kevinisabastard

23 May 2021 – This Is England

kevinisabastard, , , , , Leave a comment

This week, the YouTube algorithm decided I was going to be obsessed with “This Is England” for a few days. I watched the film years ago and remembered it as being very good but I had never watched the TV series that followed. YouTube recommended the “Shaun meets the Skinheads” clip. It’s a great clip, a great introduction to the characters and a really good example of the dialogue and chemistry of the film. It’s been a long time since I’ve properly binged anything but that clip kicked off an urgent viewing of the film and series and a lot of shitty promo interviews.

I really like the whole series. The characters are great and the stories work really well. I love the exploration of subcultures and the creation of worlds in stories in general and “This Is England” is a really immersive series for that. The cast are very solid and the acting is very natural. I think that’s something that’s missing from most film or TV with very young casts. The improvisation element to the acting obviously helps with that but that’s a bit ask of young actors so it’s a real testament to all the performances. That ties the actors to the characters very closely and I wonder if that is part of why so many of the cast have had low key careers outside of the show despite their obvious talent. I would hope that it’s by choice and that young actors don’t want to stay in acting when they grow up, but I can see how they could become typecast since there are so many iconic roles in the series.

“This Is England”(2007)

I think the film is great because it sells you these characters. As I said above, I had seen the film but not the TV series that followed, but I was sold on the characters based on the film, I would have watched anything they did next. The characters are so natural and real. The atmosphere is is quite light to begin with. The scenarios are childhood scenarios. The group of skinheads are actually quite sensitive. Then when Stephen Graham appears as Combo, there’s a real tonal shift. Things get very tense and a little scary. Suddenly, Thomas Turgoose’s Shaun is a mini grown man. More than that, he’s a tiny evil racist. There’s brain washing and angry men dealing with their emotions terribly, on an individual and national political level. The soundtrack is also solid, I have a lot of time for those Toots and Maytals hits.

“This Is England ’86” (2010)

My hopes for the TV show were very low. As the writer and director of the series, Shane Meadows, has said, the bar was pretty low at this time for movie from film to television. And there were some big changes to the show. The focus shifts from Shaun to the wider cast a bit more. It follows Woody, played by Joe Gilgun, and Lol, played by Vicky McClure, more closely. It deals with that phase where those two in particular are supposed to be growing up. There’s much goofier moments. Meggy and Banjo, who were Combo’s henchmen, seem to become a comic relief duo. Meggy’s heart attack is played for laughs and a distraction from other growing issues. There’s also much grimmer moments. The tension isn’t as scary, it’s more a sense of dread as things fall apart. There are two very disturbing scenes however towards the end which are very tough to watch and link back to the gruesome pinnacle of the film.

“This is England ’88” (2011)

This season is super fucking grim. There’s something about basing it around Christmas that multiplies the bleakness. It’s a very honest season. Everyone is heartbroken to some degree. It’s tough going because they’re all characters that I had come to love. There’s lots of exploration of the break up of romantic relationships in art, but the break up of friendship is always one that gets me.

“This is England ’90” (2015)

’90 is a great season as someone who enjoys the subcultures. Gadget, played by Andrew Ellis, has always been the best cultural indicator character and I really appreciated his Madchester look. The extremes of the show get more polarized. The goofiness of Flip and Higgy is cranked up and the the bleakness of Combo’s return is incredibly tough going.

There’s been talk of another series and lots of talk about it being finished and it’s a dangerous thing. The series has been fantastic and it’s been amazing to follow characters as they grow, but there’s a real balancing act in giving an audience what they want and the the integrity of it all. It can’t and shouldn’t go on forever and there’s a lot of merit in ending on a high.

23 May 2021 – This Is England

20 May 2021 – Freedom! ’90 by George Michael

kevinisabastard, , , 1 Comment

You can listen to “Freedom! ’90” by George Michael here.

I was thinking about George Michael and I was going to write about how I first heard him. I went to listen to that first song that I’d heard and I got side tracked on the way so that will have to wait for another day. I watched “This is England ’90” today and as well as the similarity in title, I copped the similarity between “Freedom! 90” and some of the soundtrack to the show, most obviously “Step On” by The Happy Mondays. I thought that was a fun coincidence.

George Michael was a tremendously talented songwriter and his lyrics could be cutting or cheeky or emotional all at the same time. “Freedom! ’90” is a classic example. There’s criticism of the music business, all wrapped up in an incredible pop song. You can see that in the video which features Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Linda Evangelista and was directed by David Fincher.

