Have we been too Harsh on Alanis Morrisette?

Critical re-appraisal time, prompted by me hearing my sweetly singing colleague quietly singing "Ironic" by Alanis Morrisette. Twenty years old now, that song. Crazy.

(BTW - "Crazy" by Aerosmith is even older, 23 years old).

She had an amazing impact, did Alanis. I thought "You oughta know" was astonishing when I heard it, even if it was castrated by Radio 1. "Are you thinking of me, When you __________ her" my tower hi-fi used to say. What? "Instruct?" "Massage?" "Cook?".

Oh. Fuck. Oh fuck.

But then a bit later "Ironic" came out, and things started going a bit haywire for our favourite Canadian chanteuse. First up, people began to talk about her acceptable, but hardly Cindy Crawford, looks. "She's got a big behind" said others. "Is that a hint of a moustache problem?" mused an unsubtle minority.

But the real problem was "Ironic" itself. It wasn't. Ironic. English lit. smart-arses have been on its case ever since.

"Oh, what she's singing about isn't ironic" they would chirp. "They are just things that piss you off a bit. That's not irony. Tchah."

And looking at the song 20 years down the line, they are right. It isn't really ironic. Not being able to smoke on a fag break is an annoyance. Dying the day after winning the lottery is a pisser as well. Rain on your wedding day is a drag, but it isn't even remotely ironic. "Ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife" is just bad culinary planning.

However, I'm going to be charitable. I think being a chap who is afraid to fly, who then musters up all his courage and steel to get on a place only to be immediately killed in a plane crash; well, at the very least that is certainly in the ball park of irony. I might even be so bold to call it, here and now, actually Ironic.

Sorry Alanis. We've been far too harsh on you. We should take at least one, tiny bit of it back.

Even if we can't forgive the unflattering nudity in the "Thank You" video.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.05.15

The Space Music of Doctor Phibes

The music of space. Been on my mind a lot recently, with the thoughts of the poor Philae lander all on its own, batteries dying on a cold and hostile comet before it fell into what seems likely to be a permanent sleep.

What sounds does Philae hear in its sleep out beyond the orbit of Mars. Has The Sandman's sister Death called on it to take it across to the "other realm".

A band that always transports me into other space dimensions is Doctor Phibes and the House of Wax Equations. You almost certainly haven't heard of them, they were a very short lived concern in the early 90s, one that if I remember right very sadly came to an end when their charismatic vocalist Howie suffered mental health problems that ended in tragedy. I saw them live only once, at the 1993 Phoenix Festival, and can vouch for out there their music was. So hypnotic.

They were much better experienced live than on record, although their one album "Whirlpool" is a psychedelic classic. Enjoy their single "Hazy Lazy Hologram" and let those echoing guitars wash over you.

"Between Thought and Expression..."

"...there lies a lifetime."

Lou Reed wrote these words in 1968-69, and he was clearly a far more considered man than I am. For his statement is sometimes true, a thought can sometimes gently stimulate the synapses for what seems like an age, before impulse finally makes its way to sensuous, charming mouth or expressive hands, like the spark expanding along the metal loops of a Tesla coil before it crackles into reality, a flash of inspiration in a bar; a bedroom; or even on rainy streets where puddles are irridescent with oil dropped from ill maintained cars.

The person brings forth elegance and flourish like a skater posing at the end of a spin. The effect is deadly.

How wonderful it must be to be able to allow your brain to effortlessly pick the right thing to say or do, for it to act with studied contemplation before it lands the bowler on the hat-stand without even looking.

Me, I operate at the two other extremes. One is where the lifetime's contemplation becomes eternal, a never ending lightning streaked fog of indecision and panicked pondering, agonising over whether something is the right thing to do. By the time the decision is made, the moment is gone and the action is trapped within a pile of dust long after you've died.

The other extreme is where expression is so fast, it actually proceeds thought and almost rips it' way backwards up your spine to explode a “Oh my god, how could I have said that?” bomb in your mind. Sometimes its the only way to try and break the cycle of obsession described above, but the dangers are countless.

Most of the time you just end up mentally slapping yourself in the face, or scrubbing your knees with a brillo pad.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 04.03.14

Sister Ray and the Transgression in my Head

I've out the song on now, the classic Velvet Underground festival of sound, the scratch of guitatrs, the stilleto organ stabs and the metronomic pound of Mo Tucker's drumming.

