Swingin' Ryan

All I want to listen to at the moment is Prince. This is one of the most perfect pop songs ever, so much better than anything Michael Jackson ever did.

Dixon is probably the best actual pundit they have on MOTD though. Hansen and Lawro just hate football and Shearer is hopeless.

I love it when Lawro's in a bad mood, the all time highlight was at the last World Cup when he lost the head with Jake Humphrey after he suggested that Switzerland should be a better footballing nation due to their near "proximity to France and Italy".

I'm just glad McCarthy's been back doing commentary, he's a joy. It's like watching the football with a curmudgeonly Uncle who doesn't think anyone is ever injured, "Quick fuckin' rub with t'it magic sponge and that broken leg'll be right as rain...bloody jessie".

Is there actually a person in the world who likes ITV football coverage?

Normally it's the worst ever but I do like Gordon Strachan's dry as a bone sarcasm. The best one recently was when they were discussing Spain setting up without a striker and Adrian Chiles asked him "Did you ever try that at Coventry or Southampton?" to which he sighed "No...it just looked that way". He followed this with a rambled comment about the Spain team being so relaxed because they all "go to bed at 3pm and take 12 hours to play a round of golf". Lovely stuff.

Must have said this a thousand times on this forum; if you are involved in making music in a small city that doesn't ever really get written about or mentioned by mainstream media it is a GOOD thing when someone in that city does get written about. It means that people might start thinking "Oh I like this, I might see what else is going on in this city". How do people not get this, it's pretty basic.

Can already see transcripts from this thread being stored in a police evidence room somewhere...

The most recent episode of Mad Men was incredible. Can't believe it's still so good on it's fifth season.

Anyway, I made a Classic League don't think we'll bother with the head to head one.

203284-61040

Got a team on the McDonalds one already so I'm up for this league, too confusing having different teams on different leagues. Fantasy football is fucking magic.

New Future of the Left is fantastic. Crunchy, hissing guitars and some of the most genuinely funny lyrics I've ever heard.

The new Walkmen album 'Heaven' is stunning as well. Never given enough time to The Walkmen, always thought they were pretty good and they impressed me live but I wasn't expecting to be quite so blown away by this album. Oh and 'I Predict a Graceful Expulsion' by Cold Specks is lovely also.

Missed the first two bands due to the football but heard good things about both.

I feel I would have probably enjoyed Platypus more on another night but after being on the go since 7am, a lengthy train journey and then a concentrated period of boozing I really wasn't in the mindset for anything woozy and reverby as my head felt like mush. I did kind of like the way the vocals kept panning through the speakers at the back of the room though, at one point me and my mate spun round as we thought there was a huge group of people behind us singing along.

Min Diesel were spot on. I seem to remember saying about five times during their set they sounded 'fucking proper', which is my highest praise. Healthy turnout as well I thought.

What?

THOOO DEEP

I don't know what this means, is it an internet thing? Is 'THOOO DEEP' a kind of sarcastic way of saying 'The lyric is really deep' but as if the person saying it had a lisp?

Assuming I've got that right then you are right, that line is not deep, it's just funny. I quite like funny things.

Everything about Future of the Left is absolutely spot on, when it comes to 'heavy' guitar bands in the UK, I don't think anybody else touches them at the moment. Falkous lyrics are a joy aswell. The demo for Notes On Achieving Orbit on the new album features the opening line "Where were you when Russell Brand discovered fire, did you join with the crowds in Trafalgar Square and watch it on the big screen?". Genius.

This looks great, gutted I live in Edinburgh now. I had an aborted attempt at getting a C86 night going a couple of years ago, glad to see someone's got one going. I know quite a few people who would be into this, will spread the word. Hopefully make it to one in the future

Mad Men and Game of Thrones are both so bloody good right now. Awesome TV.

Last two episodes of Mad Men have been two of the best, also some of the funniest moment the shows ever had.

Anticipating now that the new Future of the Left record will be my AOTY. Hope I'm right.

Ditto. Definitely my most hotly anticipated release, can't get enough of 'Sheena is a T-shirt Salesmen'.

now moved onto the first Cornershop album 'Hold On It Hurts' partying like its 1994!

Yes! Cornershop are such a brilliant and under appreciated bands, they always get lumped in the 'One-hit wonder' category but they're basically the British Beck. 'When I Was Born for the 7th Time' is a masterpiece.

Daily Mirror and the Independent. Independent for news, Mirror for football and scorching hot celebrity gossip.

I adore The Clash, but I can't say I'm totally convinced by the "punk saved us from Prog" argument, especially since in later years when punks owned up to liking Prog and took influence from it, from what I understand*. Can were a big influence on PiL and John Lydon was apparently a fan. It's a useful myth since it got kids to pick up guitars, but the experimental side of prog still had an influence.

A lot of punks were still middle-class and and/or educated, and the rest were Sham 69. It was an art-school movement as much as it was a street one.

*have read in Simon Reynolds books

I have also read the same Simon Reynolds book and I know the bit you're talking about but I still think Progs influence on Punk is fairly minimal. There's definitely examples of punk bands influenced by Prog-ish type bands, but I think it was more of a cultural/aesthetic shift. That shot of the Emerson, Lake and Palmer convoy is the one that always sticks in my head, an endless parade of 18-wheel lorries carrying all their gear and light show. Punk made that go from looking fantastically exciting to faintly ridiculous.