The link back to Madchester tunes isn’t just that piano sound. The beat is sampled from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer”. If you do any reading about Madchester and the sound, there’s a quote from Joshua Clover about how the dance beats were descended from the James Brown track.

I have a huge amount of time for George Michael as a singer, songwriter and as a man. He has an incredible and unique voice, he has written some truly fantastic songs and he seemed like a very good dude.

20 May 2021 – Freedom! ’90 by George Michael

19 May 2021 – Diver by Canterbury

kevinisabastard, , , Leave a comment

Listen to “Diver” by Canterbury here.

There was a phase around 2011 where people were obsessed with serious over ear headphones. You had to wear them around your neck all the time so people knew you were listening to something interesting. It was a real wanker move that I was gleefully guilty of. Conceptually, the explosion of big headphones made sense around that time. The mid 2000s were a time of peak poor quality illegal downloads being blared through mobile phone speakers. Then towards the end of the decade there was a swing towards sound quality snobbery that coincided with my late teens.

One of my favourite things about serious headphones was sometimes finding songs that had way more layers than you originally noticed. My little mind would be blown sitting on the 103 bus coming up Whitworth Road in the evenings fairly regularly. “Diver” is probably the main song that I think of when I remember that feeling.

Canterbury were an English band at a weird time for English rock bands. They were kinda heavy but too good looking to be marketed as a proper heavy band so they ended up as a kind of a rock band for teenage girls. I went to see them in 2011 without having really listened to them and then downloaded their free album “Thank You”. I gave the album a listen and the chorus of “Diver” was absolutely massive. If you skip to the one minute mark you’ll hear what I mean. The drums have that indie disco rhythm going. There’s one guitar playing a riff that kinda goes in circles. There’s a second guitar throwing in disco chords. And then the bass riff has this great slide and then grooves along. You’ve got all these complete layers and it feels like each layer is a band member. Lots of bands have more instruments than band members in their songs and they lose that band feeling. “Diver” on a decent speaker makes Canterbury feel like a real band, all doing different things to make the same song.

19 May 2021 – Diver by Canterbury

18 May 2021 – Love Shack by The B-52s

kevinisabastard, , , Leave a comment

I’m trying something new this time. I’m linking to the song at the beginning of the post. That way, you can have a little listen and hopefully hear what I’m writing about as you read. So…

You can listen to “Love Shack” by The B-52s here.

I started writing a post today about guilty pleasures. I was writing about how what we generally think of as guilty pleasures are perfectly acceptable things to like and associating guilt with them is ridiculous. What we should do is collectively reevaluate guilty pleasures. We should actually feel guilty when we listen to Chris Brown or Morrissey. People who do bad things but make music that we like. I was going to write about a Morrissey song, but I don’t feel comfortable supporting his music on my little platform, despite how good I think some of his songs are.

Instead, I’m going in the other direction. I’m sure there are lots of people that would feel that “Love Shack” is a guilty pleasure. I think “Love Shack” is an incredible song. It’s camp and goofy. The singer, Fred Schneider has a cartoon voice. There’s call and response lyrics and everyone knows the words. The surf guitar riff is iconic. There’s something powerful about it in the way it makes me want to dance that can’t quite figure out. There’s something about the punchiness of the snare sound that sounds like the drummer is all in on this track. “Love Shack” one of my all time favourite songs and I feel zero guilt for that.

18 May 2021 – Love Shack by The B-52s

16 May 2021 – The Italian Job and the other Italian Job

kevinisabastard, , , Leave a comment

The original idea with these weekend blog posts was that they were supposed to be longer pieces of writing but they weren’t fully intended to be film based every time. What has developed in my mind is this idea that the Sunday posts are based on film projects. The problem there is that the size of projects can take up a huge amount of time. The Marvel films took me weeks to watch and that’s not sustainable every week. The Guy Ritchie films were a good sized project in terms of the amount of prep I can put in and the amount of content I can put together about each film. So my approach now is that I have a number of large scale projects ongoing at the same time and in the meantime I’m also looking for smaller projects that seem interesting to me.

