Category: music

HMV

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And lo, as had been widely predicted, HMV was placed into administration yesterday. I spent many a happy afternoon (and many a hard earned pound) in HMV stores, most especially Pinstone Street in Sheffield, Northumberland Street Newcastle, Cornmarket Street in Oxford (who could forget their midnight release of Radiohead’s OK Computer in 1997?) and, of course, Oxford Street in London.

That’s where this photo came from – a-ha doing a signing for their first album, Hunting High and Low, back in January 1986:

hmv

Those clothes? That hair? Look, it was acceptable in the 80s.

As of course, was paying High Street prices for music and the like, because we never had the luxury of the internet. Thankfully, those dark days of bad clothes and worse hair are now in the past.
Sadly, after 91 years, so is HMV.

Let Us Move On

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Driving back from the Bafana Bafana game on Tuesday evening, annoyed, tired and annoyed, I heard this track Let Us Move On and, in the context of the appalling football display that I’d just witnessed, it didn’t seem like a bad idea.

At the time, I thought it sounded a bit like Dido (the artist formerly known as Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong). But how could that be, because Dido (TAFKAFCdBA) hasn’t done anything for years and anything worthwhile for even longer?

Well, obviously, it is Dido and it marks a new album Girl Who Got Away which is scheduled for release in early March.

Reminiscing on her early stuff in the late 90s and early noughties brings back memories of late nights chilling out at home with a glass or two of decent whiskey after the the pub quiz, the living room lit by Tiger Woods Golf and drunken chatter.

Has her music moved on since then? Not much it would seem, if this is anything to go by. But it’s worth a listen, just in case you want to mentally pop back to wherever you were 15 years ago.

Stop Right Now

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Thank you very much. The Telegraph’s Tim Walker needs somebody with a human touch.

In a theatre review brought across in the telegraph which accompanied my parents from Blighty, there’s a review of the new Spice Girls musical. And it’s not ever so complimentary:

When one is up against the tsunami of hype that the publicists of Viva Forever! have managed to whip up, it is awfully tempting to try to be a really hip old daddy-o, go with the flow, and, after lighting a Hamlet cigar and taking out the earplugs, dispensing the five stars that the exclamation mark appear to require.

One cannot, however, ignore the old tosh-o-meter, when the needle goes off the scale to register a show that’s so bad, it ought, if there were any justice, to be accorded a minus-star rating.

This show is not just bad, it is definitively, monumentally and historically bad.

I shall not dwell on the plot, because, goodness knows, Jennifer Saunders, its writer, certainly hasn’t done. There is no acting to speak of, either, so I shall not identify any of the girls who appear in it, lest they be subjected to recriminations.

Viva Forever! marks the West End coming to an unequivocal dead end.

I don’t think he likes it. He gave it zero stars. Which is a whole one less than his colleague Charles Spencer gave it after enjoying enduring the opening night:

I’ll tell you what I wanted, what I really, really wanted – I wanted this terrible show to stop.

The producer Judy Craymer hit pay dirt with Mamma Mia!, which became a global smash hit. But that show was blessed with a witty and touching script by Catherine Johnson and a raft of perfect pop songs from Abba.
So cashing in on the Spice Girls’ back catalogue must have seemed a no-brainer. In fact, it was a ghastly mistake.

This musical is tawdry, lazy and unedifying, and one could sense a miasma of disappointment emanating from an audience of up-for-it Spice Girls fans slowly realising that they had paid top whack to see a clunker.

This is a fatuous show with nothing fresh to say about popular culture and our fixation with fame.
If you love the Spice Girls stay at home and listen to their greatest hits.

I’m unlikely to be hitting the West End to see this or any other musical any time soon, but some of you, my loyal subjects, might be considering a trip to the Piccadilly Theatre before June 1st 2013.

I’m here to tell you that Tim and Charles think that’s a really, really bad idea.

Arrivals

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Much to the kids’ excitement – and after several months of near breathless anticipation – Grandma & Granddad have arrived in Cape Town. They brought Pot Noodles and mushy peas with them, which is always a bonus.

The neighbours are also delighted to welcome my folks to the Mother City: they’re celebrating their arrival by repeatedly blasting out the theme to The Full Monty – a film set, as many of you will recall, in Sheffield. I’m not actually sure if it’s a party going on or just a drunk woman sitting alone dreaming about stripping steelworkers.

Either way, the 26 hour journey door-to-door has hopefully tired my parents out sufficiently to sleep through the continuing insistence that Errol Brown believes in miracles.

Where you from, you sexy thing?