Mrs S and I were sat in a hotel room a few weekends ago; she'd just bought an iPhone and was keen to show off what it could do. I initially held the iPhone with the same disregard as I did for the iPod, but I rapidly came round to appreciating that device and will no doubt feel the same way about her iPhone – in time – also.
We decided to watch some music TV, but the options on the hotel TV were limited to one (it was some trashy pop-only channel; these channels seem to spring up then die with alarming regularity, so even if I could remember what it was called, it probably wouldn't be there now). So we sat there, slack-jawed at just how crass modern pop music is and bemused at Craig David's comeback. And then came Jedward's cover of 'Under Pressure', replete with interjections from Vanilla Ice reprising his 'Ice Ice Baby' (which of course famously 'borrowed' the intro from the Queen / Bowie track). Awful though it clearly was, Jedward do thus have the dubious accolade of making Vanilla Ice, a terminally-derided white rapper from the early Nineties, look cool for perhaps the first time in his career.
So Mrs S and I got to talking about To The Extreme, Ice's 1990 album which we both owned on cassette. Such wistful recollections of our respective musical yesteryears are fairly commonplace between us. As an impressionable (yet tasteless) teenager I thought To The Extreme was brilliant and it was rarely out of my tapedeck, and in my head I thought I was as cool as my mate Rob's brother Chris, who was into Public Enemy. At the time I hadn't started reading the music press, nor had I started listening to 'underground' (i.e. credible) music, so I wasn't really able to see just how lame Ice was, and how mistaken I was.
Still, during the course of our chat about To The Extreme, we both said how – at the time – we thought the song 'Stop That Train' was infinitely better than 'Ice Ice Baby' (but then, it wouldn't have taken much). Before I knew it or could protest, Mrs S had launched iTunes and had purchased and seconds later was playing that song, and then in short order the Keith & Tex version of the song as well. No good can come from having portable access to near-instant music purchasing, I fear. Not only does it create the conditions for the inevitable capacity to overspend wantonly on ill-considered song purchases, but also it destroys any of that sense of anticipation that you used to get between buying a record and getting home to play it. However, without it we wouldn't have known about the Keith & Tex track, which is an outstanding piece of early, skanking Sixties rocksteady reggae. The Vanilla Ice song, on the other hand, was obviously always rubbish. Delete. Now.
From music TV to radio, specifically to the plight faced by BBC 6Music, which may face closure as part of a wave of proposed cuts at the national broadcaster. 6Music remains the only non-commercial station to broadcast music which can be broadly classified as 'alternative'. Imagine the sorely-missed John Peel presenting his eclectic mix of old, new, archive performances / sessions, the forgotten and the 'classic', twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and you get the picture as to what this specialist broadcaster is all about.
Some of the things I've written about in this blog have reached my ears because of the exposure that non-pop music receives on 6Music. Without the station, there really is little alternative for anyone truly passionate about the music that is not acknowledged by Radios 1 and 2, leaving us with little more than Zane Lowe's brief weekday slot filled in the wake of Peel to satisfy curious ears. To lose 6Music from the BBC portfolio would be an absolute travesty for music fans. To act, do one or better still all of the following:
1. Take a listen at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/playlive/bbc_6music/
1. Join the Facebook group at:
http://bit.ly/bbc6music
2. Sign the online consultation at:
http://bit.ly/srconsultation
3. Tweet with the hashtag #savebbc6music
Vinyl corner
Last week I said I'd resurrect my practice of digging out an old record from one of the boxes hidden away in the darkest corners of my house.
This week's slice of vinyl comes from The JAMs, aka The Justified Ancients Of Mu-Mu, aka The KLF. The anarcho-techno duo of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of course produced some brilliant dancefloor records with the trio of 'What Time Is Love?', '3AM Eternal' and a remixed 'Last Train To Trancentral', perfect club hits interspersed with faux cult mythology. They also appeared on Top Of The Pops with Gary Glitter back when they went under the name The Timelords, performing an early example of the mash-up genre with their blending of their 'Doctorin' The Tardis' with the now-deposed Glitter's 'Rock N' Roll'. The KLF quickly descended into artistic dubiousness – machine guns and dead sheep at The Brits, heavy metal re-versions of their biggest hits, burning a million quid on the Isle of Jura, not to mention a questionable duet with Tammy Wynette – but we should never forget that one of their earliest 'releases' as The KLF was a book, published in the wake of 'Doctorin' The Tardis' hitting the top spot of the UK charts, called The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way, a book whose opening fragment of advice to budding popstars is 'Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole'.
So, not a band to be taken especially seriously then and on one hand 'It's Grim Up North' continues the theme. Basically a list of Northern English towns and cities spoken through a megaphone over a thudding 'What Time Is Love?' acid house track, occasionally punctured by the distorted 'chorus' of 'It's grim up north', it's classic KLF and pointed to a future where they'd ditched some of their more wayward tendencies in favour of a return to the dancefloor; the album that this was purportedly taken from (The Black Room) has become the stuff of legend and has never, and probably will never, see the light of day.
If the A-side ('It's Grim Up North (Part 1)') is still a bit pranksterish for you, or you don't like the grandiose orchestral conclusion, a straightahead techno dub can be found lurking menacingly on the B-side.
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