Let’s go!
William Shakespeare’s Ye Olde English Bake Off
‘William Shakespeare’s Ye Olde English Bake Off’ reads the first panel of this comic from @StephenMauriceGraham, and immediately a whopping great hazard light starts flashing in my head. Because, as an inordinate number of Radio 4 panel shows have shown us, there are few things less funny than taking a modern cultural phenomenon and recasting it in the distant past. It reeks of the dreaded phrase ‘Improv Theatre’. “Hey guys, what would Skins look like in the Court Of King Arthur? I think it would go a little something like this… yuk yuk yuk”. Die. Stephen’s even used the phrase ‘Ye Olde’, an act deserving of a King Lear “out vile jelly”-style eye-gouging. But Stephen’s not going to have his eyes gouged out today, because his central point is a good one: the elevation of the GBBO Baked Alaska palaver to the level of National Drama - gate suffixes, Ruby Tandoh thinkpieces and all - is evidence that we’ve gone horribly, horribly wrong as a culture. Plus his twitter avatar - a cartoon of a beret-wearing dog painting with a brush between his teeth - is terrific. GM
Jimmy Hickmott - Teacher
“Why don’t you be a teacher?” asks Jimmy Hickmott, and I can think of around a million reasons: children are annoying loud selfish idiots, schools either smell of vomit or the violently caustic cleaning products used to clean it up, and you’re not allowed to use brilliant words like bollocks, or bumwaft, or stinkhamlet. I don’t have time to go into the other 999,997 reasons but we both know they exist. I’ve listened to Jimmy’s tune - which is acoustic tweeness, weaponised - six or seven times now and I’m still not 100% what he’s on about. “Why don’t you be a schoolboy?” he goes on, and I’d like to reply that, if I did, I’d probably be writing this on a phone I’d had to sneak into prison up my stinkhamlet, because that’s a very weird thing to want. I assume the questions he posits are rhetorical and he’s doing ‘metaphors’ and stuff but I can’t be bothered to unpick them to be honest. I’m certain, objectively, this song isn’t very good and proper music journalists would happily set fire to Jimmy for writing it, but its sheer jauntiness and the frankly spellbinding dance routine in in the vid - like Dave Gorman and his architect mate Kev jiving pissed at Christmas - roused something unfamiliar deep in my abdomen. Is this... happiness... ? Is this what joy feels like? A warm feeling of... is it... love? No, wait, it’s just a bumwaft. As you were. LH
Psychedelic Disco Angels – EVRYDY
FFS. This isn’t a Soho bar in the early 90s. We’re not backpacking around Thailand and trying to blag a lift to the next Full Moon Party so we can daub ourselves in dayglo paint and do a couple of buckets with a copy of The Beach hanging out of our board shorts. This is the budget Hed Kandi of ‘psychedelic disco’ music, like a bad Bacardi advert in song – all furry, neon-pink boots and fairy wings swinging around podiums, spirits free-pouring into leering men’s mouths, and writhing around on white beds raised above a dancefloor. It’s Groove Is In The Heart and its quirky saturated take on 60s beat music goes to Goa, elbowed out on an assortment of Fisher Price keyboards and a stream of unimagination, with a name that wouldn’t even get them a covers slot in a dive bar in Marbs. FFS. KH
Religion, you may have noticed, can be a thorny issue. The thorniest, in fact. As thorny as making a serious faux-pas, while wearing a crown of thorns, while being dragged through a hedgerow by Everything But The Girl vocalist Tracy Thorne. What makes it really complicated is that there’s a lot of religions out there, and they all say broadly similar things but with a few small differences, except these small differences turn out to be the difference between ascension to paradise and eternal damnation, and that’s not really the sort of thing you want to confuse. Thorny, see? Luckily, The First Church Of Raymond are on hand to sort all this out once and for all. They’re a sort of religion aggregator, all things to all men. “Zoroastrian? Wiccan? Pastafarian?” reads the website. “No matter what your conviction Raymond caters for it!” Nothing is explicitly forbidden, nothing in particular recommended. Likes include cheese, knees, and pachyderms. Rituals include The Nine Dances Of The Blatantly Obvious and The Path Of The Fourfold Pieshop (“Watch telly and eat samosas”), while their website links out to Lifts NOW!!, “the magazine for people that work at publishing companies in tall buildings and spend all their time waiting for the lifts.” I can’t really get hot under the collar about it, in the same way I can about Russian Orthodox Christianity, say, or radical Islam, but I quite like the thought of Richard Dawkins looking at the website and starting to get irate, before gradually tailing off, confused and disappointed. LP
The Delay In The Universal Loop - Spasmodica
This week, the Guardian revealed how a data boffin (note: not actual job title) has separated music into no less than 1,264 distinct genres, including charred death and the delightful-sounding deep filthstep. Needless to say, our loyal army of nuisances, sorry, commenters soon dismissed his findings for being too mainstream. Perhaps they’re all big fans of The Delay In The Universal Loop and their unique blend of ambient Danish glitchcore (ding! That’s 1,265 now). Here, they take a typically otherworldly Scandi vocal refrain, then splice, dice and submerge it under layers of hiccupping synths and malevolent difficult-era-Portishead drum salvos, The result sounds like Coldplay being intermittently prodded by Skrillex, though will inevitably struggle to live up to that particular mental image. MH
What We Call Progress - Floating
I’m all about ironic band names but this is ridiculous. This lot are about as progressive as a Tory taxation policy. They’ve taken the dullest bits of deep house, mixed them with some whiny lyrics about floating, and a bit of rudimentary guitar. Honestly, it’s like the Postal Service, but even wetter. LB