During the week, I watched “The Italian Job”(2003). It was not very good. It was bad to the point where I started to wonder why it was made. By the time it was over, I had made up my mind that good actors sometimes get roped into making bad remakes/sequels/reworks of old films because of nostalgia for the original. That made sense to me. “The Italian Job”(2003) made no sense to me. It’s not a real remake. It’s not a sequel. It’s just a heist film about stealing gold in Mini Coopers. There are some of the same names. At one point they even reference the original. It’s just a conceptual nightmare. The execution isn’t even that bad. If the film had a different name it would be acceptably forgettable. It probably wouldn’t have got the budget though. To be fair the action scenes and the car chase looked pretty decent so fair play to them for that.

The cast is peak 2003. Mark Wahlberg is a lame leading man. He pushed the plot forward but he’s just lame. I don’t fully understand the idea of romance between his character and Charlize Theron. Her father was like a father to him so that seems fairly suspect. If Seth Green’s character were around today he would be MeToo’d. Ed Norton is a pantomime villain and has criminal facial hair. He was the real mystery to me. I didn’t get why he was there and the only rational reason I could think of was that maybe he liked the original.

I really liked the original when I was a little kid and so I decided to rewatch it to see if that was enough to justify the 2003 effort. It’s probably not. “The Italian Job”(1969) is a very strange film. Very British. Very shouty. Very problematic. It hasn’t aged particularly well. The worst thing about the new version is that it makes the driving in the old one look very shitty. The car chase is pedestrian and slow and at times very pointless. Lots of the iconic scenes, like the Minis driving on to the roof of the stadium for example, are completely pointless in terms of the chase. It’s fun and cartoonish though. It makes sense that that appealed to me as a child. Any violence happens off screen. At one point, the silhouette of Michael Caine’s character gets beaten up behind smoked glass. Someone dies in a car crash in a tunnel in the dark.

It has aged terribly though and not in ways I thought about as an eight year old. Benny Hill’s appearance as a computers expert who doesn’t seem to be the full deck and has a compulsion to sexually harass larger women, is an absolute nightmare. The most unpleasant thing in the film is Michael Caine’s Charlie Croker’s threat to the mafia if he was killed. You can see it in this clip. The whole film is so pro Britain in general, that the threat of driving Italian immigrants in Britain into the sea and making them suffer made me very uneasy.

So I watched both and, to be totally honest, I could probably do with having watched neither of them. The motivation behind remaking films is an interesting idea and it makes sense to compare new and old versions. Both versions of “The Italian Job” are pretty trash. Having watched the original, I wasn’t any wiser on why Ed Norton would attach himself to the new film. It didn’t justify any real feeling of nostalgia. Then, as I sat down to write this, I did a bit of reading and it all makes sense. Ed Norton was forced to make the film due to a multi picture contract with Paramount. He didn’t want to be in the film and refused to promote it. I feel at ease in the world once more, safe in the knowledge that money is the real motivator.

16 May 2021 – The Italian Job and the other Italian Job

14 May 2021 – You Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate

kevinisabastard, , , Leave a comment

I don’t know why I know “You Sexy Thing” but it feels like one of those songs that’s always been around. I had never thought about it much until the last few years when I started thinking about how much of a banger it is.

I think “You Sexy Thing” appeared in my world around 1997 because it was in “The Full Monty”. I’ve never seen the film but I think it sparked a revival for the song. “Sex on the Beach” was out around that time and I used to sing it. As I was five years old, this resulted in parental intervention and I think it affected my brain. I categorized everything that mentioned sex or the word sexy as explicit. As a result, I thought “You Sexy Thing” was very risque as a child. In truth, the lyrics are fairly tame and almost sweet.

The song itself is iconic. There’s the lazy guitar riff that’s instantly recognisable. There’s loads going on on the bass and there has to be at least two people involved in the percussion. The best thing about “You Sexy Thing” are the vocals from Errol Brown. It ends with my favourite style of song ending, the descent into madness. Errol Brown yelping away, singing random phrases from the song as the music fades out. It always makes me feel like the sound engineer is trying to wind things down because otherwise the song will go on forever.

You can listen to “You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate here.

14 May 2021 – You Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate

13 May 2021 – The View From The Afternoon by The Artic Monkeys.

kevinisabastard, , , Leave a comment

I always really liked The Artic Monkeys’ first album “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” and I think “The View From The Afternoon” is probably everything that I like about it.

There’s jarring guitars. The bass is heavy. The drums are that kind of indie drumming that made these kind of songs into songs that you could dance to. Vocally, I always like when people sing with their own accents and lyrically, The Artic Monkeys wrote about what was going on around them in the way that they spoke. I liked the truth of it. “The View From The Afternoon” kicked off the album with a bang and I guess that’s part of why it’s stuck with me more than some of the others.

