Herbert Jansch was Glaswegian by birth, Edinburgher / Edinbronian* by "origin", according to iffypedia.
(The internet can't agree on the correct term, although I did see “C*nts fae Edinburgh” suggested by one, presumed, Glaswegian contributor.)
"Origin", I'm guessing, means than Bert Jansch was bitten by a radioactive acoustic guitar in the Scottish capital, giving him amazing plucking skills and leading him to be cited as an influence to everyone from Jimmy Page to Mike Oldfield, Paul Simon to Nick Drake, Donovan to Johnny Marr. At times, they called him "a British Bob Dylan", though it was a comparison Jansch didn't really care for himself.
As well as being a leading light in the British folk revival of the 60s, Jansch went on to form "one of the most influential groups of the late 20th century"... No, not Showaddywaddy.
In his later years, Jansch would work with many of the artists he'd inspired in his younger days, including opening for Neil Young on the old grumpy git's 2010 US tour. Young once said, "as much of a great guitar player as Jimi was, Bert Jansch is the same thing for acoustic guitar... and my favourite." And if you can get a kind word from Neil Young, you must be doing something right.
More eye-catching song titles and ear-catching tunes today, starting with the gentleman above, who certainly knew a thing or two about writing an intriguing title. Any of these would do...
However, I'd argue that his best title is the one below... but maybe that's because I can't separate it in my head from the full album title.
Perhaps I've not got anything else that can compete with the Dame at full power... but I'm going to give it my best shot. Starting with this little beauty...
The driving force behind Firmament & The Elements was Bruce Woolley, one of the three men responsible for Video Killed The Radio Star (another great title). Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes released that song as The Buggles, while Bruce released his own version (with Thomas Dolby in keyboards). History is written by the victors.
Thank heavens then for Andy Arthurs of bands like La Bouche, Tonight and The Rock Along Combo. He's clearly what they used to call a "new man". Although I'm not sure what he's doing in that raincoat...
I used to work with a guy called Duncan Brown. He was an amateur weather man. As soon as he saw one snowflake in the sky, he'd start packing his bag and heading for the door. "I don't want to get stuck in that!"
His namesake, with an added E, was a prominent figure in the English folk rock scene in the 70s. Sadly this Duncan died from cancer at only 46, but he left behind some great tunes, and one song title in particular that sticks in my mind...
I've had a few "friends" like that over the years...
This week's big discovery is from 1995, and the closest thing I can compare it to is Chumbawamba at their best. Although Chumbawamba take themselves seriously from time to time.
TISM (short for This Is Serious Mum) are a bunch of Australian alt-rock lunatics who wear balaclavas and a variety of outrageous costumes on stage and generally take the piss, with added nihilism. Band members include Humphrey B. Flaubert, Jock Cheese and Eugene de la Hot Croix Bun. TISM played their first gig in 1983 and broke up immediately afterwards. Every live performance since has been a reunion gig.
All this will enrage those people of you believe there's no place for fun in popular music, but you're generally unhappy about everything anyway. Perhaps you'd be interested to learn that some pretentious goon in the Grauniad called Greg! The Stop Sign!! "a metaphor for our collective mortality". Or perhaps not...
Did anybody actually drink coffee in the 70s and early 80s? Everyone I knew drank tea from an early age, but the only coffee you could get was that nasty freeze-dried stuff, and although there might have been a jar in the cupboard, I think it was only there for if we had a weird workman in.
By the time I reached my late teens, I was drinking a lot of tea. A large teapot full every night. And because I don't like milk, I was drinking it black and strong. Three bags.
I've written before about how I was invited in for coffee after my first date, and I didn't even like coffee, but coffee was all that was on offer. I'm covering old grounds here (you see what I did there?), but I ended that post by explaining that I finally ended up a coffee drinker when I started using the Klix vending machine to keep me awake on nightshift. There weren't a lot of great options from that machine. The tea was white only - at least you could get coffee black. Beyond that, there was a hot lemon drink that tasted like wallpaper stripper... and a sub-sub-Bovril effort that I once tried in desperation and can still taste how disgusting it was 30+ years later.
I don't know when I first tried a proper coffee, maybe as an after dinner treat in a restaurant, but it changed my life forever. Nowadays, there are more coffee shops in the UK than there are pubs, but back then there were hardly any. The interweb tells me that coffee shop culture was a big thing in the swinging '60s but died away when people discovered instant coffee in the 70s and 80s. This confirms something I've long suspected: the general public are idiots.