The song tells a tall tale of a drag party, where sailors and queens suck each other off while observers struggle with mainlining heroin in the dark, collapsed veins under hep stained skin, struggling livers, the nod out to avant garde Ornette Coleman sax riffs. All is presided over by Sister Ray, King Drag Queen of the Lower East side, seducer of seamen, conductor of sex parties and orgiastic ejaculations on the dirty carpet, a carpet littered with needles, bent spoons and dead lemons.

Cotton buds stained brown. Oxidised blood stains on the arms of the sofa covered in burn holes, exhusted hipsters and smacked out poets. There is a panic as the police bust the door down, cocks are hastily put away and the stashes are thrown out of the window, dirty dock water laps against the warehouse pilings, the hep cats climb down the iconic New York fire escapes.

That's the song. And it never happens here and I want it to, I want to play this very damn fucking song and watch it all happen in front of me, violent fucking, screaming maniacs dancing with whips, bad poets having their tongues cut out and aliens landing in a black spaceship in the courtyard.

The aliens take the drag queens and EMOs away for pentrative medical tests; and I play guitar and kick the face in of the chav trying to spoil the party...make him kneel as if for a faceful and then knock his teeth down his throat, harvest his skin and throw him out the door for the urban foxes. Leave us alone, this is the world of the elites not the peasants, the coolest people doing the most sordid and unspeakable things and leaving marks and stickiness all over the place, as I watch emotionlessly, drinking black rum from the bottle and occasionally spitting it in people's faces like toxic phlegm. The epileptic lady and the boxing helmet bops, grand mal attack in the car park when she leaves. People engaging in Public Displays of Affection told to either fuck or get out of the room.

For I am Sister Ray, in a waistcoat and bowler hat, and what I say goes.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.02.14

Timepiece and the Rednex of Futurism

Timepiece was the place to go once upon a time, on Thursday nights.

It was a fascinating place. Pub area downstairs full of signs and gadgets and geegaws, and a club area upstairs to blast your ears off and strobe burn your retinas. Thursday night was the “Indie Night”, the “Alternative” alternative to the cheese elsewhere in the city for the sporty types to dance to. By now starting to manifest the illness that would blight me over the next few years, I would always take any chance for distraction, get drunk, go, and get drunker.

I could in those days.

The interesting thing about Timepiece on Thursday was that it wasn't a University dominated scene, the art college folk and non students would go, revelling in the fact that loud and gobshitey Rugby boors were not present. The weekends offered “Angel Dust – Harsh Lights and 20^th Century Alienation” but I only went once. I was alienated by the fact that there was only three people there. No, Thursday was my Timepiece night.

I didn't fit in. Not at all. I was a shoegazier kid, with hair on the relatively short - if Eraserheady – side. This was an Industrial slash Metal night, with people to match. The boys I don't remember, apart from lots of dyed black hair, but the girls were 11 hole Docs, stripey tights (purple and green, or black and green) and leather skirts. Diaphanous black blouses. I wanted to call them goths, but never did, goth was an un-word in the early 90s, the scene had died the moment Tony James had joined the Sisters of Mercy.

No, this was the Industrial Age, the Molten Metal future, a future of piercings and heavyweight jewellery and paraboots, rank dreads and Mad Dog 20 20. The music told us that, it made your fillings fall out and liquified your kidney stones while your irises leaked their colour onto the sticky floor. Butthole Surfers, Revolting Cocks, Ministry...later on Les Claypool and his Primus bassoodlings would emerge.

Only it wasn't. The Industrial music beloved of the Timepiece crowd was “Cotton Eye Joe” in leather waistcoats, Rednex with skeleton draped microphones. The obsession of the music was a lavatorial one with one horse town America, hot rods, race cars, and outwardly het as anything men getting all Tom of Finland with each other. It was a primitive racket, leading not to a world covered in steel and glittering towers of industry, but of dustbowl primitives skinning lizards in an unforgiving heat.

Powerful? Yes, as hell! Fantastic music. But it was taking us backwards, not forwards. Thank god for Trent Reznor.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 15.01.14

When the Snowman Brings the Snow...

Courtesy of Roy Wood of Wizzard, this is another little lyrical poser that Christmas songs throw at us.

How exactly does a snowman “bring the snow”?

A snowman cannot bring snow. He is snow surely, and can only bring snow if snow has already been brought with which to construct him, so he can then bring snow. Another snowman might have already have brought snow, but then, who brought the snow that constructed him?

To consider this, I suppose in all honesty, would have taken Mr Wood a long way from an all time seasonal favourite (and pension plan).