I agree with the point about US Post-Punk though, so many great bands from that era/scene. I can never understand why bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat seem to be the big names when 80's US Punk gets discussed but nobody mentions bands like Pere Ubu and Mission of Burma.

The only Rancid album I like is the S/T 2000 record, which had about 100 songs on it, and they were all fast as hell, and barely over a minute long.

That is a great album, particularly Rwanda. I still think 'Out Come the Wolves' is genius though, I must have listened to that album for about a solid year when I was fifteen, I even had pink and orange hair modeled on Lars. Fucking Punk as Fucking Fuck.

This is good. Really, really good.

Annoyingly I won't make this gig as I live in Edinburgh but definitely going to keep an eye out for these guys.

Don't know, but here's Terry Richardson and Gavin McInnes. You can't really get much more hipster:

This video might be the most perfect representation of everything I hate that I've ever seen. Terry Richardson is a major creep aswell by all accounts, some of the stories of the shit he cajoled models into doing are nauseating. I would say a good rule of thumb for all girls is, if you meet a softly-spoken man dressed like a peadophile lumberjack who tries to impress you with his vintage hardcore band t-shirts and the people he knows from Vice magazine then he probably spends most of his time getting wanked off by sallow, East-European girls with tearful mascara smeared eyes.

Come on now, there was a bit more to GG Allin than smearing his own shit on his face. Even in that video, he drags a girl by the hair to the front and starts thrusting his (tiny) junk on her head and face. Surely not an isolated incident either. He was openly sympathetic to rapists, paedophiles and murderers, visiting them in prison and glorifying them as good people. He even said that if he didn't play music he would be a mass murderer. It's probably a good thing that he's dead. Genuinely.

Completely agree. I've actually seen a few people recently in GG Allin t-shirts which I hope isn't a sign of some kind of resurgence. The Dum Dum Girls covered one - of his songs in a moment of raw stupidity so that may have prompted some kind of revival. He was a loathable cunt - misogynist, infantile bollocks dressed up as some kind of revolutionary 'real rock and roll'. Total pond life.

The Wedding Presents

Before some fucking internet pedant picks me up on this, I am fully aware the band are called The Wedding Present (singular not plural) but I was typing last night at 1am after a large amount of travelling and made a number of typos and I don't appear to be able to edit posts.

I'm not trying to take Soda Jerk's post apart because I probably agree with some on the sentiments on some level but just a couple of points for healthy debate.

Well, as far as debate is concerned, I’m surprised some folk still seem to consider The Clash to be the pinnacle of punk rock, considering how much punk rock has evolved and what it has to offer now, and also how their idea of punk was naughty hand gestures, and playing on Top of the Pops.

Although I understand the point you're trying to make I think you're making it about the wrong band. To me, the point of The Clash, and their idea of Punk was to 1) Say something real about youth and society in the UK in the 70's and 2) To strip away all the wanky, cape-wearing, chin-stroking Prog shit that Rock music had become. Had they, along with bands like the NY Dolls, Ramones, Pistols etc, not done that, the musical playing field would have never really been leveled for bands like Black Flag.

According to documents like Our Band Could Be Your Life, and Rollins’ Get In The Van (which you should have a read of if you have any interest in punk rock or DIY music) they were drinking water from the sinks of public toilets and eating dog food balled up in old, thrown out bread for sustenance

It's a pity nobody was hiring Rollins for advert voiceovers or presenting monster truck shows in those days, then he wouldn't have had to have I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here-esque challenges for dinner!

I like loads of UK bands, but I don’t think I care a jot about all the stuff that gets put on those “Best Punk Album Ever” compilations CD’s that come out around Fathers Day, where punk starts and ends with the Pistols, Clash, that 2-4-6-8 Motorway song and Ian Dury and the fucking Blockheads.

This seems to be one of the main reasons it's more credible to be into stuff like Black Flag than the Clash etc, because it's the kind of thing that Dad's are into. Honestly a lot of this stuff is worth looking deeper into though. For example 2-4-6-8 Motorway (which is a fucking tune incidentally) was written by Tom Robinson who was punk as fuck. He was one of the first openly gay men in Rock music and released the song 'Glad To Be Gay' in 1978 when the gay age of consent was five years higher than the hetrosexual one and gay bars were still being raided by police.

I like a lot of the US bands that are featured in that Our Band Could Be Your Life and from that kind of scene, but it does piss me off that there were so many great UK bands doing a similar thing at that time if not better who don't get a fraction of the recognition. I'll always prefer McCarthy, Talulah Gosh, The Wedding Presents and The Shop Assistants to any of the American Underground 80's stuff, but it's different strokes I suppose....

I voted But, what is punk?

But actually the UK wins just for The Clash.

Agreed. UK wins. America had the NY Dolls and The Ramones but Britain had The Clash so they win on points. Don't have any knowledge or interest in the 'earnest, sweaty men in black t-shirts shouting about who's done the most press-ups' school of Punk. It's supposed to be louche and sneering. I don't believe in the whole 'Punks just doing whatever you want maaan', it's not. It's The Clash doing this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9eLeZS9OeY

Wanda Jackson - Queen of Rockabilly

Hard Headed Woman

Shakin' All Over from Letterman last year with Jack White on guitar