Gorgonzola dolce

A blue cow’s cheese, made in Italy, and bought from The Tasting Room

We have a slice of this milky, melty, sparsely blue-smattered cheese. It’s pale and creamy, with a slightly darker rind. It’s got an almost jelly-like soft texture, smooth and silky, and very melt-in-the-mouth-ish.

This is very exciting! Kat smears a wedge of this soft cheese onto her piece of baguette, and chomps down on it. It ‘tastes of blue cheese’, unsurprisingly. It’s tangier than she anticipated, and soggy. She gamely eats the rest of the piece – it can’t be terrible – but declines to try another piece.

The taste – and this is not meant as a complaint, at all – reminds me a little of the toilets at Glastonbury. I’m not sure that I want to examine this thought any further.  As well as a whiff of long-drop, this is a very sweet and milky blue cheese. The blue taste is quite mild, and the caramelly fudgey milk taste is like milkshake. This cheese is smooth, sweet and gentle. It’s possibly a little too unassuming but gorgeously gloopy.

Cashel Blue

This was written about in more detail here.

Next up is this soft and spicy blue; it’s been a favourite of mine for years. Kat tries it and declares that it ‘doesn’t taste of blue cheese’ (I dispute this assertion) and proceeds to munch her way through this with relish. SUCCESS!

Next up, in the Kat Cheese Challenge, will be some Roquefort.

Voting for this match ends at midnight on 15 March.

FRANCE:  Françoiz Breut – “Si Tu Disais” The Manager Says: “One of those songs that feels on first listen as though it’s always existed somewhere, such is the ease with which Françoiz Breut – original stage name Françoiz Brrr – taps into a familiar strain of pensive, elegantly (re)strained melancholy. Taken from her (thoroughly excellent) 2000 sophomore album Vingt à trente mille jours.”

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MEXICO:  Los Dug Dug’s – “Smog” The Manager Says:  ”In our first game we were very much playing to the crowd back home, and failed to ingratiate ourselves with the global audience that had tuned in for the opening salvo of the tournament. Now, with a pressing need to get points on the board, the changes have been rung, the big name players have been dropped, and a group of veterans from the Mexican league with little international experience have been called up. In spite of this, they play a forceful, compelling game, recognised the world over, and the management are confident that they won’t be over-awed by the occasion.”

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Commentary Box Analysis: “Beguiling chamber pop from the French here, but will it have the skills to get past the muscle and the FLUTE of this pacy Mexico attack? This is the first real decider in PWC10, who will take it?”

Result! Brazil 0 North Korea 4 It’s like Ayresome Park against the Italians all over again Brian, but should we really be that surprised? Lord High Everything Else Mullah Resmat knows how to pick teams to impress the crowd. North Korea is going to go far in the tournament on this form. It’s just like watching Brazil! Except rubbish. Their performance is ridiculously good. They talked the talk, and they’re walking the walk. Acrobatic gracefulness and fluidity that is more than a match for the Brazilians’ somewhat oafish up-the-center tactics.

Coming up: Group B is tighter than a tight pudding, what will Argentina and South Korea have to lift them above the rest of the teams? I hand you over to my co-anchor (i said anchor) TimH…

Listening to this song you realise that at some point the idea that a rock record should sound like a bunch of people in the same place playing the same music at the same time was completely abandoned by record producers. Not in the name of experimentation, or expanding a record’s sound, but I guess just because that kind of verisimilitude didn’t seem relevant any more. In its way this even seems a more radical shift than genres like dub reggae or techno which were clearly studio constructs from the off.

This is a long way of saying that there’s something quite off about a song like “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”: built for a movie, it has the same oddly flat, perspective-warping quality as a studio set, like it only really exists in the context of the action, when it’s soundtracking something. That eerie dead space is created pretty much entirely by the echo on the percussion: I guess it could also be filled by crowds of people singing along, which is why arena rockers took to this kind of song.

Listened to alone there’s a discrepancy between the size and effort of the sound (colossal) and the emotional take-out from it (pea-sized) that tips me into laughter when Starship try and go up a gear leading into the guitar solo. Maybe if I’d put more hours in with Grace Slick’s earlier work I’d find it in me to despise Starship but for all its vacuous, leaden bigitude, deep in its tiny heart this is affable enough to be harmless.

We start the second round of matches with a scrap for group supremacy between South Africa and Uruguay. A win for either team here would almost guarantee them a place in the last sixteen, so Isabel and Jim will no doubt have been sweating over their seleção…

This match will end at midnight on March 14th* – for now, get voting.

*oops, gave you 8 days originally, will close on sunday night now

SOUTH AFRICA: Mapaputsi – “Izinja” The manager says – “Straight in and no messin’! Attack with men forward and leave “the dog”, our very tough defender, covering at the back.

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URUGUAY: Opa – “Botija de me Pais” The manager says: With 3 points in the bag we can afford to be a little more experimental this time round, so here’s Opa. The intro is creepy and great – it makes me think of funky little goblins chanting in a cave. The song proper is a gorgeously smooth bit of nu-candombe, with a chorus which has a touch of the Bee Gees about it. But those goblins keep coming back, and the song really takes off when they storm the mountain in the last minute or two – the final 20 seconds are UNDERWORLD TRIUMPHANT! (Um, I’ve no idea what the words are really about, sorry)

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Commentary Box Analysis: “Well Brian, two rather different tactics here, Uruguay are very laidback caressing the ball around not unlike a South American Steely Dan. But what’s that? Oh, even men with steel hearts love to see a dog on the pitch with the South Africans there.  Could easily go either way this one…”

RESULT: Cote D’Ivoire 3 Portugal 1: Well It looks like the Portuguese tactics didn’t quite pay off here as CIV power past them. This is stunning play from the Ivory Coast though, fast, fluent, powerful and incessant. Ivory Coast continually cut out passes, and after 25 shots in the general direction of the goal finally a couple go in. the sheer loose energy of it is ridiculously good. No contest; Côte d’Ivoire just mop the field with their competition, and this from a man who’d be rooting for Portugal any other day.

Coming up: France and Mexico are both desperate for a win to avoid elimination. Even at this early stage Pop World Cup faces its first decider.

So here’s a poll of all 32 of the tracks we’ve seen so far: I’d like you to pick the five you’ve liked most, and I’ll bundle the tracks which do best up into some kind of PROMOTIONAL THING.

While I’m at it, I’d like to publically thank everyone who has taken part – as managers obviously but also the voters. Even the reduced turnout in the last couple of matches has been way more than what we got last time we did something like this, and it’s gratifying that people are finding it fun to do. Now enough from me and onto the REALLY BIG POLL:

Voting for this match closes at midnight on the 11th March.

SPAIN: Juniper Moon – “¿Volverás” The manager says – “Spain’s rookie manager faces the tough task of making his debut in international pop against Switzerland, the winners of EuroPop 2008. In preparation for this difficult challenge the Spanish training staff practiced many different formations and tactics. In the end he has decided for a direct and fast-paced approach, hoping to catch the Swiss by surprise. The organized chaos by Juniper Moon will hopefully confuse the reigning EuroPop champions enough to take the 3 points back to Madrid.”

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SWITZERLAND: Touch El Arab – “Muammar” The manager says – “Touch El Arab are apparently a Swiss one hit wonder from 1987. I have absolutely no idea what this song is about but it’s really pretty and atmospheric and nicely bloopy. It also has a really catchy sample.”

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Commentary Box Analysis: “A beguiling approach from the Swiss but somewhat one-paced – Spain on the other hand are a little more ragged in their passing and crossing but have speed and energy on their side.”