Various articles online suggest that the UK coffee shop resurgence happened in the 1990s as a result of young Brits watching the Friends characters hang out in Central Perk. It may seem hard to believe now, but the first UK Starbucks didn't open till 1998. I'm not particularly a fan of Starbucks - a bit too close in texture to the Klix Vending Machine Gravy - but I will drink it as a last resort. Unlike Neil Young...
My preferred chain, Caffè Nero, opened its first in that London in 1997, so I'm guessing they didn't get to the rest of the UK till well into the noughties. I remember when the Bradford branch opened; I was working radio advertising and it became a daily ritual to walk across Bradford in the afternoon for a proper Americano. By then, I was pretty much a coffee addict.
That addiction only grew when I became a teacher, but all that caffeine clearly wasn't doing a lot to help with the anxiety caused by the pressure of working at The Bad Place.
Nowadays I'm mostly a two coffees a day man, and visits to coffee shops have become a luxury rather than a necessity... who can afford at nearly £4 a pop? That said, I always feel more relaxed in a coffee shop than I ever felt in a pub. Even when I was a drinker, I found pubs to be intimidating places. And not just because of the stress of getting served at a crowded bar. I know I'm in the minority here - most people find pubs to be welcoming places, but I never felt like I belonged... even when I was handing over a small fortune for a double Jack Daniels and Coke. (I dread to think how much my former beverage of choice costs these days... one more reason to be grateful for being tee-total.)
My dad became a coffee drinker later in life, and I wonder if my love of strong black coffee was in some way an attempt to emulate or connect with him? Although Sam's way too young to indulge, he spends a lot of time in coffee shops with me... in the same way I guess many parents might have taken their kids into family pubs when they were growing up, to acclimatise them to that culture. Although he liked a pint of lager and lime from time to time, my dad wasn't a big drinker and I never went to the pub with him.
Every Saturday morning, about ten a.m. (once the Snapshots excitement has died down), Sam and I stop off at the local Co Op cafe before starting the weekly shop. I have an Americano, Sam has an Appletiser, and we both have a pastry. We sit and talk... it's good father and son time. The highlight of my week.
It wouldn't be my coffee shop of choice... but any excuse to watch this video again...
Louise sent me the above image, which she'd found on the book of faces, in response to the news that David Cameron is rising from the dead, like a Marvel super-villain, ready to resume the reign of terror and destruction that led to his previous downfall. I mean, he's going to have to go some to beat completely destroying the country, but bad guys always like to think big, don't they?
Anyway, I was rather amused by the aged cultural reference, so I shared the image with my work colleagues on our Whatsapp group. Being teachers, they're a bunch of politically-minded so-and-sos who regularly carp on about the malevolent excesses of the Tory regime, so I figured they'd find it funny.
Only one person got the joke though. Everyone else just thought I was sharing a picture of a naked David Cameron. If they didn't think I was weird already...
In despair, I decided to consult another young person about my faux pas. So I messaged Ben.
I should also point out that a few days earlier, I'd sent Ben a disgusted message regarding the Hollywood remake of 80's TV favourite The Fall Guy, starring Ryan 'as much charisma as a plank of 2x4' Gosling in the Lee Majors role and Aaron 'Oh my god, why does this guy keep getting work?' Taylor-Johnson as Howie Munson. To say I was horrified at this desecration of my childhood is a gross understatement.
Ben replied that he'd never heard of The Fall Guy. Worse still, he was less than complimentary when I sent him a video of the opening credits featuring the classic Lee Majors-sung theme tune. Frankly, he's lucky I was still talking to him.
Rol: As a 30-something who's never seen The Fall Guy, do you understand the cultural reference in this?
Ben: David Cameron at uni with his pig-lover in the shower?
So you're not aware of Bobby Ewing in the shower and what that represents?
Dallas or Dynasty? Is that the who shot JR bit?
I'm aware of these things existing in a loose form.
Or is it the this is all a dream bit?
Dallas. They killed Bobby off. He was dead for a whole series. Ratings dived, so they brought him back to life. The explanation was, yes, the previous season had all been a dream. His resurrection happened with his wife waking up and finding him in the shower.
I kinda got there with some help.
Did the ratings return?
For a while, yes. But a lot of people were pissed off that they'd watched a whole season that was just a dream.
I'm sure I had my dinner watching something on TV There's not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see
Thanks though. You answered my question about how well this would be understood by a young person.
Hate to break it to you, but as I'm in my mid 30s, I'm not sure I class as a "young person".
You'll always be a young person to me.
