Everybody talk about Pop Muzik

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I’ve always had an odd taste in music. I was pretty much ‘down wiv da kids’ all the way up until the early 80s, but then The Jam broke up, punk was long gone, and the ska and reggae revivals had pretty much had their day. So I started going back in time to discover sounds new to my ears, but old hat to everyone else.

I can probably trace this first spark of curiosity to when I first saw the John Landis movie The Blues Brothers. I was captivated by the music of all these people I’d vaguely heard of but never actually heard nor seen: “Ah, so that’s what James Brown looks like ? He’s the man !” ” Jesus – I now see what all the fuss about Aretha Franklin‘s all about.” “Do love that John Lee Hooker. What a cool dude.” ” WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT ????  “Oh- that’s a Cab Calloway. Wonderful stuff.”

It was but a few short steps from hearing that stuff for the first time to discovering Buddy Holly, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley (and any other old popular acts which will boost me up the Google rankings).

I was in my element and I loved it. For the next 20-odd years all I ever did was listen to old stuff (ok, ok, of course I kept tabs on Status Quo and Chas n Dave, but a man’s gotta keep up with the times, ain’t he ?). I was experimenting with music in the way young kids in the 60s dabbled in The Doors, The Rolling Stones and hallucinogenic drugs. It was the same music for me, just 15 years later and with tea & peanut M&Ms.

In the early 21st century I left my shaded safe haven of Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell albums, into bright new world of singer-songwriters like Nora Jones, William Elliott Whitmore, Diana Krall, Jack Johnson and the like. You know, the singers that sound exactly like  Joplin, Dylan, Cash and Mitchell. At least I was consistent. Like a Japanese soldier, I emerged into the light, not asking “Is the war over yet?” more like “has Kurt Cobain stopped wailing shite yet?”.

And as luck would have it, he had.

In this way I (thankfully) missed New Romantics, Rap, Housey Housey, Hiphop, Britpop or anything else masquerading as entertainment.  When most were listening to the Gallagher Brothers, I was more than likely listening to the Everly Brothers or even the Doobies. When the naive easily-led young fools of the world were discovering The Smiths, I was genning up on The Temptations. I didn’t think anything could be as abhorrent or sounds as bad as Soft Cell or Morrissey – until I accidentally overheard Oasis and Eminem.

So (and this is where we get to the bit where I disclose why I’ve been wasting your time with all this self-opinionated rubbish) it was with some surprise that I stumbled across this (by way of a Viz magazine tweet) today and found myself wondering: why the hell haven seen this before ? I have never listened to Depeche Mode back-to-back before, but I sure had at least one second-take at this one. If I’d had known back in 1982 that this existed I’m sure I would have hit paue on my tape deck on which Songs for Swinging Lovers was playing (or was that 12 Gold Bars ?)

So in case you missed it (and, as I say, I could have saved us all a lot of time) I give you: Deepche Mode. Performing (miming to) See You.   Holding chickens.

I dunno what the hell they were thinking, but from being a song I couldn’t stand to hear, this video is now strangely alluring.    Chickens.

Lord Snooty Comes Clean

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Below is an extract from my old firm The Daily Telegraph, written by a former Editor and ex-guvnor of mine Charles Moore (pictured below, second left, with Dave -far left, which is a first- on a jolly day out). Moore, known by all as Lord Snooty , and the unlikeliest of all Tory critics, seems to have some concerns. Now if HE is starting tho think like this about Dave, Gideon and co, maybe, just maybe there is some hope. (highlights are mine)

By
30 Mar 2012

When I first heard Francis Maude’s suggestion on Sky News that we might all stock up “a bit of extra fuel with a jerry can in the garage”, I did not, I must admit, panic. His remark seemed a little unwise – and you could hear, by the way he immediately began to qualify it, that he thought so too – but I let it pass.

What I was forgetting is that ministerial words about an immediate problem with basics like fuel or food is the only sort of ministerial statement which people believe. It was like when Edwina Currie, the then junior health minister, said in 1988 that most egg production was infected with salmonella. People stopped buying eggs. After Mr Maude spoke, they swarmed to the petrol pumps.