RESULT! New Zealand 3 Slovakia 1: It may not have drawn much of a crowd but this was a fine performance from New Zealand, who soon took complete control of the game despite a bright start from Slovakia. “Slovakia shows a few nice moves to begin, but, unfathomably, from about 1 min 20 sec on they just start passing the ball around themselves at the back, never to be seen again. This back-line needs a bass-line to stand a chance of success.” “NZ mutant disco v. the Slovak Jack Johnson (straight faced or not)? The Kiwis have it.” “NZL go out and win it with a forthright, attacking disco-revival performance; solid rather than spectacular, but I like the way the playfulness of the vocals overcomes what initially seems like harshness.”

Coming Up! Next week you’re in the capable hands of Tim Hopkins and Steve Hewitt who will be masterminding the second batch of group stage matches. South Africa take on Uruguay on Monday, then France play Mexico on Tuesday with the loser facing an end to their qualification hopes.

This blog entry is an explanation of some of the references and underlying assumptions behind my little bit of sci-fi journalism. If the piece doesn’t make sense without it, I’ve failed, but it will hopefully be of interest to anyone who did enjoy the column.

Introduction: Marc’s cassette piece is very well worth reading. I was originally going to frame this with a “letter from the future” device but decided to be as clear as I could about what the column was, since I’d tried to keep a deadpan tone in the thing itself.

The 2022 publication date is semi-arbitrary. I wanted to position it far enough in the future that CDs had stopped being a going concern for a few years, but also near enough that the 00s were a “live” cultural issue in the way the 80s have been this decade.

March 21, 2021: This is the 20th anniversary of the industry suing Napster, a decision which didn’t slow the CD’s demise, but ensured the transition would be costlier and more bad-blooded than it needed to be.

Reece Maclay: was going to be Reece Marclay, after sound/record artist Christian Marclay, who is fascinated by the physical and artistic possibilities of recorded media. But I decided to change it. “Reece”, like most first names, was picked by my looking at baby names that were popular in the mid-late 90s.

“a way of demonstrating the durability”: this was demonstrated on the British popular science TV program Tomorrow’s World, when the CD was first introduced. It’s acquired semi-legendary status among people old enough to be Reece’s parents. It’s not actually on YouTube but it ought to be!

“stopped stocking CDs five years ago”: 2017 or so – to be honest I think this might happen quite a lot earlier.

“dedicated to making and swapping CD-Rs“: craft, music and booze ‘clubs’ are fairly common in London and will no doubt remain so. I thought the main battleground of “CD culture” would be over the social use of the music – as opposed to the “almost human” physicality of cassettes and vinyl which is the site of nostalgia (and resistance) in those movements. Any CD revival will be basically a front for a battle between certain ways of using digital sound and certain other ones.

“pulling ‘found files’..onto their CD-Rs”: an assumption I’m making is that computers in a decade’s time basically won’t use file systems: they’ll have lots of apps, and will be marvellous portals into cloud-based services, and they’ll have tons of ’space’ but it wont’ be used for data storage primarily. So dumped machines, packed with files but too power-hungry and slow to run, will be highly scavengeable in the way thrift store postcards etc are. Most of these machines will be today’s desirable portable things, by the way.

“Chantal Fielding“: “Chantal” is a 90s baby name, Fielding is after Anna Fielding who replied to a question about this piece on Twitter. Hi Anna!

“Prismatic Spray“: The name of an old AD&D spell. It’s in Rochester because that’s where the CD’s inventors, Kodak, were based.

“literally everything you look at you can find out everything about it“: the combination of augmented reality and the ‘internet of things‘ means that everything in reality is becoming “clickable” to some degree, acquiring an aura of . In this environment the pendulum may well swing back away from “authenticity” (today’s most desirable quality) to “mystery” (being able to cloak information or mislead or baffle).

“trying to work out who the playlist owner is“: haven’t really worked through the details, but this is assuming that the norm for the informal end of “club nights” (like our Poptimism one) will be a crowdsourced, ‘celestial jukebox’ type deal.

“The rejection of music’s networked elements”: it struck me reading Marc’s piece that one of the roots of cassette culture was rejection – a rejection of the digitalisation of music. This is no bad thing – any change is always a balance of loss and gain and people reminding us of the loss are very important. I wanted “CD culture” to have a similar rejection as its backbone, and settled on the ’social’ elements of music as something people might push against. Later in the piece this fits into the context of a more general social media backlash.

“the amateur press associations of 20th century fandom“: Prismatic Spray is a CD-driven APA, pure and simple. I used to be a member of several APAs and suspect the model might revive in the near future.

“the best themed CD-R“: the inspiration here were the “Rough Guide” series of CDs curated by ILM members – the time limit bred creativity.

“Inire Wolfe”: Wolfe is a reference to Gene Wolfe, my favourite sci-fi writer, and Father Inire is a character in my favourite book of his, The Book Of The New Sun.

“Hall of Mirrors”/”secret architecture“: In the book, Father Inire uses an array of dimension-shifting and teleportation devices which are known as “mirrors”. He has also built a kind of chateau, the House Absolute, which contains one house existing parallel to but physically hidden inside the other, so the concept of “secret architecture” in CDs is a little reference to the book too. Game-playing, declared or otherwise, is an important part of a fully social-media-integrated world.

“Zaireeka principle”: A reference to the Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka album, as written about by Pitchfork’s managing editor Mark Richardson in a 33 1/3 book. Zaireeka can only be listened to ‘properly’ if played simultaneously on four CD players.

“the artistic roots are different”: a lot of underground music-making takes its cue from various DIY based scenes, which often incorporate honesty and transparency as virtues. But there’s a parallel underground tradition of pranking, game-playing, bricolage etc. This tradition is intertwined with the DIY one, of course – both share some key values. In an environment where “honesty and transparency” have become the watchwords of what is essentially the new establishment you might expect the other tradition to resurface and bare its fangs (or at least enjoy itself). I decided this tradition would play the same kind of role in my “CD Culture” as the noise/DIY scene did for players in Marc’s cassette piece.

“post-social”: i.e. the backlash against social media culture – from within and below: any current 2010 backlash (stressing its dangers, stupidity etc,) being largely by non-participants and from above.

“Neoism and Fluxus“: they’re on Wikipedia. I’d forgotten Neoism entirely and only remembered looking up mail art for the APA mention.

“troll artists“: like most of the stuff mentioned, these already exist.

“bot-creators”: thinking here of things like David Bausola’s “demographic replicator” project, essentially creating bots on blogs and Twitter for unwitting members of the public to react to. It’s being investigated for market research, as well as for art and entertainment purposes.

“recommendation-scramblers”: scripts which fuck up the radar of predictive algorithms by generating clouds of chaff, and leave your tastes free from exploitation by The Man. Turn your personal aesthetic into a Dazzle Ship!

“Karen Eliot“: a portable identity used by the Neoists. I’m fascinated by these shared nom-de-plumes and expect to see more of them. Perhaps I already am.

“Starstrukk”/”My Humps”: guesses at potential 00s “Never Gonna Give You Up”s. Quite poor guesses, probably: perhaps St Rick will still be our patron.

“deliberately lo-bitrate”: not content with imagining a CD Revival I decided I’d sneak in a revival of sub-128kbps MP3s too.

“to the lossless warmth of most streamed music”: when I asked for ideas around a CD Revival a lot of people said “CDs are good because of sound quality” – but in a decade or so this won’t still be an argument, internet speed and a move away from private storage will do for that.

“ghostwave”: sorry!

Cursor Daly: Feeble semi-pun on Carson Daly.

“Loads of CD nerds were neuroscience majors”: speculation on what a common topic of study will be, the 10s equivalent of doing computer science in the 80s maybe.