The Artic Monkeys absolutely burst onto the scene and have obviously been super successful in the years since, but I totally lost track after the first album. I guess I was probably just in a different phase when the next album appeared but I felt a bit like I got left behind as they ascended further and further to a point where they were probably the biggest band in the world. While I didn’t keep up, it would be difficult as a fan of the first album to begrudge them their success. “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” was so consistent and so good that they earned whatever they get.

You can listen to “The View From The Afternoon” by The Artic Monkeys here.

13 May 2021 – The View From The Afternoon by The Artic Monkeys.

12 May 2021 – Unforgettable by French Montana feat. Swae Lee

kevinisabastard, , , , Leave a comment

I heard “Unforgettable” when it leaked in winter 2016 and I felt like it was such a massive summer song that the timing was confusing. I was relieved when it reappeared in April 2017. It’s one of those songs that gets so huge that there’s a danger of it becoming overplayed but I’ve always loved it.

There’s an obvious dance hall influence which meant it was a summer song in 2016/2017. Then “Despacito” happened and reggaeton became the new summer indicator. Sometimes pop music leans too hard into other musical styles when they’re popular, co-opting instead of taking inspiration, but I think “Unforgettable” balances that well. There’s obviously steel drums and a classic dancehall beat but it’s definitely incorporated into a hip hop sound.

“Unforgettable” also has another of my favourite bad rap lyrics of all time, coming from French Montana: “I got a hard head, but her ass soft”. The real appeal is the Swae Lee’s choruses. His echo-y vocals on the top of the dance hall beat is top notch. There’s been some back and forth about the origins of the song and debate about how responsible French Montana was. It’s an interesting idea that Swae Lee may have had more of an input as the featured artist, than French Montana in the biggest song of his career.

You can listen to “Unforgettable” by French Montana feat. Swae Lee here.

12 May 2021 – Unforgettable by French Montana feat. Swae Lee

11 May 2021 – Heat Waves – Stripped Back by Glass Animals

kevinisabastard, , , Leave a comment

Heat Waves is a great song and has been a massive success for Glass Animals, but the Stripped Back version has just stuck with me. As the name suggests, it is stripped back to the bare bones and I think sometimes that’s an interesting exercise to see the real quality of a song.

With all the bells and whistles removed, “Heat Waves – Stripped Back” is perhaps an even better song. There’s a haunting quality to just the vocals and guitar and the use of empty space. There’s room for the lyrics to come across. The subject of the lyrics is one of those classic ideas that always terrify me, that you could love a person but a relationship might not be what’s best for either party. I feel like the Stripped Back version matches that idea better, although I do really enjoy the layered vocals of the standard version.

You can listen to “Heat Waves -Stripped Back” by Glass Animals here.

11 May 2021 – Heat Waves – Stripped Back by Glass Animals

10 May 2021 – New Light by John Mayer

kevinisabastard, , , Leave a comment

John Mayer is a mystery of a man. There’s obviously something to him that appeals to people. And I don’t mean that in a way to dismiss middle of the road music and its fans. He also seems to appeal to serious people who are into serious things in terms of music, comedy, fashion and intense internet meme culture. He seems a bit unhinged though. Infamously, he self destructed around 2010, but also more recently he has seemed self aware to the point of it being scary.

And so we arrive at “New Light”, the first song I ever consciously listened to by John Mayer. It’s weird. The song is super vulnerable. It’s hard to know if it’s just a song or genuine feelings, because it would make sense if it was genuine. I could believe that women secretly date John Mayer but are embarrassed by him. At the same time, the lyrics are great. They’re simple and conversational but quite naturally poetic. Musically it’s interesting as well. It’s 80s tinged, kinda funky, very smooth. There’s a very neat guitar solo. It’s produced by No I.D. who has produced with Kanye, Jay-Z and Common. It feels like a weird combo, but it sounds fantastic.

The video is very of the time. It’s goofy but very aware of its own goofiness and there’s an underlying understanding of internet culture. The clothes are the real give away. The press commentary refers to his dirty hoodies and pyjamas but John Mayer is wearing limited release Japanese streetwear. He wants to go viral, he understands the game, and he understands the fashion. How is something so mainstream so niche? It hurts my little brain and I am completely fascinated.

You can listen to “New Light” by John Mayer here and check out the video here.

10 May 2021 – New Light by John Mayer