But now that I have heard the Conservatives’ private explanation, which is being handed down to constituency associations by MPs, I begin to feel angry.

The private message is as follows. “This is our Thatcher moment. In order to defeat the coming miners’ strike, she stockpiled coal. When the strike came, she weathered it, and the Labour Party, tarred by the strike, was humiliated. In order to defeat the coming fuel drivers’ strike, we want supplies of petrol stockpiled. Then, if the strike comes, we will weather it, and Labour, in hock to the Unite union, will be blamed.”

There is a key difference which ministers have not spotted. When Mrs Thatcher piled up the coal at power stations until the strike began in 1984, she was not inconveniencing the public. In 2012, the Coalition is trying to press-gang the public, without saying so, into its political battles. All those people queuing on the forecourts were pawns in a Government-organised blame-game.

So this gerrymandering with jerry cans, along with the rows about pasties, dinners for donors and granny taxes, sheds light on the present discontent. People detect selfishness.

It continues at length, including this

Being myself a southern, public-school, Oxbridge person, I do not feel patronised by this milieu, but even I, as I watched the Budget on television and saw the “Quad” of Messrs Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and Alexander all in a self-congratulatory, Oxford Union row, did get that “What do they know about anything?” feeling which, opinion polls suggest, is doing the Coalition harm.

For the rest of the article, please click here and see how some of that lot have started to think. Enjoy and cross your fingers.

Jobs for the Boys and Girls.

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I’ve had a few decent jobs. I’ve had a couple of bloody awful ones too. I spent a good deal of my working life at The Telegraph; then a decent amount of time in London at TIME Magazine. I spent only a few months in the employ of Rupert Murdoch, but I don’t think he misses me. He’s probably got plenty on his plate to worry about at the moment anyway. Mr Dacre doesn’t lay awake at night wondering why I only did a couple of weeks freelancing on his Daily Mail. At least I assume he doesn’t. How much time Alexander Lebedev spends wishing I was still at The Independent, only he knows. When he gets too depressed about it, he goes off and punches someone, I hear. Robert Maxwell fell off his boat before I got the chance of working for him. Pity.

So you’d think that the constant moaning and whingeing from her father might have put a young Bealing off of journalism, wouldn’t you ? Well apparently not.

If you click on the picture above you’ll see an interview with former Tory politician Ann Widdecombe, the first raft of questions being asked by my eldest daughter Lucy (bottom right hand corner of this photo) . The more observant of you will notice Lucy keeps here questions to Ann’s role in Strictly Come Dancing rather than tackle her on political issues. It’s probably for the best: Her dad, whereas he would have struggled to come up with anything coherent or relevant to ask about Strictly, would have ended up on an assault charge should he ever have had to ask Widdecombe about her “struggle against Socialism”. Probably why her dad ended up as a picture editor, rather than an interviewer. You’ll also note that Lu speaks the Queen’s English unlike her father. Another advantage she has over me.

So that’s my eldest sorted out for the future, but the job market is a precarious one. My current job of “Watching Columbo and Printing T-Shirts” is one of my favourite jobs I’ve had, it just doesn’t pay anything like I thought it might. Almost the opposite in fact. On the other hand, I’m working at a place I like (home) with people I like (my mate Rob) and the hours are pretty good.

It could be worse, I could be Andrew Strauss who’s looking particularly precarious in his job as England cricket captain, his team having lost its fourth test match in a row. There’s no disgrace losing in Sri Lanka. The conditions are brutally hot and the pitches are so different from those in England that you’d need to be a particular talent to pull off a win, especially in Galle which has the reputation of being a graveyard for English players, and in particular English bowlers.