“in an age where the smooth user experience and the invisible interface is everything”: going back to the points about the end of file-based navigation systems. This is extrapolation from the directions represented by the iPod and the iPad, plus the way alternative culture generally likes to reject the ‘homogenous’.

“lo-bit R’n’B and Scando-pop, reflecting the era he’s hoping to evoke”: the assumption here is that – if the term still means anything – ‘indie’ musicians will continue to draw at least some inspiration from popular styles which have been historicised.

“sneak into stores”: a riff on an old situationist action, but this one with a genuine delight at the idea of selling physical music at its centre.

“Of course if you scan the code on the CD you get the music free”: my assumption is that most acts will give away at least some of the digital versions of their music, perhaps all of it. Free is the underlying expectation.

“the same spikes and troughs of popularity”: one effect of social media on audiences is that your viewership/readership tends to be made up of a lot of spikes, rather than a growing or shrinking ‘audience’: ‘trend data’ isn’t as useful, which has implications for the ideas of building a career, etc.

A quick note on the characters in this piece’s opinions: none of them represent me, though I like them all. I don’t necessarily agree with them, and they are straw men in that sense. But I was careful to only invent projects I thought would be really fun and exciting. Also, one of the ideas underlying this – that “social media” is something which works best in small-group, collaborative, game-like experiences, is one I believe in very much.

The characters in the article have a spectrum of opinion and most of it is already out there. The strands about your tastes becoming public property are kind of related to the anxieties expressed by Jason Lanier in interviews around his book. The ideas of game-playing and mischief-making are hardly uncommon online and have a tradition going back long before that. Regret at the passing of broadcast media is currently more common among my generation so might die out entirely but I was thinking it would survive in the same semi-ironic way a nostalgia for ‘rock star excess’ endures: big remains potentially beautiful.

(Of course like most pieces with an element of ‘futurology’ none of the underlying stuff in “Shiny Shiny” isn’t happening now. And just as the time to start shouting about the loss of physical music was about 15 years ago, if you agree with the ‘post-social’ bits in this column the time to start worrying and thinking about them is now.)

This match ends at midnight on the 10th March – please listen and vote!

CHILE: Kudai – “Ven” No comment received from manager.

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HONDURAS: Banda Blanca – “Chica Disco” The manager says – “Welcome to the wonderful world of Honduran punta rock! Banda Blanca were pretty much the first of the Honduran acts to have big hits (Punta-rock is based on the Garifuna rhythms of the region, so there a lot of Belizian acts as well as Honduran, which has been fun) and seem to have been knocking round for about 20 years. My thinking is going for an enduring formation could help save me from the battering I might be about to face, as the definite minnow of the whole competition.”

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Commentary Box Analysis: “Both sides here playing strong, positive football – they know this is a big game for them and they need to make it count. Chile have muscle but not always finesse, Honduras are playing a pretty, uptempo passing game but I wonder about their options in the final third. Could go either way but there are goals in this game.

RESULT! Italy 0 Paraguay 0 Italy’s ruthless defense left no way through for a spirited but deeply limited Paraguay side. By the end of the game fans of both teams seemed resigned to a draw – those remaining in a fast-emptying stadium, that is. “If Italy’s approach results in a win in this game it could revolutionise the world of pop-football. It’s an untried tactic, a formation imported from another sport entirely. Surely it can’t succeed? But it’s up against such formulaic unpleasantness from Paraguay that it may have a chance on the day.” “real metal >>>>>>> silly Eurovision metal” “SPACE FOOTBALL! One side fields giant flesh-eating slugs with a lifespan of millennia, the other side fields metallic-clad strippers out of a Heavy Metal comic. The winner is of course the production designer.”

Coming Up! Our last two teams take the field tomorrow – Spain taking on the Europop 2008 winners Switzerland. And then it’s back to Group A on Monday as South Africa take on Uruguay.

Madonna’s appropriation move into Latin pop is a tightrope walk between corny and respectful: on the one hand an arrangement which packs in every Hispanic signifier bar a finishing “Ole!”, on the other a performance that has far more authority, conviction and love than her last excursion into pastiche. “La Isla Bonita” on paper looks like the most awful quesa – but right from “Last night I dreamed of San Pedro” it goes in a different direction, a reverie full of the real ache of missing somewhere beautiful – there’s something close to dread in her voice.

But in a British pop context “La Isla Bonita” resonates slightly differently: here San Pedro sounded like a Mediterranean island, which meant package holidays, and at the time I disliked “Bonita” as basically a middlebrow cousin of “Y Viva Espana” and suchlike. Eyes like a desert instead of straw donkeys and sombreros, but the principle was the same. Well, I was a bit of a fool back then. Especially since the collective ache of a holiday ended was about to transform British pop culture: a bunch of DJs and partygoers determined to establish the vibe of Ibizan clubs back home, and succeeding in the most remarkable ways.

The ripple effects of the Second Summer of Love – still 15 months off at this point – have transformed how I hear “La Isla Bonita” as an adult: now it sounds like Madonna making a Balearic record. For those unfamiliar with the thin slicing of dance music genres what that means practically is that now when I listen to it I tune in to its buried spaciness, I want more of those Spanish guitar runs, more inessential prettiness, more of the dream and not so much of the song the dream created. Frankly, my ideal version of “Bonita” would be an 8-minute long disco edit which pushed the lumbering chorus to the sidelines: that’s the one bit I still agree with my younger self on, a spell-it-out wake-up call in an otherwise captivating pop track.

Despite formal protests from the DPRK’s representatives we will still be using the concept of “voting” to decide the outcome of this match. You have until midnight on the 8th March.

BRAZIL: Los Hermanos – “Quem Sabe” The manager says – “The famously tight-lipped Chris Ambrose is going to let his game do the talking in this first match.”

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NORTH KOREA: Wangjaesan Light Music Band – “Singosan Taryeong” The manager says – “Victorious Greetings from the Hermit Kingdom! Prepare dismally to grasp all you know is wrong, by the medium of HOT YOUNG DPRK WOMEN PERFORMING LEGGY PEOPLE’S ROCK WITH KEYTARS AND EVERYTHING. The Wangjaesan Light Music Band soar above your puny imperialiist tweetings. “Singosan taryeong” is a puissant polyform ballad in which peasant and proletariat, united, surge across the ploughed fields to defeat the emaciated lion of individualistic delusion. Let the barbarian “jazz” of the pitiful outer layers roar and whine in feeble acknowledgment: ALL SHALL WORSHIP US AND DESPAIR.”

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COMMENTARY BOX ANALYSIS: “A physical ska-rock formation isn’t what neutrals necessarily expect from Brazil, and it’ll be interesting to see how well these direct tactics work against a Korean side with a lot more individual flair than I think many anticipated.”

RESULT! Cameroon 1 Japan 1: Cameroon had by far the better of the first half but faded badly in the face of a Japanese fightback and can consider themselves very lucky to have escaped with a point. “Cameroon is OK, a bit “incidental music on a visit-our-beautiful-country advert with added miaowing”, but OK.” “The Japanese are left panting, but their breathlessness energizes them, somehow, are far more resilient than you’d expect from a band whose manager labels them “indiepop.” The motion is one-track in comparison to Cameroon’s, but has a similar beauty, and if the track takes them to the goal, what’s the complaint? I hear a much closer match than the other commenters do.” “After reading the comments I was expecting a poor entry from Japan, but this really is great stuff. Cameroon have novelty value, but not enough to win it here.”

Coming Up! The tournament’s final group brings us Honduras against Chile on Thursday, while on Friday Spain and Switzerland are the last of our 32 countries to play their opening games.

