One thing is now clear
They knew, they all bloody knew
Doomed us all to hell
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Now I Got Worry by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Sometimes you just want music to be an enjoyable racket, with a group thrashing around and having a good time, without overthinking anything. This album does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a mix of blues, random screams, punk riffs, a bit of dub, weird shit and a very creditable Elvis impression.
You really can’t go wrong with tracks like Fuck Shit Up and Chicken Dog which brings back veteran bluesman Rufus C Thomas to reprise his classic hits Funky Chicken and Walk the Dog, and apparently have a whale of a time doing it.
https://album.link/gb/i/1100060926
Monday, March 23, 2026
Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd by Lynyrd Skynyrd
Solid southern blues/rock and featuring the epic nine minute Freebird, this album should be up my street, but unfortunately it comes with a big red flag - literally in this case. Lynyrd Skynrd (probably the only band named after a strict PE teacher) made a thing of using a confederate flag as part of their stage set and on album covers. They also had a beef with Neil Young’s song ‘Alabama’ and wrote ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ as a response, saying it was unfair to blame the whole of the South for slavery. Given that their music owes a huge debt to the delta blues, this is a disingenuous stance to say the least.
A plane crash in 1977 killed lead singer and front man Ronnie Van Zant, two other band members, their roadie and the two pilots of their charter plane. The surviving members reformed the band 10 years later with Van Zant’s younger brother Johnny as singer, but carried on using the flag until 2012, dropping it for a while and cravenly restoring it for a while after ‘fans’ complained.
Giving this two stars purely for memories of Freebird always being played at school discos that I went to as a kid.
https://album.link/gb/i/1440838012
Sunday, March 22, 2026
One Battle After Another
I went into this film not knowing a great deal about it, other than it was this year's Oscar winner. It opens with an audacious raid by a rag tag left wing revolutionary group on an immigration camp on the Mexican border to free prisoners being held there. Whilst Pat (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is seemingly in charge of little more than letting off some celebratory fireworks his partner, the marvellously named Perfida Beverley Hills (Teyanna Taylor) sexually humiliates the camp commandant Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn).
After an attempted bombing, Perfida is intercepted by Lockjaw who it seems has a fetishistic obsession with her and blackmails her into meeting for sex. She winds up pregnant, but this doesn't seem to quench her revolutionary fervour (one striking shot shows her heavily pregnant and joyfully firing an automatic rifle), and after giving birth to a daughter she returns to the fight and is finally arrested during a bank raid.
Cut to 16 years later. Pat is now living off grid under an alias as Bob with daughter Willa (played by Chase Infiniti). Lockjaw has been invited to join a secretive White Supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club so determines to hunt down Willa to hide any evidence that he might once have had an interracial relationship. Hijinks and ultra violence ensue.
I'm still not sure quite what to make of this film. There are obvious parallels with the current situation with right wing racist paramilitaries hunting down immigrants and carrying out summary executions of undesirables. However, the revolutionaries seem to be more rooted in the radical chic of the 1970s than contemporary movements like Antifa. The film was adapted from the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon which was set between the late 60s and 1984, which might explain this though.
There is an uneasy tension between the truly vile politics of the Christmas Adventurers and almost farcical/slapstick humour as acid casualty Pat tries and fails to remember his identifying passcodes, worries about charging his phone, and then falls off a roof to be tasered by the police whilst on the run.
The film is also on the long side at over two and half hours, cramming an awful lot of stuff in there with some great action sequences and car chases that feel almost grafted in from a classic 70s style thriller. The score by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead is also worthy of note and underpins the action nicely.
Not what I was expecting, but worth a watch.
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Stella Gibbons began her writing career as a journalist in the late 1920s with spells at the Evening Standard and The Lady, reviewing books for the latter and getting something of a reputation as a snarky reviewer. One genre that seemed to particularly irritate her were the then fashionable rural romances, known as 'loam and lovechild' stories, featuring purple prose and overblown plots about love amidst the harsh lives of the simple working folk down on the farm.
For her first (and best known) novel, she created the character of Flora Poste, an infuriatingly chipper young gel from London, recently orphaned and wondering what to do with her life given that she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She writes to all of her various relatives, before settling on visiting the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, who seem to have owed an unspecified obligation to her late father.
The initial impressions are not promising - the farmhouse is as bleak as the name and the labour is back breaking and barely profitable. The Starkadders are an eccentric family, to say the least, from Judith (Flora's cousin) and husband Amos (a hellfire preacher), their sons Seth and Reuben (who one imagines spend their live striding around shirtless), Elfine (who lives up to her name) and various other half-brothers, distant relatives and aged farm hands. Most ominous of all is the rarely seen family matriarch Ada Doom, who spends most of her time hidden away in her room complaining of once having seen 'something nasty in the woodshed' that has evidently left her scarred for life. All of them seem to relish the misery of living on the farm scratching a living by scranletting two hundred furrows or clettering the dirty dishes with a twig.
Flora soon settles in and briskly sets about interfering in their lives with a view to improving their respective lots and maybe finding out what the debt incurred to her father might have been. This ranges from offering unsolicited advice on contraception to fecund farm maids, buying a dish mop to make washing up easier than using twigs, attending a hellfire sermon, to arranging a suitable wedding match for Elfine instead of the unpromising sounding cousin Urk. It becomes clear that she is doing this out of a kind hearted nature rather than any ulterior motive, without any thought for her own gain.
Gibbons writes in a nicely observed parody of the florid style of writers like DH Lawrence with scarcely hidden sexual undertones - to quote a passage:
The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, his …
She also invents many fictitious terms for rural matters - scranletting, clettering (with a clettering stick), the ubiquitous weed sukebind and the salacious sounding activity of mollocking which usually results in the unplanned pregnancy of some or other unfortunate maiden. Most of the rural characters speak in the sort of accent described by Archers script writers as 'Mummerset' and I imagine that such comedy stalwarts as Joe Grundy and Walter Gabriel would have felt right at home down on Cold Comfort Farm.
The overall effect is generally very funny, albeit occasionally hard going to read involving checking odd looking words with the kindle dictionary to see if they are real or not. Oddly enough this book is technically science fiction - written in 1932 but set some years in the future from that point with personal planes and video phones.
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