Bealing leads off The Fleet St Exiles having taken 6-22, taking them to a
3 wickets victory against the Sri Lankan Airways XI, Galle, Sri Lanka 2005

Then again some people are luckier than others. My good mate Dave has finally ended his long wait for a permanent job by landing a plumb one on a magazine. It’s been a long wait for him and I was thrilled when he called to tell me he’s landed it. Well done, Wavey ! Then there’s rugby’s Stuart Lancaster who has just been given the job which everyone in the country (57 Old Farts aside) thought he should have been given weeks ago. The new English Rugby Coach has fought off seemingly nearly every other coach in the world for the job before the old Twats of Twickenham finally run out of South Africans to turn them down. The RFU were forced to give the job to Lancaster, something they should have done when it was clear he a) knew how to coach a rugby team and b) had no time for show ponies. Celebrity coach he ain’t. And thank fuck for that.

Andy Robinson keeps his job. Yes, really. The Scotland coach had presided over a team which last won a match in black&white but somehow managed to convice the SRFU that he’s the one for the post. Can there be another man in the country (and yes, we can still count Scotland in that) who’s luckier to be still employed ? No, not if you don’t count Francis Maude there isn’t.

The Idiot Saville Row Tory Cabinet Office Minister Maude emplored drivers to fill up their Jerrycans with petrol and prepare for fuel shortages due to the tanker driver’s strike and that “there are lives at stake”. Once people had Googled what a Jerrycan was (apparently not everyone’s obsessed by WWII like me), checked that there is no strike (and won’t be one for at least a fortnight, and even then, probably not) and that the tanker drivers weren’t using Mad Max II technology to threaten people’s lives and protect the remaining gasoline, everyone assumed Maude would be taken round the back by Dave and Gideon and pummeled to death with his own Jerrycan. Sadly not.

“Half a tank of unleaded and 3 lucky dips for tonight’s lottery, please mate.” – a scene from Mad Maude II: The Road Warrior

For starters, Dave was too busy telling us how much he loved Pasties, and about the hilarious incident when he recently bought a pasty on Leeds railway station from the West Cornwall Pasty Company. MMMMmmmmmmm….Yum Yum. Trouble is all the poor sods at the Leeds station branch of the West London Pasty Company lost their jobs in 2007. So all that justification by Dave, all that gettin dahn wiv da prols an da kidz was, ow u say,  a load of old bollocks.

Still, Dave’ll soon have some proper opposition in Parliament to point out all his mistakes, scandals, lies and wrong-doings. George Galloway is back in a job. Sadly, it’s true. The Big Brother Cat Impersonator is back in his job as an MP, this time by winning a by-election in Bradford West, a once Labour stronghold. George won by a landslide by campaigning on one issue: An anti-Afghan War campaign in the predominantly-muslim neighbourhoods of Bradford West. He even intimated earlier in the campaign he actually was a musilm (he isn’t really).

Just fancy that: A tv celebrity, however micro and annoying to you and me, campaigns in a Muslim area against a war seen by many to be anti-muslim, securing a 10,000 majority and WINNING a by-election in a previously Labour heartland. Now who could have predicted that ? Should anyone in Labour be brought to account for this humliation? Should Mr Millipede still be in his job ?

Magherafelt’s Got Talent

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Of course, Simon Cowell didn’t invent it ….

This is one of those videos you’re sent and think “ooh! 9 mins 10. That’s gonna be far too long to bother with.” Fear not , my friends, time will just fly as you watch this one.

It leaves you with so many questions, and here are just a few which occurred to me:

Was this filmed by the world’s shortest cameraman ? Why didn’t Emperor Roscoe (and his performing genitalia) appear on TV more often ? What, apart from a huge wig and some superglue,  did contestant #1, John Henry, ask for on his 27th birthday (and if he’s 26 I’m a bad disco dancer) ? Where can I buy an Atmosphere Extractor for my house like the one used by this Discotheque ? And why don’t more people dance like Cossacks , as demonstrated by number 10 (H.Moore) and his enormous performing trousers ? And why is he “dancing” to the theme from Crimewatch ?

I’m sure you’ll have your own questions. Meanwhile :

Download Part II yourself to see who won, if indeed anybody actually did.

SHARPSINGLEPIEAD