2. We know that the strategy review recommends a big shift in focus on Radio 2, making it at least 50% speech-based in the day time and giving its specialist, comedy, concert and jazz shows higher-profile slots. This is to create greater distinction between R2 and commercial radio.

3. We know that the strategy of creating branded digital “sister channels” which allow more diverse and in-depth content is seen as a success. 1Xtra costs more per listener hour than 6Music but is not being threatened with any cuts – instead it will have “closer ties” to Radio 1 (a very dubious idea, but that’s for another post!). The relatively successful Radio 7 is being rebranded as Radio 4 Extra (R4 listeners are uncool enough to need the ‘E’ in Extra, apparently).

4. We know that 6Music as it stands has passionate fans, but we also know that at least until its existence began to be threatened, it was open to a good deal of criticism: the comments on this Martin Kelner piece, from only a year ago, are especially interesting partly because very few are from 6 Music listeners saying how wonderful it is – most agree that changes are badly needed.

So taking all these things together, one really obvious course of action suggests itself: push through the changes suggested by the Trust anyway and rebrand 6Music as Radio 2Extra.

This would have the following benefits:

- continue to make the BBC’s radio channel strategy more coherent and justifiable.
- preserve the good elements of 6Music – specialist shows like Craig Charles and Stuart Maconie, their live and session broadcasts, etc.
- raise awareness of 6Music/2Extra among listeners to the biggest radio station in the UK.
- widen the channel’s non-new music programming away from its current comfort zone of the post-punk and indie eras and make it think a bit more widely about what “alternative” might mean to different and more diverse audiences.
- give 2 Extra a distinct music-based identity compared to the more speech-led identity of Radio 2 proper.
- lower the listener cost per hour over time by using 2 Extra as a seed for formats, presenters etc. on its sister channel.

So simple! I bet they’ll end up actually doing something like this so I thought I’d blog about it now.

And while they’re at it they could nick all of Resonance’s best programming for 3 Extra too ;)

Let’s vote! You have until midnight on March 7th to pick a winner here.

IVORY COAST: Bab Lee – “Tropical Mix (Sous Les Cocotiers)” The manager says – “All out attack. Melody is left on the bench as rhythmic nous, constantly switching wingplay, the best two-note hook since Boredom, and enough energy to last until the 95th minute are deployed to undo the Portuguese.”

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PORTUGAL: Mikado Lab – “Takket” The manager says – “It’s not often that exceptional pop music from Portugal reaches the rest of the world. The music sung in Portuguese that everyone loves almost without exception comes, of course, from its former colony Brazil. Fittingly, Lisbon fourpiece Mikado Lab isn’t really a pop band, and they don’t have a singer. The gorgeous “Takket” comes from last year’s Coração Pneumático, one of two albums released by the band in 2009. Theirs is a Stereolabby kind of jazz, with hints of both Bach and the Beach Boys. Keyboardist Ana Araújo plays a melody as simple as it sounds irresistable, with bandleader and drummer Marco Franco keeping the rhythm light yet insistent. ”

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Commentary Box Analysis: “Ivory Coast are playing a constant pressing game all over the pitch: Portugal are doing their best to keep the tempo down and build attacks. I don’t think either side is playing with a recognised striker but there’s enough skill and innovative tactics on show here to satisfy any real lover of the game. Fascinating match.”

RESULT: Denmark 1 Holland 4: Spirited effort from the Danes but they ultimately had no answers to this well-drilled, slick Dutch side. “Great stuff from NED – love her poise and sense of timing. It’s a big tune, but she doesn’t overplay it – she holds back, it’s all in the details of her phrasing, her judicious pauses and “mm-hmm”s.” The Dutch track is another order of quality, the song itself isn’t all that interesting but she tackles it with the right kind of lacksadaiscal aplomb.” “Sukkerchok has a great melody, though, and delivery too I think. It’s classic stuff, for sure, but performed with enough self-confidence and pizzaz to thrill.” “TULIP ALLEN! DO YOU SEE?”

Coming Next! TREMBLE O WEST as North Korea put the correct pop thought of the great leader to the test against the samba skills of Brazil tomorrow. Then on Thursday Chile play Honduras – battle of the minnows? Or will they be able to spring a surprise?

Firstly, mostly to get them out of the way, two boring anecdotes.

Semi-irrelevant anecdote #1:
Once when I was working in Waterstones in Oxford, I sold lovely David Mitchell a book of M R James’ ghost stories. The end.

Semi-irrelevant anecdote #2:
I went to a supposedly haunted school. The school was in the Thames Valley, reasonably old although not much predating the 20th Century, at a guess (I’m sure I could find out but my interest is limited) and situated in some rolling countryside that I am sure I would have found impressive had I not been brought up as a yokel and thus seeing a massive field of oil seed rape as a massive field of oil seed rape, rather than a burning golden sea, etc. The school itself was in old farm buildings, the former barn and stables made a sort of three-quarters-enclosed courtyard, with an ancient, crippled weeping willow tree in the centre and this was where the junior school basked sunnily, the buildings whitewashed and their insides at least semi-efficiently converted to schooling purposes.

The senior school occupied the old farmhouse, which was at once more conveniently school-enabled and also completely ridiculous; the library was only accessible through the English classroom and the corridors were sharply-twisting, crowded things. Originally, the entire school had been in this building and the attic had been used as dormitories but had long since been abandoned, its accessibility being even more limited than the rest of the place, as a dumping ground for old play costumes and props. In certain conditions, light would shine through the attic windows and from the playground, you could make out a dress or a mannequin’s head and everyone would run round describing the fact they’d seen the ghost of the girl who’d killed herself out of the attic window. This girl had various different names, as far as I can recall but there actually had been someone who’d died (I think of TB) there and so there was a semi-taboo over the whole thing from the teachers, who considered it half-bad taste and half-hysteria, not incorrectly.

The attics themselves were fabulously creepy; I went up there possibly four or five times, usually to retrieve play costumes. There was no electric lighting up there, so we had to go in the afternoon when the light would be suitably angled as to illuminate the racks of mouldering furs and tea dresses and consequently, the rooms would be heated specifically according to the sunbeams, making some areas baking and stinking of dust and mothballs and others freezing and full of dank, a disorientating sensation to experience as you crossed a stooped, poorly-lit room and trailing rags brushed against your head and shoulders. This was fairly par for the course, however and since my own room in my parents’ house was similar it didn’t freak me out enough to overwhelm my curiosity about the costumes and the jewellery and the boxes of photographs up there.

What freaked me out utterly and completely and turned absolutely everyone into a screaming idiot, teachers included, was the rooms the other side of the hall. These were never lit up at the same time, due to the sun-angling lighting and so were in a sepia-darkness that made them seem timeslipped; old iron bed frames rested against the walls, never removed and they cast odd, long shadows, decaying leather straps that had once supported mattresses hung like torture-restraints and the paint was peeling off the ceiling in curlicues but there was no evidence of it hitting the floor, which was utterly black in a layer about an inch-and-a-half thick of dead or half-dead bluebottles. Thinking about those rooms now, well over a decade after I must have last seen them, I can feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up and hear the noise of these dying flies buzzing a steady, low drone that rose and fell. I never saw one airborne in there and I suppose that there must have been insecticides used by the caretaker to kill them but there were so many of them and in such drowsy, fitfully mortal states that it was like some overwhelmingly surreal, morbid scene from …well, I want to say a Hitchcock movie but I don’t watch films and don’t really know, so I’ll have to say one of those lasting images from M.R. James.

These rooms filled me with incapable, sick fear and seemed portentous but without reason; why were the flies there, why were they dying in such numbers and why were they always carpeting the room thus? Rather like the more terrifying bits of James, there wasn’t any explanation offered, merely the fact of their existence.