A snowman already constructed in another location where snow was already in place, could theoretically bring snow with him when he visits Mr Wood's vicinity. But this is assuming that the temperature in Birmingham was cold enough that the snowman and the snow he was bringing wouldn't melt, and if it was cold enough there might already have been snow there, so the snowman bringing some would have been pointless.

However, it has just been pointed out to me that I might be making an assumption vis-a-vis the nature of the snowman. A milkman is not made out of milk, yet he brings milk. So it could well be that a snowman is actually some sort of tradesman, who's job is to deliver snow – possibly by means of a float – to people in the Black Country.

The snowman thus delivers snow to adults, and also to children, so that they might “Take it!!!!”

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23.12.13

Spaceman Came Travelling

I haven't heard this song for such a long time.

This is of course no bad thing. Chris de Burgh is a rolled up jacket sleeved, mono browed buffoon who's best known song is a paean to strange love with Cardinal Wolsey in drag. I have never paid the ferryman, I never even fixed the price, he drowned Mr de Burgh for me for free.

It's Christmas you see, and you'd think Chris' Von Daniken inspired talk of the birth of Messiahs being a 2000 yearly thing heralded by the appearance of the Angel Gabriel in a spaceship would be dominating our local gold station's seasonal output. But they have better taste.

Driving Home for Christmas by that other craggy Chris is their favourite. Possibly because it doesn't contain such lyrical gems as;

"He followed a light and came down to a shed,
Where a mother and child were lying there on a bed,"

Of course, it gets better than that.

We've always wondered what form our first communications with a sentient extra-terrestrial lifeform would be. We've sent them plaques with naked pictures on, a record with birdsong on, or a beamed message to the globular cluster Messier 13 with a digitised image of DNA within. So far, we've heard nothing back, and we're not even sure that if we did, we'd recognise it.

Chris de Burgh himself is in no doubt.

"And it went la la la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la la."

Having travelled "for light years of time" - oh and by the way, light years are a measure of distance, not time, you fool - you'd have thought Homo Superior might have something more interesting than that to say on a First Contact. If the Vulcans had said that to us that wondrous day after Zephraim Cochrane had got to Warp 1, we'd have thought they were taking the piss.

"Gort! La la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la" - well, that wouldn't have helped.

"Ulla-la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la la" is just about acceptable I suppose, but visitors, travelling spacemen, stick to "Take me to your leader."

Works every time.

The Most Sci Fi and Retro of Videos - "Tonight Tonight"

The Smashing Pumpkins, or rather Billy Corgan for the "they" of the band is actually the "he" of he, are mainly snotty, childish, bratty, whiney and annoying.

They can also be lush, melodic, moving and beautiful. None of their work epitomises this more than their string driven masterpiece "Tonight, Tonight" and the promo video that goes with it.

Taken directly from the first science fiction film ever made, Georges Melies 1902 silent work "A Trip to the Moon" - which itself was inspired by Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" - the video is an overwhelming retro-steampunk joy, with comet maidens, moon men and a selection of vintage style clothes I would die to be able to wear. Sound and image marries perfectly as our intrepid adventurers take humanity's first ever steps on another world as violins soar above the man in the moon's sinister face.

It is a world I still wish existed somewhere.

Along with "1979", a promo that reminds me of an all to brief period of typical teenage behaviour in my life, this represents the highpoint of The Smashing Pumpkin's creative output, and shows that for all Billy Corgan's greater-than-moon-sized ego, there was a time when he did indeed have "it".

Watch and enjoy, time and again.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 11/08/2013

STORY - I am the Resurrection

Written while listening to the famous Stone Roses track of the same name.

I Am The Resurrection

I was brought down to the shore and nailed so firmly to the iron cross you could have dissolved me in acid and I'd still be hanging there.

In washed the sea and a wreckage of razer shells, mermaids purses and starfish drank the blood from the mud as it settled from my wrists and ankles. Moth faced children laughed at me as they made sandcastles that the incoming tide just bounced off.

This happened every day for three years, until the tide rusted the foot of the cross away and I toppled sideways into the surflife, choking on the sand and salt, being stung by mocking Portugese Men'O War and having my welts pissed on by acid bladdered thugs from the local seaside estate, straight through their tracksuits.

The powers that be decided that I had suffered enough, and when the tide finally washed over by sunburnt head, that was the end of me. The blue sea faded to indigo, then black. It was over.

Then the dawn came, unexpected, out of time. Secured between four horses ridden by saints, slowly moving away from each other, an inch a day...

It never ends.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20/03/2013

STORY - To the Centre, Rosas!

Instant story written at the library, inspired by the music of Steve Reich and the dancing of Anna Terese de Keersmaecker

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 04/10/2012