarring moment of editing, which makes me believe something major was cut out, when the scene in which Sawyer is packing to run away from home suddenly jumps awkwardly to him already on a raft with Huckleberry Finn with a steamboat about to capsize them. I even exclaimed: “Wait! What’s going on?!”, which your audience really shouldn’t be doing.

After a murderer goes on the run when Sawyer fingers him in court, the screenplay wisely keeps reminding us that the fugitive is still out there and may come back at some point to wreak his revenge on our diminutive hero. I can’t fault the writers for holding our hands like this, as we surely would have forgotten the matter had they not mentioned it again, but characters discuss the whereabouts of said fugitive once too often, making such moments feel like the parody of what a screenplay needs to do. I was all like: “Oh, golly-gosh, I do so wonder if that guy will appear right at the very last minute!”.

And he does. Spoiler alert.

Leading “man” Johnny Whitaker is charming enough that it’s actually a shame he hasn’t done much worthy of his potential since. His vast mop of red hair stands out like a beacon amongst the pretty sets and locations and costumes, and his cute friendship with the seemingly-homeless Huckleberry Finn, with whom he can’t not go skinny-dipping with on a regular basis, certainly does explain why he isn’t too fussed about fighting for Foster’s character after she angrily rejects him.

Bless.

I also admire the fact that the film doesn’t utilise a vocal “stand-in” for Whitaker, as he clearly is no gifted singer. Perhaps the inclusion of musical numbers was so last minute that the producers couldn’t book session vocalists in time. Which would explain a lot.

The film rambles on gently, as if Robert Altman was behind the camera, which is fine by me. I do enjoy a chilled-out movie experience with an ensemble cast and unchallenging goings on. You know, when I’m not watching action movies featuring epic shootouts and car chases and spaceships falling out of the sky. Basically, Tom Sawyer is one to stick on when you feel like spacing-out on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Which is no bad thing.

If I gave out star ratings, this would be a solid 3 out of 5. But I don’t. So I won’t.

It just needs stronger musical numbers or pulling them out entirely.

Oh and the earworm that plagued me isn’t from this, but is from the 1979 Huckleberry Finn and His Friends TV series, which I guess must have somehow found its way onto British television at some point in the 80s. While I don’t remember anything about the show itself, the tune is haunting enough to have had a lasting effect on my subconscious. This film just brought those vague-memories back to the surface.

You can find the song here.

Do stay in touch, darlings.

Toodles!

Hupsakee!

I thought I’d post a brief ramble about this fun music video, which never fails to cheer me up. And what’s more worthy of discussion than that?!

The spunky lead singer is just fabulous, with her mischievous vibe putting a smile on my face every time. I hope she’s gone onto do plenty more successful performing arts stuff. The same goes for her lively backing singers and dancers.

I’m not usually one for noticing, or even participating in, any dancing, but the moves in this video are strikingly-angular and memorable. Everybody looks like they’re having such a blast! Kinderen voor Kinderen have now figured out how to include interesting dancing alongside their tunes without making them suggestive. They’re basically exaggerated exercise routines, which creates a sensibly-uncontroversial balance. It’s certainly better than the awkward “dad-dancing” of yore.

I shall not embarrass myself by attempting to learn the moves in “Hupsakee!”.

There’s no direct translation into English for the Dutch word “hupsakee”, by the way, but it’s meant to be an energetic motivational platitude, such as: “Let’s go!” or “Come on!”. I prefer: “Up you get!” myself, as at least it sounds vaguely similar to the original. So, next time you’re bending at the knees ready to lift a heavy box at work, be sure to exclaim: “Hupsakee!” and remember how The Whittling Post has now ruined your life.

The gangly nerd playing the confused teacher in the video is actually KvK’s official, and very patient, vocal coach/director, who features in multiple behind-the-scenes clips on YouTube. They’ve also started commandeering him for more-frivolous fare, which is no bad thing. He’s camp as all get out and super-cute, so I’m happy.

Songs like “Hupsakee!” are helping me keep afloat these days, especially in the face of crippling moods of despair and anxiety. There’s a deep pain within me, which even medication can’t seem to cure, but I continue to tread water day-by-day without a goal.

Kinderen voor Kinderen provides me with a burst of hupsakee each day, which I will be eternally grateful to them for.

I believe that is why the Dutch music collective is still going after 45-amazing-years.

Do stay in touch, darlings.

Doei!

The Whittling Post Digest - Issue 21

I’m very pleased that the weather is now much colder, as the three or four major heatwaves we experienced during the summer completely broke me. I’ve still not gotten back into playing guitar since the rise in temperature halted my recording efforts. The heat also makes me drink heavily, which I’m trying again to cut back on. As it turns out, switching from whisky to beer and wine hasn’t solved the problem.

Funny that.

So, yeah, I’ve been falling off the wagon for weeks at a time again. Sigh. At least I tried. I doubt I’ll stay sober forever, but I now know my true limitations and weaknesses, if you want to call them that. Still, the boredom I experience whilst indulging means I have more motivation to get clean and start doing joyful geek stuff again.