A School Story is one of my favourite of his stories, for this reason. I enjoy matter-of-fact ghost story telling, as James does it; there is little or no effort made to rationalise the events with supporting background stories, such as the vengeful ghosts you tend to get in supernatural mystery stories (although I like them, too, for B-Movie reasons) and there’s rarely a potential get-out for the victims of the tale. I particularly like that in this one, the narrator knows no way to make any sensible link between the events and so any and all conjecture about how things come to unfold is entirely our own. Like the rooms full of flies seemed to me, the narrator knows that the events are in some way portentous or significant and certainly frightening but without any ability to define why, each being seemingly innocent in isolation.*

The first ghostly or apparently significant incident occurs during the description of Sampson, a favoured tutor who had travelled the world and seems to have been a bit of a rogueish figure, in a disciplinarian manner, who had on his watch-chain a charm fashioned from a Byzantine coin. The narrator, possibly with retrospect, describes the tutor as having “rather barbarously” carved his initials and a date across the coin. This is pretty much a red herring, of course but James’ drawing the reader’s attention to it and indeed, the rare occasion of him describing something in detail (a paragraph ago he has dismissed bothering to describe one of the protagonists except to say that he was entirely unexceptional and Scottish) means that instantly this appears to be a hinge-point in the tale.

It is slightly offputting, then, that “the first odd thing” then happens a paragraph later in Latin class. Again, the Latin is a red herring; although, as it’s been noted before in this series, anyone who is anyone in an M R James story can speak Latin there’s no more significance than that to the setting, I suspect, although it works well with the Byzantine coin to throw suspicions off-kilter as the reader looks for a pieceable mystery.

McLeod, the unexceptional Scot, is delayed in delivering his Latin sentence using the verb “memini.” I have never learnt Latin and can’t read it in the slightest, so whatever memino librum meum means goes right over my head but is no doubt a hilarious error but apparently, this is “the sort of rot” that some of the boys will have come out with as they wait to pass in their sentences to Sampson. McLeod, seemingly in a dream-state, doesn’t fill his in until, berated by the rest of the class, he finally scribbles down a sentence he doesn’t understand but which seemingly Sampson very much does; “memento putei inter quattor taxos.”

Apparently inspired by a vision that popped into his head before he wrote it, McLeod says to the narrator that it means “remember the well among the four yews,” with a small discussion of which tree he is referring to placed prominently enough that the reader is led to dwell on the trees. And yews are sinister and conjure visions of churchyards, which coupled with Sampson’s spooking seems obvious that there is something unwholesome occurring and that this is a warning shot of some kind. It is not a particularly scary one, however, being too specific to be a common fear and too disjointed to be obviously leading and the boys seem to largely forget the incident as McLeod is taken to his bed for a month with illness and the nameless narrator only retrospectively sees it as suspicious.

The next event is also set in the dull surroundings of the Latin classroom, embedded amongst notes on grammar and a complaint against conditional sentences (which I won’t pretend to know the specifics of) and again an incident where Sampson is alarmed by a contribution to the boys’ testing. This time, our narrator steps in as a Boy Investigator and, after the teacher runs from the room, discovers the slip of paper which has alarmed him. The sentence, belonging to no one in the room according to their dying oaths and some weak CSI handwriting analysis, is innocuous enough that our narrator steals the piece, the paper itself obviously offering no sense of foreboding despite the decidedly sinister message of “If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you,” which is the sort of fantastically stalkerish thing that would unnerve anyone.

The disappearing ink is a weak way to make the paper seem unnatural; the fact of it existing is creepier and it annoys me to some extent that James uses that fact to confirm its supernatural origin. A paper that has appeared, written by no hand in the class, by no ink in the class and by an apparently extra person in the room, unnoticed, is much more alarming for its physicality and continued existence than otherwise and so the message disappearing after the narrator steals it is frustrating, especially given the next events seem to suggest something far more corporeal, if no less unnatural, going on.

The description of the thing which McLeod (although notably, not the narrator) sees at Sampson’s window is one of my favourite passages in any of the ghost stories; like a lot of the rest of the story, it is the mundane turned sinister by some creeping suspicion that, whilst unconfirmed, is bad enough in its suggestion. Originally describing the situation to the narrator as there being a burglar at the teacher’s window, visible from their dormitory, McLeod makes the bizarre excuse for not raising an alarm of not knowing who it is, as though burglars are generally known to the victim and something about this phrasing is obviously off-kilter enough to support the creep the narrator feels when, looking out to an empty courtyard and realising somehow that there is indeed something wrong afoot.

These suspicions are confirmed, when the boys begin speaking again, with McLeod’s description-

“I didn’t hear anything at all,” he said, “but about five minutes before I woke you, I found myself looking out of this window here, and there was a man sitting or kneeling on Sampson’s window-sill, and he looking in and I thought he was beckoning.” “What sort of man?” McLeod wriggled. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I can tell you one thing – he was beastly thin: and he looked as if he was wet all over: and,” he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, “I’m not at all sure that he was alive.”

Insofar as a burglary is mundane, this is the inverse to most accounts of supernatural events in that McLeod at first claims to have seen a break-in, then post-rationalises it to be an incident involving the undead. Normally, we would expect him to start with the notion that he’d seen a zombie and then suggest raising the alarm in case of a break-in, whereas here terror actually seems to grow with distance and why not? The image is a disturbing enough one that even someone who saw it probably wouldn’t think of all they’d seen until a few moments later. Initially, you see a man breaking in, then you think perhaps he’s beckoning, then you think about how thin he was and his wetness and a dread that perhaps you have seen something more awful than you really want to think about sinks in.

The idea of faces at windows terrifies me. No, wait, right. There’s a bit in Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters, which was a staple of scaring the pants off me as a very small child, where Father Christmas wakes to find goblins have once more invaded his house. The actual description-

“One night, just about Christopher’s birthday**, I woke up suddenly. There was squeaking and spluttering in the room and a nasty smell – in my own best green and purple room that I had just done up most beautifully. I caught sight of a wicked little face at the window. Then I really was upset, for my window is high up above the cliff, and that meant there were bat-riding goblins about – which we haven’t seen since the goblin-war in 1453, that I told you about.”

which isn’t as earth-shatteringly terrifying as I remember it because a) I am now nineteen years older and b) at some point during those nineteen years I think I concocted an entirely different passage, which I believed I’d learnt pretty much verbatim from the book, enraptured by terror although after a quick investigation by Mark and I, I’ve realised is probably from a dream (there was a supposed accompanying illustration but I think I’d invented that as well, since it doesn’t follow Tolkien’s bright inks style) and which went as follows;

“One night I awoke to silence; there was heavy snowfall and it seemed the fire had gone out, making the room freezing and dark and at first I thought it was this that woke me. Crossly getting up to stoke the embers, if possible and cursing the Polar Bear for his choosing wet logs I smelt something wrong. There are plenty of smells here; soot from the fires and wood in the workshops and spilt ink and soap and the Polar Bear’s coat smells something awful when he hasn’t dried it properly but this was none of them and I began to be afraid that something dreadful had occurred. There was a soft noise at the window, settling snow dripping off the roof I thought and something made me turn to move the curtain where, pressed nearly against mine I saw a pointed little face and knew they were back.”