Someone asked me, "Why is youth Wasted on the rude and uncouth? Blinded on cheap vermouth A would be poet in Duluth Long on time, short in the tooth Fantasies of John Wilkes Booth Come back when you're younger
See you had that, but I grew up in the early days of the internet where shock tactics were the shared things that are now cultural flagstones. Ask anyone my age what "goatse", "lemon party" or "meat spinner" are and you'll get nostalgia for an internet before it became corporatised. None of those are pleasant things but it represents the wider culture of the internet as a mysterious entity prior to it becoming standardised. The rise of these standardised sites can be attributed to places like blogger, Tumblr and myspace who sought tohomogenise how the internet looked and was consumed before the rise of the true current social media spaces. You just got shit telly.
That last line is a complete reduction, but I felt it hit as a good punchline.
Blow up your TV Throw away your paper Go to the country Build you a home Plant a little garden Eat a lot of peaches Try an' find Jesus on your own
I won't. But I feel like I've just seen a Lynchian glimpse behind a curtain I don't want to look behind.
Was it like the dark web?
I think dark web is exaggerating quite a bit, yet excessive gore, violence and stuff of a sexual nature was pretty much everywhere. But it wasn't for consuming content the way we use the internet now, it was just for shock. If that makes sense?
So people weren't hunting it down for kicks, it was just randomly placed to cause upset?
I spent a lot of time online in the early days of the Web. Why didn't I stumble across this shit?
The websites were passed along like folklore. The internet wasn't monetised at that point so there was no impetus to drive traffic.
Was this widely shared by your whole generation though? I wonder if it's comparable to the collective consciousness from my generation regarding the TV shows of our youth, even the ones we didn't watch.
Because there was far less choice, there was much more shared cultural knowledge back then.
These things were the early version of memes. Links sent to others in msn messenger, written on each other's schoolbooks, typed into a friend's computer in the computer room at school (before siteblocking).
Because you have to remember, my generation is the one that grew up in the world you mentioned whilst also growing up in the early days of widespread internet, meaning the habits from the former informed the way we used the internet.
Sam's generation however will experience a curated internet.
Not quite the same then. I'm consistently surprised by the lack of a shared cultural knowledge by today's teenagers. Like how many of them don't know who Homer Simpson or Indiana Jones or Darth Vader are. I know they're all older generation examples, but I knew about John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart when I was a kid. Everything is fractured now, little pockets of knowledge but very few shared cultural touchstones.
Look, the internet now is curated along two distinct lines...
1) a company wishing to monopolise visits to the internet (i.e the platform).
2) content curated by the ways in which Sam will view the internet ( i.e. logarithms).
I feel like you're just sending me pages from your thesis now.
My last point ties directly into yours though: the internet now is so curated towards likes and viewing habits (down to how long on average we stay on a single image or video, so as to then recommend more of the same to keep us engaged) that a level of shared culture isn't possible anymore.
Is this why nobody reads my blog?
The internet doesn't show you content about what you *think* you want to see anymore. It gives you stuff that you *do* engage with (positively or negatively). It needs you to stay engaged. And the data which it uses to provide you with this is based on hundreds of thousands of hours of billions of people's viewing habits.
So whilst it sounds utopian, it's not driven by enjoying, just engaging. You take a second to read how terrible that Daily Mail headline is on your Google news feed? You engaged with it. It'll show you more. But it needs time to work out why you engaged with it. So it shows you soft politically biased things in that area to see if you engage with those. If you do, you might get some alt-right stuff. It knows you're male based on how you view and men engage with alt right stuff more than women. Not engaging with that stuff enough, it'll move to testing your engagement with things until it finds where you are.
This is how so many young men end up engaged with alt right stuff. Once they begin, it'll start flooding their feeds with it. Cars - sports cars - luxury cars - alpha mindset - Andrew Tate. Comic books - whining about certain aspects - woke comics nowadays - anti woke - Andrew Tate. And it's not set up to force people into certain beliefs, but because of how we engage with the internet and the "need" to monetise it, it's the conclusion.
Populist beliefs have become far stronger across the western world since the late 90s and increase year on year. That means it gets engagement so is viewed more. And on the internet, views = money, so notoriety and fame are the same thing. As a result, people who want to be successful express extreme opinions. Those get views. People want to make money, so they replicate those views.
By no means am I saying Sam is destined to end up with those views. You're too decent a person and I know he'll learn from you. But he will be exposed to it. A lot of it. Without ever searching for it. His friends will. And some will identify with it. And people are trying to blame particular websites or certain heads of the hydra instead of dealing with having to have difficult conversations with their kids.