Which is where we arrive here.

THE SECRET TOKEN

A nonfiction book about the lost American colony of Roanoke. It’s not something we know much or anything about in the UK, because why would we?! It’s part of America’s history, not ours. Splitters! Although, technically, they were English citizens at the time. It’s a story I first heard about on a history podcast and decided I wanted to learn more. I guess I find tales of human endurance quite captivating, having already read books on the Chinese Long March and Ernest Shackleton. The mystery of the lost colony is apparently a subject that has been done to death throughout the field of historical academia, but one has to start somewhere with their own curiosity. I’m a few chapters into this book, by Andrew Lawler, and so far am very engrossed in the goings on. He has a very plain and engaging writing style, which I prefer for nonfiction stuff. Be too flowery and, well, you might as well just write a work of fiction. I shall let you know how I get on!

2064: READ ONLY MEMORIES

A video game I purchased years ago, but never got into it properly at the time. Then, the other day, I just fancied something that didn’t require too much eyesight to use. A retro 2D adventure game struck me as being just perfect! Plus it has cyberpunk themes, which is a genre I adore. I’m doing well with navigating it and getting into the habit of going around each location to look at all the items before talking to people or poking objects. Or poking people. I like its camp elements and wish I had a cute companion robot, or “ROM”, of my own. I often joke to friends that I have a fictitious “admin boy” who volunteers to come round each day and help me with my personal admin nonsense, the idea of which 2064’s “Turning” certainly embodies. I’m not too far in, having only just met up with my awesome lesbian detective friend, but I actually want to take it slow and savour it. You know, like a fine wine I’m trying not to drink. The game is certainly helping with the sobriety, as I’m losing hours over it. I believe there’s a sequel out there, but if you know of any similar adventure games that I should check out, then please let me know!

GREAT ARCHAEOLOGICAL MYSTERIES OF EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

Another series of history lectures by The Great Courses, of which I now own loads and loads. The title explains it all really, although they’re not quite as fascinating as I’d hoped. It’s all interesting stuff, however, and I’m learning about archaeological sites that have completely passed me by. My favourite one so far is the Tollense battlefield in Germany, which hints at a greater civilisation in that part of the world, at that period in history, than previously believed. I’m probably a third of the way through the entire audiobook, so there’s plenty more to go. The lecturer, Karen Belinger, is just a touch too enthusiastic for my personal preference, sounding more like a hip young TED talk speaker than a nerdy archaeologist. But I guess you can’t have everything. Saying that, I found Bronx-born Egyptologist Bob Brier a bit much at first, and now he’s one of my all-time favourite people. Belinger seems like a genuinely nice person though, so her grating performing style isn’t a slight against her personally. Onwards!

GAMERA 3: REVENGE OF IRIS

I tried. I got halfway through this third in the Heisei series of Gamera films and just had to give up. It’s from the same director as the first one and so carries all the same agonising problems. If I slavishly wrote a long-form review for Revenge of Iris, as I did with the first two, I would just be repeating all the negativity I threw at 1. It’s just so boring and plain and lacking in any sort of vibrancy. How can a giant monster movie be so dry?! Well, this director has managed it twice now. Goodness knows who directs 4. Will I give it a go? Urgh, I’ll have a think. If something truly amazing happens in the last half of 3 that makes the tedium worth it, then give me a head’s up and I’ll try it again. I’ll hopefully get the third and finally Showa post to you asap. Alcoholism permitting.

FOUNDATION

I’m a fan of science fiction movies, but not really science fiction novels. I have tried to get into some though, but failed pretty much every time. I don’t know why. Perhaps I just find it something I prefer to experience through the visual arts. Still, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is a notable classic, so I’m giving the audiobook a whirl. I find fiction easier to concentrate on when sitting up during the day, usually whilst gaming, with bedtime reserved for “gentle” nonfiction reading/listening. I’ve gotten into the street-level human goings on, having been in fear over the years that the book would feature a lofty narrative that isn’t very relatable. Like the cutscenes in a high fantasy RPG video game. Snore. To be honest, I still have no idea what Foundation’s overall story is about, I just know that it’s a must read. Hopefully I’ll get to the end and seek out the sequels, but my notoriously short attention span with fiction is not on its side. I may even check out the current TV series adaptation if I enjoy the book enough.

Well, that’s all I have to report for now. It’s Bonfire Night here in the UK, so things are going crazy outside. Fireworks are generally set off from Halloween to mid-January here, so it’s not the end of it. I’m just glad I don’t have a pet to witness getting distressed over it all.

Part of me is planning on drinking over the weekend and beyond, but the other part is encouraging me not to with all my cool hobby stuff. I’m hoping to fire up an electric guitar at some point, as acoustic jamming just isn’t inspiring me right now. I need musical fireworks, dammit!

While my interest in a lot of culture has been low of late, that may very well change soon enough. I do have a massive backlog of discs to try out, so there’s plenty to be getting on with once my motivation returns. I just need my cyclothymia to shift into the right position first, I guess. Such is my burden.

Do stay in touch, darlings.

Toodles!