Which demonstrates an overactive imagination but is also one of the things that to this day utterly and totally terrifies me, despite being almost entirely of my own elaboration. The idea of the creature at Sampson’s window frightened me completely when I first read the story (aged about eleven, I think) in the same way the tapping of tree-things at a window in another ghost story I read around the same time (mostly forgotten and of infinitely lower quality than James’ but I was largely constricted by the school library) and the way the goblin at Father Christmas’ window had when I was four. My room, which occupied a peaked bit of the former attic of my parents’ house, had a window just behind where I slept, which I couldn’t see through from my bed but which, if something had been pressed against it, I could have noticed. I lived in the country and the bloodcurdling screams of mating muntjacks (which are genuinely awful noises, choking and howling like they’re dying) don’t wake me up, equally the busy cross-county main road that ran through the village ensured that there was a heavy enough stream of HGVs etc. to ensure the thing that really freaked me out was when I woke up to dead silence, presumably where the invented Father Christmas passage comes from.

Which is all a massive digression from M.R. James but one I think is necessary. The narrative of the A School Story begins with two men in a smoking room; I imagine them wearing particularly fine red smoking jackets, drinking port and looking like old MPs, which is to say fat and rendered red-nosed and tough-faced by years of pompous outrage. One begins by recounting (without the prompt for this anecdote being included) that at his school they had a ghost’s footprint. Whether this is in response to those ridiculous, soft-touch non-ghost-imprinted schools these days or not is never specified, however he does say that there was never any story behind it, merely that it existed as a quite unremarkable feature except that it was on a stone staircase. It’s discarded fast enough that whether it was an actual indent or merely a mark is never even specified.

The man continues by describing ghost stories told at schools, which is a standard enough thing; anyone who’s ever been in any educational establishment will have at least half a dozen fairly generic tales to recount that supposedly definitely really happened in some specific but varied spot not far from the school.

It’s a nice touch that the two men first rubbish these stories as ridiculous and almost certainly removed from literature; one suggests to the other that he write about it- “There’s a subject for you, by the way – “The Folklore of Private Schools” but the first speaker demurs on the basis of the scantiness of material on which to draw, “I imagine if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books.” M.R. James: early Lars Ulrich of the Intellectual Property world.

“Nowadays, the Strand and Pearson’s, and so on, would be extensively drawn upon,” -kids these days, eh? They’ll rip off any old sh1t. This is something I quite like about James, though; in discussing ghost stories within his ghost stories (and this is far from the only time it happens, often the characters pause to discuss the supernatural or are engaged in researching the very thing that comes to haunt them) he justifies his prose style, which is not on the face of it something to chill the blood. The way he recounts the stories, almost always through second-or-third party narrators, is (and excuse me whilst I stab myself in the face for my own pretension here but) Herodotian in its gossipy, editorial style. The oft-discarded characters (“and I shan’t bore you with a description,” ie: I can’t be bothered to write one, repeatedly features in one form or another) and the fact that we are hearing stories twice or thrice edited by their characters and then by James’ own, fictional researcher-author character means that the sparse style, retaining only the juicy bits or those that have been considered important adds to the apparent disparity of events’ significance. Which is possibly lazy writing but I take quite a lot of pleasure in authors who make their writing a character and so I find it quite charming.

It’s this editing that makes the creepy bits really creepy to me, too. The actual conclusion to A School Story is necessary but unfrightening. A third party in the smoking room discovers, by identifying Sampson’s Byzantine charm, that he was found dead in a well amidst a yew thicket in Ireland, with the body that presumably attacked him and dragged him back there “arms tight round” him. This is unnerving to the person who found the bodies but our distance from Sampson and the lack of any explanation of how events came to be this way means it strikes me as merely archaeological. Or possibly I’ve just watched too much CSI but nonetheless, the story at that point has taken on the same meaning as the stories rejected in the smoking room at the start; “a man was found dead in bed with a horseshow mark on his forehead, and the floor under the bed was covered with marks of horseshoes also; I don’t know why.” And neither does the reader really know why two bodies were found in a well in Ireland; Sampson had obviously feared it but no explanation for his knowledge is offered and the fact that he died is not especially frightening, given we know him by little more than the few token identifiers that allow the body to be named his.

Allowing my own fears to perhaps bias me though, the thing that frightens me about A School Story is the false clues, the strange feelings of dread and the lack of understanding. Nothing about the two incidents in Latin class suggests that a corpse will turn up at Sampson’s window, late at night (although Sampson himself presumably fears it) and although there is a little hint perhaps of something unspecified, when McLeod mentions that Sampson questions him about his origins it’s obvious that the coin and the old language are misleading. The thing in the well presumably has no classical significance or if so, is unlikely to be Byzantine in origin (although I suppose coins are flung into wells traditionally and Sampson’s tale about Constantinople could be a bizarre lie but I prefer the lack of explanation) and its link to its victim is inexplicable on the evidence we have.

And that’s what’s really terrifying and what, readers, has led to me having to recruit Mark to sit in the same room as me to finish writing this because the fireplace is making rustling noises and the window opposite is darkened and empty. The seemingly mundane turning terrifying is a common tool in horror; a glamourous young lady wakes in the middle of the night to a strange noise in the kitchen, potters down the stairs in her nightie to investigate if it’s the cat again, decides she must have imagined it and the next thing we see, she’s mostly dismembered behind a police line. I have no delusions that I will be killed in a glamourous nightie, being mostly found in flannel pyjama trousers and a Pantera t-shirt but the fear of Things At The Window makes my blood run cold still.

The significant events that lead up to Sampson’s disappearance are frightening for being apparently explicable, to at least some extent; boy daydreams in Latin class, writes something weird, annoys teacher; extra slip of paper is stuffed into pile by hilarious prankster (which is why the ink disappearing annoys me I suppose) and again, annoys teacher into having a migraine. Sampson’s fear up until that point is alien to me but in the conclusion as recounted by McLeod the idea that a thing he knew was likely coming, which had sent him warning shots, appears in the dark of night, silently. When he woke he must have felt terror, then perhaps a sense of brief reassurance that there was nothing immediately there until he looked to the window and the terror was all the worse for the moment of respite as the possibly-not-alive thing beckons to him.

In a brief “I have freaked myself out too much to continue writing” crisp break in the kitchen, Mark said that the thing that’s frightening there is the fact that this time, we haven’t seen any of this but imagine if the supernatural comes calling and we have to be the retelling witnesses to such. We’ve all had moments of suspicion about events that presumably turn out to be entirely mundane; there’s a rustling in the fireplace, it’s probably a spider and of course the window across the road is out, the occupants are probably down the pub like any sensible person at this time on a Sunday.

At my old school, the attic door was once open when I got in. I wanted to close it because I could hear the buzzing of the dying flies (or thought I could) and because at that time I arrived at school a good hour before most other people, it scared me to be the only one with this noise leading me, seductively fearful, to this place that scared me. I thought the caretaker might be up there though and didn’t want to lock him up there, so I steeled myself and got about seven steps up the stairs before I thought I saw something move (probably dust disturbed by my feet) ran back and slammed the door shut because the idea of seeing what made the dead flies pile up there, although it’s probably nothing more sensational than a can of Raid, was too sickening. The confirmations of our paranoia, irrationally displayed, are just too horrible; in A School Story there’s no sense of conclusion beyond the fact Sampson dies and there’s no assurance for the narrator or poor indescribable McLeod that what they witnessed was one thing or another.

The temptation, in a lot of horror movies or stories today, is to provide a motive or a cause (and James does that often enough; it’s apparent why, say, the bedcloth creature appears in O Whistle) and to rationalise it into a solvable thing, in order to give it some kind of narrative but James’ casenotes style in the ghost stories doesn’t demand anything more explanatory than a simple recount of events as they are known, the evidence not necessarily leading to anything more satisfying than an apparent occurrence and for a reader rationalising noises they can hear from where they sit or lie with the story, that’s much more a dread likely to make you unable to get up and turn the light off than any clarity could. James’ talent lies in giving just enough to activate one’s imagination but not enough to reassure you.

