Ducks

The troll raised his club
Thwack! Armour clanged. Feathers flew
The monster grinned, yelled "duck!"

Definitely Maybe by Oasis

Back in the 90s I was on a junior programmer on a work road trip with my boss at the time - a lovely posh, tweedy lady of a certain age - when Cigarettes & Alcohol came on the radio. “Oooh - I like this one, reminds of the music I used to listen to when I was your age”.

I’m not saying this is a bad album, but I have a slight contrarian tendency to avoid things that are popular without any particular reason. This definitely caught the public imagination during the height of Britpop, along with the media hyped rivalry between Blur and Oasis - for the record, I was a Pulp fan mainly because they counted as a local Sheffield band for me.

Listening back to this now I enjoyed bits of it more than I thought I might. However, as the saying goes, this album is both good and original. Unfortunately the parts that are good aren’t original and vice versa. It definitely captures the feeling of a live performance but apparently the recording process was anything but spontaneous. I also can’t quite get past the faux laddishness and Liam’s nasal Manc drawl that turns the word sunshine into “sun-sheeee-ine”

Oh well, after all it’s just rock ’n’ roll.

Lonely, Lightning

Lone tree standing tall
Sky shattered like broken glass
Burning heart of fire

The Slider by T. Rex

I don’t think I appreciated until today quite how much Tony Visconti was involved in shaping the glam sound of the early 70s. As well as his well known collaborations with Bowie, he produced all of T. Rex’s albums including string arrangements and backing vocals as required. This album has a notably heavier rock sound - even if Metal Guru couldn’t quite be classified as heavy metal, Chariot Choogle is most definitely heading that way.

The quieter tracks are probably a better showcase for Bolan’s unique and slightly fey vocals, and there are definite similarities with Bowie’s sound on the album closer Main Man. We can only wonder what sort of directions Bolan’s career might have taken if not for his tragic death in a car crash in 1978. As it is we are left with a fine collection of a songs and a haunting picture on the album cover (probably snapped by Tony Visconti rather than Ringo as the album credit has it).

Morning dew, cold

Cold and refreshing
Now nerves jangling, heart racing
Oh, wait, *morning* dew

One Nation Under a Groove by Funkadelic

Along with James Brown and Sly Stone, George Clinton is one of the founding fathers of funk (which, let’s face it would make an excellent band name). During the late sixties and seventies he was the driving force behind two seminal bands, Parliament and Funkadelic, together known as the P-Funk collective.

For this album, Funkadelic play with genre much as a cat plays with a mouse. They combine funk, rock, prog, soul and even a bit of disco into a hugely influential album. You can definitely hear the genesis of Prince’s sound here where rock guitars, keyboards and sexy vocals are seamlessly melded in a funk-tastic whole. It’s a bit scatological in places (and when I say a bit, I mean a lot) which can get a bit tiresome, but I’ll give them a pass on that.

The highlights on this release are the title track and an amazing live medley, which showcases what a phenomenally talented group of musicians they were.

Who says a funk band can’t play rock?!

The English Patient

Another Oscar winner and another long film that we watched in two sittings. The film opens with a sweeping desert vista and a fiery plane crash that leaves the pilot horribly burned and in the care of a medical convoy picking its way through the chaotic aftermath of the Italian campaign in World War II with land mines and unexploded bombs. Realising that the mysterious English patient hasn’t got long to live, nurse Hana (played by Juliette Binoche) resolves to stay behind and care for him in the bombed out ruins of a monastery. The man (played by Ralph Fiennes) slowly reveals more of his memories of what happened to him, going back to an archeological expedition in the North African desert just before the war where he was a pilot scouting ahead and making maps of the terrain.

The expedition is joined by a husband and wife team, and Count László Almásy (as we find out his name to be) starts a passionate and doomed love affair with Katherine (played by Kristin Scott Thomas) told through various flashbacks as the war in North Africa takes hold. The contemporary narrative in the present day mirrors the flashbacks as various other people come to the monastery - sapper Kip Singh (Naveen Andrews) defusing bombs and mines and David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), a Canadian spy bearing the scars of torture at the hands of the Nazis.

The reveal of the truth of the matter is heartbreaking but sensitively handled. The film is gorgeously shot, especially for the desert scenes although my main criticism would be that the native inhabitants of the area are merely background details for the colonial English to ‘discover’. I guess that’s true to life, but it still feels uncomfortable.