Hannah Murray (Cassie in Skins season 1 & 2, and me and the missus's favourite character) talking about on her favourite music:

"I try to listen to a really wide range of stuff. My favourite bands/people are probably The Beatles, Nirvana, Regina Spektor, The Smiths, Tom Waits and The Velvet Underground. I also really like a lot of 70s punk, a lot of folk, The Gerbils, Lethal Bizzle, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Sleater Kinney, Rufus Wainwright, Destiny's Child, Johnny Cash, 20s jazz, early Rolling Stones, Nina Simone and M.I.A."

kids today... they're different from my day... they've heard a lot... i don't think at 22, even as a wannabe music journo, someone in training as it were, i'd listened that widely... i couldn't afford to, for starters... it's not just that there's been so many more decades of music since then (22 for me = 1985), it's a whole different mentality i think... all-gates-open... eclecticism not as stance but as base-level condition of existence

which is fine if you're a punter, but how can a musician make music from such a splayed-wide sensibilty?

slightly different version



met one of John's Children once, in the early Eighties, at Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford... i think he was working as an art teacher there ... he was totally bemused by me and Paul's excitement that we were talking to one of John's Children... i think he thought they'd been rubbish

forget which one though -- Chris Townson?

"sounds like a jolly Syd full o' Marmite" (Federica Pagani)

the shitey side of New Pop, and its arse end








this extended dancemix not as shite as the original song/video




for my shame i once liked the blow monkeys

there's something oddly fascinating about this Status Quo video



here you have the archetypal Quo fan... perhaps a slightly idealised version (a pretty-ed up Rick Parfitt)

an unassuming lad whose entire (non-working) life is subsumed within Quo

even in the bath he's reading Melody Maker (Stranglers on the cover, presumably Quo an inside feature -- for this boy only has eyes for Quo)

at night he goes to sleep with the Quo poster above his head

the key to the video is when he's just approaching the record store - a girl strides past from the opposite side of the screen but their trajectories are veering apart as well coming from different directions -- she gives him a brief but frankly appraising -- and, I think, approving - once-over -- he glances quickly but -- again it's micro-subtle but there's a almost the suggestion of averting his gaze, darting inside for safety -- at any rate he continues on his path -- nothing will deflect this boy from his mission, which is to enter the record store and check out the new Quo record on headphones

now what's striking about Quo is that although it's rooted in bluesy boogie it's not cock rock - there's none of the strut or swagger of heavy metal, the phallic bravado

but nor is there orgasm: no shrieking falsetto, no explosive solos

instead there is just this endless onanistic but unresolved boogie

chugging is the apposite word

and of course that fits the lyric to "Something Bout You Baby I Like" which is about not having the bottle to approach the girl he fancies (so he has her in his dreams)

there's two exultant moments in the video:

---meeting up with his mates just prior to the Quo gig--they merge into a sort of scrum and do this strange leaping up gesture as if trying to scale the Quo billboard, the image freeze-framing as if to signify a kind of ecstasy

--- meeting the Quo backstage (who are just as unassuming, down to earth, approachable as the young man is), and again there's a kind of freeze, as the Fan is snapped standing in the midst of his "idols"

and then not quite exultant but a kind of mild bliss, the scenes of heads-down blonde manes a-bobbing headbanging

so yeah it's about homosociality, no duh ... about lads who don't find release through sex or through violence (Quo fans might get slightly boisterous but they'd never start a fight)... upper working class, skilled labourers, as Carl and Phil suggest in the comments here, and in this video, the UltraFan is a car mechanic

whatever the lyric is ostensibly about, i think the video fairly blatantly presents the younger-fitter Parfitt-alike fan as the impossible love object of Quo-dom... when he's waiting at the bus stop the camera seems to linger for just a micro-second too long on his pert blue-jean-clad buttocks

When I see some particularly Fine Acting on the television set, and usually the actor is British, I am sometimes moved to exclaim at the screen: "Theeeeeeesp!"

In this spirit, and rather aptly, I now exclaim "Sentennnnnnnnnnnce!":

"One of my dreams has long been to see Branagh play Noddy Holder on film"

Bet Joe Queenan kept on chuckling for a goodly while about the Ken-in-Slade- biopic section of his Branagh-takedown as he went about his daily business ... possibly for days. I know what writers are like.

Still it did serve to remind me of something

As with the Quo

I always forget about Slade















I would really like to see the whole of Slade In Flame

always forget about the quo