*Unlike a room full of dead flies, which is just fvcking creepy whichever way you look at it. But bear with me here.
**Sidenote: whilst looking for this passage, Sukrat and I also gleefully discovered a letter which ends:
P.S. (Chris has no need to be frightened of me -PAGING THE UNRESOLVED ISSUES POLICE.

Produced by Elisha Sessions.

This match will end at midnight on March 4th – for now, get voting.

NEW ZEALAND: Parallel Dance Ensemble – “Turtle Pizza Cadillac (Yam Who Rework)” The manager says: “Guys we’ve come from down under to march over the top with a fair few funky tricks up our all-black sleeves. I’ve picked a young but shrewd team and we’ll be playing a thrusting modern game, demonstrating how well NZ are adapting to a global game. Spearheading the attack for our first clash is poetic femme fatale Coco Solid up front with “good in the air” Bobbi Soxx. As you can hopefully hear, we’ve come to dance our way through this contest – feel free to join us!”

[tmi]

SLOVAKIA: Horkyze Slize – “R’n'B Soul” The manager says: The Slovakia manager did not attend the press conference. (Julio if you want to get a blurb featured email it to me quickly!)

[tmi]

Commentary Box Analysis: “It’s a pleasure to see two sides who understand there’s more to the game than all-out attack. New Zealand move the ball up the pitch quickly with a series of slick passing moves; Slovakia are more defensive but will try and break rapidly given the opportunity. The game may turn on whether Slovakia’s rapping playmaker can do the business – a commonplace tactic in European domestic competition but one which rarely succeeds at the highest level.”

RESULT! Australia 1 Germany 1: The Pop World Cup’s biggest crowd yet watched this close-fought game but fans of both teams were said to be disappointed. Germany pressed hard for their equaliser and had the better chances near the end but both sides may see 1 point as a missed opportunity. “Germany put in a solid team performance with a dynamic front man calling the shots and some incisive play from Herren Guitar und Sax.” “The Australia track is a bit ‘peppy excercise video soundtrack’ for my liking and in my opinion the Aussies should spend less time warming up and more time playing.” “Germany’s pulling out one of the creakiest formations in the playbook…ultimately too limited and ineffectual a game against an Australian side that bulldozes them in both energy and imagination” “Blog-house as reimagined by the clientele of a Walkabout pub in Shepherds Bush. Nein danke. But the GER track is just HORRIBLE.”

Coming Up! Assuming I get the tracks in time, we have Ivory Coast v Portugal on Monday and then, on Tuesday, it’s the hotly anticipated game between Brazil and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. That’s NORTH Korea, to us Western stooges.

Yes this is also how Wall-E starts. But where Wall-E gave us a good 30 dialogue-free minutes on the desolation of a post-human Earth, this movie starts deep in the bowels of the de rigeur giant spaceship where everyone except rotating teams of flight crew are deep in “hypersleep”, waiting to touch down on a pre-identified Earth-like planet that lies several thousand light years away.

A member of the flight crew awakens fitfully, his memory a fog. He peers around. No lights. He snaps a glow-stick. A thick layer of dust covers the room. Suffice to say, he doesn’t yet know about the evil alien clowns aboard who can run like greased lightning and who like nothing better than snacking on fresh human.

And here Pandorum does a big belly-flop. These evil clowns are RUBBISH! Don’t bother sneaking up on anyone, fellas, we can tell you’re there by the slow-moving blue glow around the corner and the reverbed whooshes you make as you breathe. Don’t bother using your supposedly superhuman speed, our heroes will always outrun you. And hey, you – old survivor. The guy who slathers himself in engine oil to mask his smell? Yeah, you. Don’t bother. These aliens prove repeatedly incapable of sensing fresh, exposed man-skin just inches from their gaping noseholes.

I know, I know, who cares. But the whole fun of alien monsters is the steady sussing out of their strengths and weaknesses. If they can run 100 miles an hour, then running away from them should not be a good strategy.

But there’s a more fundamental problem with humans vs super-evolved enemies, a problem that better movies like Predator and Alien succeed at distracting us from. Basically, we should never win. We should just die. Because we are worse than they are at most of the things necessary to win in a fight. So for the sake of a happy ending we make our enemies super-evolved physically, but mentally sub-normal. (This goes back to the Jack Tales at least, the most famous of which is Jack and the Beanstalk. No physical match for the giants he meets, Jack always figures out some clever trick to either kill them or get away, or both.)

But this movie insists on humans beating aliums on their own terms – outfighting rather than out-thinking them – so we are treated to some very unconvincing victories. Which is why Pandorum missed its real calling: it should have been a video game. Video games don’t want – or even allow – you to think outside the game’s own rules in order to win – you just have to keep bashing away at a certain section until you finally do it well enough to pass. You die again and again, because you suck. And because you are not allowed to act in ways the game hasn’t anticipated.

There’s a ton of set pieces in Pandorum that would be terrific in a video game: the shonky bridge over a squirming moat of aliens; the escape from the locked room; three-way martial arts battles; cut-scene reminisces about life before the ship..

Anyway, eventually we find out that the evil clowns were once normal human passengers (aha!) who were woken from sleep early by a power-mad ship’s officer; the enzyme that has been added to their bodies to accelerate adaptation to the new planet they are to populate has instead started super-adapting to the ship itself. And perhaps the ship’s DVD collection.

The power-mad officer is played by the aforementioned Mr Gigandet (very nice with cassis I’m told) and he is utterly convincing as a whiny, narcissistic, smug little brat who I want to brain with a giant wrench.

It all gets very messy by the end of course but it always helps when your protagonist knows how to start the ship’s reactor in barely less time than is showing on the “everything explodes when this reaches 0:00″ timer. He gets it right the first time – whew!

A newspaper is a version of the world, and a successful newspaper builds a world that not only reflects the real one, it infects it. In its 80s heyday The Sun was not only the highest circulation daily paper in Britain, it had a cultural weight that went well beyond that: it comforted its readers and haunted its enemies in the way the Mail does now. The Sun’s mix of tub-thumping, scandal, sex, games and coupons might have simply been a variation on a winning tabloid formula that stretched back to the Boer War, but editor Kelvin McKenzie pitched the paper exactly right for its brash, greedy times.

“Let It Be” is The Sun’s number one record, its logo proudly on the label and the sleeve. The disaster which sparked the single – a car ferry capsized due to crew negligence, killing 193 people – might not ordinarily have led to a charity record, but several of the dead were Sun readers, on board the Herald Of Free Enterprise because the paper had run a special offer on ferry tickets, away-day breaks to Europe being a reliable sales booster. So the Sun owned the event from start to finish, acting as chief mourner. After the disaster it hit on Stock Aitken and Waterman to produce the record and started working its, and their pop contacts book. Within a week this is what they’d come up with.

“Let It Be” itself is – like “Everybody Hurts” – one of those songs which was doomed to be a charity record sooner or later. I’ve never really enjoyed it – for all its obvious sincerity it feels too generalised and woolly for me to find it a source of comfort, and without that sentimental connection the hymnal pace is a chore. But simplicity and honesty have always suited McCartney well and it’s certainly not a song I’d sneer at. Also, its very solidity makes it – on paper – a good frame for a record that’s going to use a lot of voices.