Is this why nobody reads my blog?
It's more that it's not monetisable, so the people who do read it or come across it will always be a small group, but they will have a level of interest in the subject matter that equals yours.
Nah, he comes round for a chocolate digestive and a cup of lemon and ginger tea on most Wednesdays. Thursday's he's travelling back to Hollywood.
Must have been Billy Ray then.
He did keep going on about his heart. I just called an ambulance, though.
Don't get on the wrong side of him. His family owns a wrecking ball.
Please tell me you get other people to come and teach similes.
How was that a simile? It didn't have like or as.
"I came in *like* a wrecking ball."
They don't own construction equipment.
She is clearly swinging on a huge fucking wrecking ball in the video I've seen. I watched it repeatedly, just to make sure.
I'd guess that it'd be cheaper for the budget if they rented one.
I don't think budget is something the Cyruses worry about.
You should have said, "Don't get on the wrong side of him. His family clearly has the free capital to rent a wrecking ball as and when needed."
I maintain that they have the free capital to *buy* a wrecking ball. Tell me you wouldn't buy a wrecking ball if you could afford one. I know I would.
I think my main concern is storage. I don't want to have to buy a big enough hangar to store it.
It'd probably make sense to turn it into a business.
But then I'd have to employ someone to deal with it.
It's too much hassle.
Rent it. Do the job. Return it.
You just need one of those really big garden boxes. Watch out this weekend, there'll probably be a few flying around.
Pretty sure my neighbour's fence is about to fall over. It's swinging around.
Swingers?
I thought we'd moved on from discussing the wrecking ball?
What does 'scone' rhyme with in your world view?
Cone.
Anything else is clearly wrong.
And they shouldn't be allowed around children.
Wrong answer.
You're just posh and over-privileged. Kind of like the Prince Andrew of Scones.
I'll call the police on you.
Oh yeah? Your mates on the force? Say no more.
Are your employers aware of your stance on this?
My employers are of the opinion that 'gone' is the correct answer. I was treated to a scone with jam and cream today. Although it did have those little bits of crystallised sugar on top, which are also wrong.
Does Louise know?
Louise is on the dark side in this matter. But then she also puts toilet rolls on backwards, so there's no hope.
Let's not start with the toilet roll again.
How can a new album be iconic?
I don't like Charli XCX, nor think she's any good, so that's the first issue I have.
I also think iconic has had a bit of a change of meaning for Gen Z.
I think it means "really cool and unique" or something.
Idiots.
Why?
Language is elastic.
Just because I don't understand it doesn't make it bad.
You're just defending your contemporaries. From a nearly-50 Gen X perspective, everything you weirdos do is wrong.
Alcoholism, teen pregnancy and STI rates plummeted after your generation. Issues like that continue to decrease with Gen Z teaching adulthood. I think things are going OK.
Is most of the above due to the fact that they're all addicted to Internet porn?
Everyone rushes to say how shit kids are, but really, they're improving on the last generation mostly each time.
Spin doctor.
OK, then... define "cheugy".
Pronounced 'choogy'.
I guess phony or poser is the word you might be more familiar with.
Like a try hard.
Isn't there a generational element to it though?
Yeah. I meant the opposite of it. Like it's natural.
Now I'm more confused than I was before I asked you.
So Jarvis Cocker would be cheugy. But every fanboy who tried to look like him would not be. They'd be try hards.
Morrissey isn't cheugy because with him it's calculated.
Tom Waits: cheugy.
Every impersonator: not cheugy.
So cheugy is a compliment!?!
Nope. I've just checked the internet. It's the opposite of what I said.
Here's a member of the Partridge Family. Yesterday, we had Steve Coogan, aka Alan Partridge. I couldn't find a song with Partridge in the title, which almost derailed this quiz. And then I settled on the perfect solution...
12. Alias Harry & Jones.
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby Jr. and David Robert Jones.
Check out the new video above, starring Mark Hammill, John Hamm and Weird Al Yankovich, among others. A lot of money was spent on it. I have no idea why.
(That wasn't actually a picture of Prince. But it was a Prince Christmas tree bauble. You can buy them on eBay. Or you might prefer to save your money.)
Two turtle doves...
1. Number One.
And because I couldn't find a song with a partridge in the title, I settled instead for this gentleman.
Andy Partridge.
Andy Partridge in a pear tree.
Here's a seasonal song from the man in question.
And, to close, the very best version of The Twelve Days of Christmas, from Father Jack himself, Frank Kelly...
