9 February 2010
On Sunday afternoon (that’s real actual Valentine’s Day, chums) a selection of your Freaky Trigger friends will be taking over the Hangover Lounge (2-7 pm at London’s The Lexington, delicious food and drink available!) and showcasing the smoother side of our questionable taste in pop.
A convivial, if possibly somewhat blurry, afternoon is promised. All welcome, especially FT readers we haven’t met yet.
Tim in FT • No Comments
As you may or may not know I have been doing ANOTHER blog project, this time an MP3 blog over on tumblr: It Took Seconds.
The idea behind ITS is very simple – it’s a countdown: every day I post a song one second shorter than the day before. I started at the decadent stretch of 365 seconds and will gradually pare the tracks down to one second (the actual MP3 might be longer as I think there might be issues with files that short). There’s an informal one-track-per-artist rule too, and I usually have an ‘answer box’ where people can suggest their own favourites at each length.
I write stuff about the tracks too, but usually not very much. Anyway, here is an index of the first 35 entries: my blog design is intentionally very simple so I’ll be putting these indices here. You can still hear all the tracks at the links below. more »
Tom in FT • 6 Comments
In The Beginning There Was Nothingness. IF ONLY.
In The Beginning There Was The Word. NOT THE BIRD FROM L7 PULLING DOWN HER KECKS AGAIN.
But neither of these are strictly true. Because the first book of the Bible Of Badness is Genesis. And if you were ever to question how bad this Bible could get, Collins and the rest set a mighty low standard. One wonders if it really was the Serpent that caused the fall of man, or if Adam just wanted to get away from the prog-rock band noodling in the Garden of Eden. more »
Tanya Headon • FT/ I Hate Music •
4 Comments
stick with the beasts we got plz #1: the CENTAUR
centaurs are classically portrayed as noble and amazing (if occasionally super-horny): but i have always found em ANNOYING!!
i. look at them they are top-heavy at the front = when they gallop they will fall on their faces
ii. they have TOO MANY LIMBS = they are insects
conclusion: i for one do NOT welcome our old insect underlords
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør • Blog 7 •
No Comments
#426, 23rd September 1978
On one level the ‘plot’ of “Dreadlock Holiday” is hugely important to any judgement of it. On another, not at all, but let’s recap anyway. The narrator is a tourist in Jamaica – he gets mugged for his silver chain and returns to the comfort of his hotel where a woman tries to sell him weed.
Nobody comes out of the story well: the song’s parent album was called Bloody Tourists, and the narrator is a simp, trying and failing to fit in (“concentrating on truckin’ right”) and then fleeing to the hotel at the first sign of trouble. But the island isn’t exactly a welcoming place either, more »
Tom • FT/ Popular •
101 Comments
#394, 4th September 1976
In my teens I read a science fiction novel with a startlingly elegant twist. (I won’t mention the book’s name in case you come across it yourself.) It was about a brilliant scientist who vanishes: the book’s protagonist goes looking for clues to what happened, and becomes close to the scientist’s wife. And at a crucial juncture in the plot, the narration shifts, mid-paragraph, from third person to first: the scientist’s “vanishing” was literal, and with a thrill of horror you realise he’s been observing the action all along.
What on earth does this have to do with “Dancing Queen”? more »
Tom • FT/ Popular •
224 Comments
WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING IS NOT A PIE?
i. shepherd’s/cottage pie
ii. cheese flan/pizza
iii. scotch egg
iv. boiled egg
actually i am not going to bother you w.all the ins and outs of the GREBT PIE DEBATE, as i wz not in on its inception, and besides the militia are now formed and a stiff crackdown ordered on heretics and dissidents. Hunting last night for back-up for solid new outlier positions – i naturally supported iv. but did not come up with any of these – i discovered that the linguistic origins of the word “pie” are entirely uncertain: best guess, apparently, being that more »
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør • Pumpkin Publog •
6 Comments
8 February 2010
#583, 24th January 1987, video
Future shock? If you’d been told before the fact that a Chicago house record was going to hit number one in the UK, you might well have put your money on the showy, song-driven side of house providing it. A record like Marshall Jefferson’s “Move Your Body (The House Music Anthem)”, maybe, with a big vocal hook to grab on to. But no: Steve “Silk” Hurley throws us in at the tracky deep end: repetition, repetition, repetition, the sweeping hiss of the hi-hat, the crack of the snare, that flexing and bucking keyboard line, and from out of the mix those snarls, cries and commands – “Jackitupoutthere!” more »
Tom in FT / Popular • 39 Comments
6 February 2010
The OSP on Fulham Palace Road has had a chequered past. In its glory days it was a boxer-owned pub “The Golden Gloves” but I first knew it as The Old Suffolk Punch and there was a great, if scuffed, geezer feel to the place — my favourite work boozer. Then it went through a refurb and a phase as the (initials only) OSP just when this review in 2003 [fancyapint.com] was written. The OSP at that time was an awful, soul-destroying place. There were light-box murals of grinning early 20-somethings having a GREAT TIME, looking like low-rent Tony Stone stock photos. It was enough to make the gods of the public house weep into their ports and lemons. A wretched attempt to create a terrible West End bar in the terrible West of Hammersmith.