Even so the Ferry Aid “Let It Be” is a discombobulating listen. For a start, in commercial and stylistic terms the talent is more than usually mismatched. But charity records always have their lesser contributors, and things like Paul King’s inability to sing the word “be” are all part of the experience. A bigger problem is that the music won’t get out of the way – the kind of stateliness “Let It Be” needs is completely alien to SAW, who garnish the record with bibbling keyboards, horrid synth tones, a chuntering mid-paced beat, and that’s even before you get to the Knopfler and Gary Moore guitar solos: the ’something for everyone’ ethos of the charity record line up taken to an extreme. The uncomfortable thought that comes to mind hearing SAW’s backing, though, is that this is pretty much the type of thing those ill-fated passengers would have heard had the ferry sailed and they’d wandered into the cocktail lounge to hear the on-board entertainment.

At least until the ending, anyway. Kate Bush does her line, in the deep register she’d just used on “Don’t Give Up”, and it’s a revelation: her warm, sad, cocooning voice suits the song and the occasion absolutely. There are a few seconds near-silence after that, as if everybody else is suddenly thinking “Oh shit, this could actually have been good.” And then the moment passes and it’s time for the mass chant, and for the single to finish on a note of laughter, high-fiving and applause. Because that’s what charity records and newspaper campaigns are all about: happy endings. It’s The Sun wot Number One it.

Vote in the poll below the cut – you have until midnight on the 3rd March to pick your favourite.

ITALY: MORDER MACHINE ft ATRAX MORGUE – “I’m So” The manager says – “Some very introspective and morbid play from Italy. Is this off-colour sound the result of some dodgy prawns at the pre-match team dinner? Or are they hoping that their slow but relentless game will break the opposition? The team manager is possibly over-vehement in her denial of the tabloid rumours surrounding the mental stability of her team.”

[tmi]

PARAGUAY: SEFIROTH – “From Darkness To Light” The manager says – “Nothing says winning the pop world cup like a ridiculous metal track you might expect Finland to enter into Eurovision, but from a land which is famous musically mainly for its use of harps at least Sefrioth are a little different. Prepare yourself for some air guitar fun in the middle and get ready to RAWWWWWK!”

[tmi]

Commentary Box Analysis: “It’s fair to say this Italian line-up won’t be doing the team’s reputation for negativity any harm – they’re looking to intimidate their opponents and playing the ball is very much a secondary consideration. Paraguay are a pretty physical bunch themselves but there’s a lot more movement and positivity to their play, even considering their unfashionable tactics.”

RESULT! Ghana 3 Serbia 0: Horror show for Serbia as they crashed to a heavy defeat despite having their share of possession and several good chances. “Entertaining play from both sides – Serbia’s defensive hoover tactics battling Ghana’s dexterity on the ball.” “Serbia’s flash and bang, though it flashes and bangs admirably, gets in a few crucial early points but then succumbs to general fatigue. Ghana’s in it for the long haul.” “That’s some performance from the Ghanaian sub there towards the end. But it’s no mere fannydangle, it’s a magnificent solo effort, collecting the ball at the half way line then leaving three defenders on their arse, wrong-footing the keeper and putting the ball right into the top corner. I’m a sucker for ridiculous fast and fluent rapping in languages I can’t understand, but for me that’s still the best individual goal of the tournament so far.”

Coming Up! Group F’s other game tomorrow is an intriguing New Zealand – Slovakia match-up, and then Cote d’Ivoire take on Portugal in Group G at the start of next week.

Produced by Elisha Sessions.

The marvellous italo-house keyboard break in the middle of “Respectable” gives the game away: Stock Aitken and Waterman were Britain’s premier pop Europhiles. Their late-80s heyday is as near as UK pop has come to European Union – a joyful pan-continental pop sound with Mel, Kim, Rick et al. joining Taffy and Sinitta in vibrant, tinny one-ness.

Everything critical you can say about SAW is of course true. Were they formulaic? None more so. Exploitative? Surely. Lowest common denominator? Yes, and lower still. No hitmakers since have been as brazen about making pop into a cheap, kit-built, product, and their hit-rate wasn’t quite high enough to deflect all the distaste for that approach.

But at the same time they were inevitable and necessary. There was an enormous latent pop market that somebody was going to start catering for. The Hit Factory did so, and what’s more they did so in enjoyably confrontational style. There was a populist, rebellious streak in SAW which imagined their customers as girls who would put on the TV, see a Percy Sledge track or a worthy cover version and think, in Smash Hits terms, “Bo-RING!”. On the video for “Respectable” the set is laughably cheap, the careful, tasteful staging of mid-80s videos thrown out of the window in favour of two sisters enjoying themselves. You don’t need the proto-Spice lyrics to hear this song as a blueprint for a thoroughly achievable kind of fun.

Curing an excess of soul with a dose of soullessness seems like harsh medicine, but “Respectable” is the Hit Factory at close to its best: it hadn’t narrowed its formula down yet – there’s a lot of nice Europop touches in the background, and the “Tay-Tay-TAY-Tay” hook is splendid. Mel and Kim themselves have tons more gusto than many of SAW’s favoured vocalists. The song spins its wheels badly during the verses so I never enjoy it quite as much as I think I do – but this is still very much on the potent side of cheap.

You have until midnight on the 1st March to vote in this one.

CAMEROON: K-Tino – “La Queue De Ma Chatte” The manager says: “The first time I heard this song was during a fight I was having.This guy I was fighting had a knife to my throat. I’m certain he would have killed me there and then except that, just as the knife began to pierce my skin, a car drove past playing ‘La Queue de ma Chatte’. This guy dropped the knife and started smiling. I started smiling. We embraced like brothers, slapping each other heartily on the back and laughing raucously. We ran after the car and were able to easily run as fast as it. We ran alongside the car all night with that song playing repeatedly, hundreds of people joined us, all of our heads bigger with joy than all the great drug experiences of everyone in history combined. I was seven years old at the time. This song is the song Christ heard on the cross.”

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JAPAN: Andymori – “Follow Me” The manager says: “Japan have brought a large squad to this years World Cup with a range of styles ready to play at any time. For this first match I have chosen the young up and coming band Andymori. This hard working band have packed a huge amount of energy into this short youthful indiepop hit. With a catchy chorus, frenetic vocals and a driving rhythm section, who can resist but getting up, dancing and indeed following Andymori.”

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Commentary Box Analysis: “Delightful, unhurried play from the Camerounians against a Japanese side full of running and perhaps prone to the occasional stray tackle. Should be an intriguing game.”

RESULTS! Algeria 2 Slovenia 1 Defeat for the Slovenians – they played well but ran into an exceptional Algerian side. “The Algerian Pop Association appear to have made a canny decision here in appointing a manager with a deep-seated appreciation for the national game. It shows – this Algerian side are exquisite.” “Slovenia are the fist smallish European nation we have had so far, and this is not far off what I would expect. A solid little pop song with enough of a bonkers chorus to be lovable.” “Slovenia look like Rymans Leaguers at the start, with only that occasional synth flourish indicating there’s any spark to their play. But then they bring on an import from the prog league! The flute solo totally redeems the track.”

Coming Up! Group F brings us Italy v Paraguay, and Slovakia v New Zealand – hopefully in that order!

I hate Tesco for making terrible, flavourless food and being ten minutes closer to my work than Sainsburys, thus far more likely to be my despondent lunch venue of choice but this is basically like a great big greasy lump of olives on your toast. For the lactose intolerant, it’s bad enough trying to find something with flavour but the awesome fattiness of this is currently ensuring that, after two small slices’ coverage, I find my hair sticking to my forehead with the sheer grotesque quantities of axle lubricant. And by that I definitely don’t mean the repulsive congealed mayonnaise you get in M&S sandwiches, this is more of a serious, industrial undertaking to squash a million delicious olives into one tiny pot of pale paste. It’s like Vitalite FOR MEN.

Truly, my life is very empty. Here is a link to a thing about this delicious thing.