Category: music

Day 53 – Today: music

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I’ve got a busy day full of jobs. The kids are back at (online) school, and there’s DIY, cooking, ironing, making biltong and several (or more) other things to do. So this will be a short post before my nose heads towards the metaphorical grindstone.

My backdrop will be a soundscape consisting of three parts:

BBC Radio 6 music, because obviously.

Disco 2 – the 1994 album by the Pet Shop Boys, to remind me of 1994/5 at Newcastle University (not sure why) – I played this on repeat for months – and because I have been mentally enjoying some of the remixes on there.

And: A Joy Division/New Order stream later on UnitedWeStream later to mark the 40th anniversary of Ian Curtis’ death (and to raise money for mental health charities).

Exact details on that are still to be uploaded, but it sounds amazing.

Other live concerts I have enjoyed during lockdown here.

Day 46 – Concerts and production

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Given that there’s no sport and no socialising at the moment, I have found myself trawling the internet for stuff to watch.
They are generally quick trawls. You don’t have to look very far.

One of the things I have been enjoying is some of the concerts that have been made available for our lockdown entertainment. And one of the things that amuses me about them is just how polished a “proper” concert video is when compared to what’s being offered at the moment.

NOT THAT I AM COMPLAINING, you understand…

I’m very grateful to have these things to watch.

Here’s an example: my man-of-the-moment Baxter Dury playing an intimate gig in a French penthouse, BTV:

versus this from his bedroom for the Royal Albert Hall Home a couple of weeks ago:

Don’t be fooled by the impressive title page. Click through and it’s wonderfully laid-back, fun, sweary and deliciously informal and almost amateurish: backed by his son on guitar when the recorded backing track didn’t work and with a half dead fern in the background.

Love it!

One more example, and this one is somewhere in the middle. It’s an OMD gig and yes, the footage was also recorded BTV – last year, in fact – but never readied for performance. So you occasionally get hands in front of the camera, it gets bumped by energetic concert-goers and there are sometimes chunks missing between the songs. Who cares? It still looked and sounded great on the big 4K TV in the corner of my living room.

We watched this premiere on Saturday evening after winning the Captivity Pub Quiz Part II by a whole half a point. Really good evening, and some good memories of seeing them really live back in 2012.

Will we ever do concerts again? I wonder.

In the meantime: more online gigs, please.

Day 38 – Best lyric

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Bit busy today, so just a quickie to keep you all going.

Jarv Is is Jarvis Cocker’s new musical vehicle, and the Sheffield superstar is the first mainstream artist to release a “proper” lockdown song.

It’s called House Music All Night Long.

Of course, it wasn’t a lockdown song when he released it at the end of February, but wow – did he see it coming or what?

And much as I told you that Baxter Dury’s I’m Not Your Dog was the best song of the year (so far). This one has the best lyric of the year (so far). Only Jarvis could come up with a rhyming couplet like this:

Goddamn this claustrophobia
‘Cause I should be disrobing you

It was another one I couldn’t believe I’d heard right. But I had, and actually, the whole song is packed with clever plays on words.

Soon: more music from middle-aged white men. But right now, I’m off to roast a lamb (not a euphemism).

Day 33 – I’m not your dog

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OK, so a music post, but one with a bit of a story, at least.

I was listening to the radio last week – something I’ve been doing a lot more of during lockdown – and on came this song with some French lyrics in it. Now, the majority of the song was Baxter Dury languidly describing some bad event in his love life, coupled with an addictive little keyboard synth strings riff, but then there was this French bit. I was hooked, but the French had me a little stumped. Initially, at least.
I often joke that I can speak just enough French, German and Afrikaans not to get by. This time, I managed immediately to identify:

Ce n’est pas mon probleme.

It’s not my problem.

But then things went massively astray, because I thought I heard:

Je ne suis pas ton chien.

Which translates as “I’m not your dog”.

wut?

Now, I could remember Madame Clarke telling us that when we were doing listening tests in French, you could give yourself a little advantage by looking at the hypothetical situation and thinking what might be being said. It’s all about context. For example, if you are in a supermarket and you are asking where the wine section is, the assistant is unlikely to tell you that the trees in Morocco are very green at this time of year. Unless you’re both spies introducing yourselves to one another. But that was never a thing in GCSE French.

Maybe it should have been.

Applying that advice to this situation, I really didn’t think that Baxter would be telling someone that he wasn’t their dog. I’ve listened to a lot of bitter, heartbroken love songs* in my time, and this was a sentiment that I’d not heard expressed before.

So that clearly couldn’t be it.

But that’s what it sounded like.

And guess what?

Brilliant song (best of 2020 so far, IMHO), brilliant single shot video as dawn breaks over Benidorm. And yes – Baxter Dury is not your dog.

I’m well aware that Je ne suis pas ton chien is hardly higher grade French – you probably conjugated être and did pets in your very first term.

But hearing something over your shoulder in a foreign language while you are cleaning the dishwasher [#glamour] and having the confidence to stick with your original translation despite the clear lack of context, [several] years after your last French lesson?

I’m happy enough. Happier than Baxter, certainly.

 

* far too many actually, now I start to think about it. [sad face emoji]

Day 18 – Exercise revisited

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Or The Incredible Speed of 6000…

Following the debacle of the first lockdown run, I’ve been getting better at exercising and doing small circuits of the garden Chez nous.

Some upper body weights, some online core and HIIT classes, the occasional run, a bit of cardio up and down the steps. It’s mostly been great. I’m actually feeling pretty good.

There are a few things that still need sorting out though.

This was yesterday’s workout:

Not bad. Decent figures. That distance isn’t correct though – the first run was measured on GPS and sold me short. This one relied on my steps and probably overestimated by a couple of kilometres. But this was all about heart rate and time, not about distance.

It wasn’t about speed, either. And that was a pity:

How do you like them apples?
What’s up, Usain? Can’t keep up, petal?

Yes. My maximum speed was 91.9kph. A speed I haven’t managed to achieve since heading back from Agulhas a couple of years weeks ago.

I’m faster than I look. Weird though – I don’t remember my face being dragged off my skull by the sheer, brute force of massive acceleration next to the pool. And Christ only knows what the braking distance is for that sort of speed. I’m surprised that I didn’t collide with a wall somewhere. My garden really isn’t that big.

There’s one other issue. Timing.

I’ve been timing my workouts by song. As in:

I’ll just do two more songs and then I’ll get a beer.

And when you know that you’ve only got one last song, you put in every ounce of effort you can. And then that last song turns out to be the 12 extended player of some 160bpm dancefloor remix by the Pet Shop Boys. And you very nearly die.

For 9½ minutes.

For the record though, the Pet Shop Boys are really good for getting you going while you’re exercising. Yesterday’s dance version of Love is a Bourgeois Construct got me up to almost 92kph.

Powerful stuff.