Thankfully that passed — if a little too slowly — and it became The Old Suffolk Punch once again. A reliable if unremarkable Greene King pub. Well I do have one remark, though I imagine it’s about Greene King food menus chain-wide: The Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding wrap with gravy (and chips). Behold:
Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pud ... in a wrap
From the menu my colleagues and I were imagining a bread wrap around slices of beef and some tiny Yorkshire puds, but it was probably the IPA getting in the way of the obvious interpretation. A flat Yorkshire pud-style batter pancake was the wrap. Brilliant. You pick it up by the batter wrap with the beef and horseradish sauce trapped inside and dip it in the bowl of gravy. NOM, NOM, and three times NOM.
Well it was new to me. This update on a classic, I can get behind. And in to my tum.
Alan in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Tomme de Fleurette
A soft unpasturised cow’s cheese, made in Switzerland and bought from KäseSwiss.
A round of soft white cheese, smattered with a bright white bloom, and striped with little ridges from where it’s been sitting on racks to mature. Inside it’s soft and pliable, the colour of cream.
This cheese is fantastically milky, and melts away to in my mouth. The thin delicate rind has a slightly crumbly texture, and tastes of heather, flowers and astringent herbs. This complements the utter drippiness of the inside of this cheese, which is smooth, creamy, gently sweet and nutty, and has just a hint of cocoa to it. more »
marna in FT / Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Of the thousands and thousands of words that have been written about The John Terry Situation this week, Louise Taylor’s ridiculously florid piece in the guardian on Wednesday which starts:
Fabio Capello’s still somewhat limited English vocabulary may not yet incorporate the term “invidious position”
must have been the turning point where Fabio decided that he had to go. Not because of Ms Taylor herself, but, I think, because of the following piece of genius from Freaky Trigger’s very own Patron Saint of Sport, Lord Harry of Bassett:
Dave Bassett endorsed [Glenn] Roeder’s view that a Rubicon has been crossed. “The problem is John Terry’s a wrong-un. He’s masquerading as one of the chaps but he ain’t because this shouldn’t happen,” the former Wimbledon and Sheffield United manager said. “Of course you have players misbehaving when they’re married. But they aren’t doing it to a team-mate’s missus. That’s off bounds.
“It sticks in the throat. There’s an unwritten rule that you don’t start messing with players’ missuses. I’ve had players who have left their missus or had bits and pieces on the side but they’ve not gone off with a team-mate’s bird. That’s crossing a line and where it comes unstuck with Terry. I don’t recollect it in all my years in football.
Gawd Bless yer Harry!
CarsmileSteve in FT / TMFD • 2 Comments
3 February 2010
AND ABOUT BLOODY TIME. Finally finished 1986 – I know there’ve been slower years but this one really has dragged – thanks for yr patience. Here’s a poll, and add your usual lists, reminiscences, discussions of the year etc in the comments box. As ever this is where YOU get your chance to say which tracks you’d have given 6 out of 10 or more to.
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My highest marks this year were 9s for “West End Girls” and “Papa Don’t Preach”, my lowest a brace of 1s for Nick Berry and the Horned Beast of County Wexford.
Tom in FT / Popular • 55 Comments
2 February 2010
#582, 27th December 1986, video
“Reet Petite” would have fit right in on an advert: I scratched my head for a while trying to remember which it came from. No luck – so I went and looked it up, and of course it wasn’t on one at all. It got to number one on the back of an animated short – played on BBC arts show Arena – in which a triangle-headed plasticine Jackie shook and jived while mouths on stalks quivered behind him in an angular landscape which reminds me a little of Krazy Kat. As an enactment of the song’s pop-eyed restlessness and vocal flexibility it works, and it’s more a fan video than an advert. All the giant caricature lips threw me at first but as a sung performance “Reet Petite” is a real celebration of the mouth with all its trills, twists, held notes and squawks of joy. more »
Tom in FT / Popular • 57 Comments
The main event.
It was a perishingly cold Saturday night on Mare Street, and the Empire was sold out.
Staff were taking photos of each other, old friends were hugging and saying hello, before saying goodbye. It was the last hurrah for the current staff and management. The gang of mates that had run the place since it rose from the ashes of Mecca Bingo’s stewardship in the mid-1980s was getting the heave-ho. But first there would be a show.
more »
Tracer Hand in Do You See / FT • 1 Comment
31 January 2010
For a long, long time my Default London Pub was the Blue Posts on Newman Street. I’m a big fan of the Sam Smiths brand, and the BPNS had it all: cheap, cosy, usually full of people I knew and – most importantly – just around the corner from my office at 76 Oxford Street. When someone suggested going to the Champion one day, just to make a change, I was flabberghasted. Not ONLY would I have to walk a whole hundred yards further to my pub destination, but… well, it wouldn’t be the SAME, would it? I’d found somewhere I liked, and now it seemed that I would be untimely ripp’d from its warm, comforting embrace. I approached the Champion with a fair measure of resentment. more »
Katie G in FT • 7 Comments
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