Kingfisher

The kingfisher keeps watch
Over water smooth as silk
The world holds its breath

Emergency On Planet Earth by Jamiroquai

Jay Kay from Jamiroquai became something of a figure of fun in the 90s, known for his taste in fancy cars and even fancier headwear, earning the nickname of the Prat in the Hat. However, they managed to get at least a couple of very successful earworms into the charts so they must have been doing something right.

How does this album hold up nowadays? Surprisingly well, to be honest. They are channelling a lot of the jazz funk feel of 70s era Stevie Wonder, which is quite a feat for someone from Lancashire. It’s not doing anything particularly revolutionary, unless you count going against the 90s zeitgeist of grunge and Britpop as that.

I think I enjoyed it more today than I did back in the day, with a new appreciation for jazz funk and fusion styles. The only grating element is the use of the didgeridoo which is both cultural appropriation and has unfortunate associations with a certain disgraced (and now deceased) Australian cartoonist. Given the choice, I’d listen to Stevie Wonder or Herbie Hancock, but these are a pretty good alternative.

Hat-tastic!

Withered Grass

The long, hot summer
Left a patch of withered grass
Resow in the spring

O.G. Original Gangster by Ice T

Oh no, not another gangsta rap album, was my first reaction. I then read some reviews that said that this was smarter and less overtly misogynistic than other examples of the genre, so with trepidation I pressed play.

The first track was drearily predictable schtick about body bags which was then followed by an excruciatingly embarrassing skit. Unless Mr T is an ardent supporter of the protected constitutional status of the Church of England then I don’t think that ‘Antidisestablishmentarianism’ means what he thinks it means.

After that, I rapidly lost patience with the usual stream of mother-effin n words and the usual misogyny, which is a shame because some of the samples and beats sounded interesting, but I think I’ll just go and listen to the originals.

Antidisestablishmentarianism-tastic!

Faith by George Michael

Even though I wasn’t in the right demographic for Wham’s cheesy teeny-bop pop in the early 80s, they were the soundtrack to many of the school discos that I went to, although I’m still not sure about the financial viability of Club Tropicana. I wasn’t expecting to hear from George Michael again after Wham split up which made this album from 1987 something of a revelation.

From the striking cover art and the video that accompanied the breezy title track it was clear that he was now a long way from the world of wise guys realising the danger in emotional ties. This is an album about exploring love (and sex), taking chances and the risk of being hurt in the process. It’s all the more poignant because we know in retrospect of his struggles to come to terms with his sexual identity.

George Michael may have had his inner turmoil, but he didn’t deserve the gleeful monstering that he suffered at the hands of certain tabloid newspapers when he came out in the 90s. In spite of this, he stayed true to himself and it was only after his untimely death from heart disease in 2016 that his numerous quiet acts of charity and generosity came to light.

This still probably isn’t the sort of album I would listen to on a regular basis, but the honesty and humanity of George Michael shines through in a way that is clear to see.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks

Gentile or Jew 

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, 

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. 

T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” IV

I don’t think I’ve re-read this since it first came out, so when I saw it going cheap on Kindle I picked it up. It’s Banks first novel set in his Sci-Fi Culture universe - a utopian, post scarcity communist society run by hyper-intelligent AI minds usually embodied in starships with punning names.

This book takes the viewpoint of someone opposed to the Culture, fighting on the other side of an intergalactic war allied with some spectacularly warlike aliens called Idirans. Bora Horza Gobachul (Banks does like his expansive character names) is the protagonist - a ‘changer’ who can alter his appearance and is one of the few people with the permission to land on Scharr’s World, a dead planet guarded by a god-like entity.

Why would he want to go there? Well, his Idiran masters would like him to capture a Culture Mind who is believed to have crash landed there during a space battle and is hiding out in the underground defence tunnels of a long forgotten civilisation, wiped out in a nuclear apocalypse and now preserved as a memorial to the folly of war.

There follows an entertaining series of events as Horza teams up with an independent band of pirate mercenaries (straight out of a Traveller campaign) through jungles, vast orbital rings, high stakes gambling games on the eve of destruction and a spaceship chase through the insides of an impossibly huge transport ship. He is pursued by a Culture agent from the ‘Special Circumstances’ division who all have a licence to act with impunity and carry out any number of dirty tricks in the name of winning the war.

Shenanigans ensue, and the last third or so is set in the tunnels of the dead planet where nuclear powered trains once shuttled back and forth at random. The locations are all described with considerable sense of wonder at the scale of these sci-fi mega structures, and there are some memorable characters, including a sarcastic floating drone who tags along with the pirates against its will.

Banks himself was a fervent socialist and anti-war campaigner, so it’s interesting to see his approach to considering why a war against an expansionist religious entity might be justified from the viewpoints of characters who are of little significance in the grand scheme of things, but who are bearing witness to conflict on an almost unimaginable scale.

It’s not the best Culture novel (that would be Player of Games or Use of Weapons for me) but it’s a good introduction to the setting.

Dub Housing by Pere Ubu

Ok, it’s not dub and it doesn’t have much to do with housing of any description, but what it is is a quirky, post punk experimental album with some nice touches as well as some deeply irritating ones. On, the latter, a weird buzzing on the first track made me think my speakers were broken and odd pitch shifts on a later track sounded like a Walkman with dead batteries playing a cassette that had been left out in the sun.

However, as with similar albums from bands like The Residents, I tried to embrace the weird and started to enjoy the experience including a deeply bizarre riff on the sea shanty “Drunken Sailor”. I can see a route from this to other post punk bands that followed, making this an album that I’m glad I listened to, but probably not one that I will go back to.

Spodyody-tastic!