Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
What the inside of my head sounds like on a good day (Pixies – Alec Eiffel)
What the inside of my head sounds like on an average day (People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz – Pierrot’s Persecution Mania)
What the inside of my head sounds like on a bad day (Masonna – Wonderwall)
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal — Albert Camus
I love Alex Lahey.
I love the song Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself by Alex Lahey.
I love the saxophone solo in the song Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself by Alex Lahey.
But I still NEEDED to make this.
I APOLOGISE FOR NOTHING!
Being the kind of self-righteous snob who doesn’t consume a lot of commercial media it can sometimes happen that absolutely fantastic and hugely successful songs entirely pass me by, only for me to randomly stumble over them well after they’ve been moved into the realm of old.
For instance back in 2023 a YouTube playlist threw up Walk the Moon’s Shut Up and Dance. I’d somehow missed this absolute banger for almost a decade and had to resist the urge to run up to everyone I saw shouting “HAVE YOU HEARD THIS SONG!? YOU HAVE TO HEAR THIS SONG!!” when they’d almost certainly heard the song so much back in 2014 that they’d be happy never to be reminded of it again.
Well it’s happened again this week, with a little ditty named Pompeii by a little known British group named Bastille…
Now I wasn’t completely unaware of this track thanks to the legendary Important Videos YouTube playlist which included this gem…
…but it’s still kind of remarkable that such an amazing song has passed me by for (in this case) over a decade!
Did you know that the chant that features throughout the song is actually Latin? And that the line and the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love is a reference to the earthquake of AD 62 that severely damaged Pompeii and Herculaneum 17 years before the eruption that destroyed them? Well I do now, and my life is unmeasurably improved by that fact!
There’s also a Latin version – although the singer (one Heleen Uytterhoeven) appears to have missed the memo about eheu meaning “oh no”, “alas” or “oh crap”. Nonetheless it’s a great cover!
I wonder what hit ancient songs I’ll stumble over next?
Andrew Eldritch pops up in the most unexpected places. From the Wikipedia article on Numbers Stations…
In the British television spy drama Spooks episode “Nuclear Strike”, a Russian sleeper agent is awoken by a numbers station broadcast to detonate a nuclear suitcase bomb in central London. The radio broadcast states in Russian, “2.5.0.0.2.5, Finland Red, Egypt White, It is twice blest, It is twice blest, rain from heaven, rain from heaven.”
What’s to be done about that?
After agonising over it for weeks I eventually decided to simply jump in and vote for the first 10 tracks I thought of for the Triple J Hottest 100 of Australian Songs. This worked pretty well, except for the realisation a few days later than I’d left out Wide Open Road – a sin so grievous I expect to be asked to return my Western Australian citizenship at any moment.
In any case, here’s how I went…
Yes, it’s pretty old stuff but I am old and someone has to stand up for the classics.
Here is a clickable list for those who like that kind of thing
(As much as I love Long Loud Hours it probably would have been shuffled out to make room for the Triffids if I’d been thinking straight).
In addition to the Hottest 100 there are a few songs that have really caught my ear lately. First up, Shy Girl by Haute and Freddy. I have no idea who these people are, but they’ve come up with something incredibly 80s sounding in this, the Year of Our Lord 2025, and I’m 100% there for it.
Secondly is this effort by G Flip. I’ve always through G Flip is cool, but their music has never really done that much for me – Disco Cowgirl though grabbed me from the very first time I heard it. The acapella bit followed by the key change at 2:30 is clichéd as hell, but it works so well!!
And finally a surprising blast from the past. I’ve always been a Florence and the Machine fan (not least because Florence Welsh is clearly some kind of ethereal goddess from the realm of the Fae) and I’ve known of Shake it Out ever since it first came out back in 2011, but I’d only ever heard some kind of chopped down radio edit, and never heard it before through headphones. The full version happened to pop up on my playlist at work and it just about blew my eyes out my head! It was like a goddamn spiritual experience! Honestly, you could found a religion on that song! OOOO-WOO-OOOO-OOOO!! OOOO-WOO-OOOO-OOOO-OOOO-WOO-OOOO-OOOO-WOO!! OOOO-WOO-OOOO-OOOO!! OOOO-WOO-OOOO-OOOO-OOOO-WOO-OOOO-OOOO-WOO!! TAKE ME NOW FLORENCE!!
Ahem. Sorry about that. Suffice to say I quite enjoyed it.
So, it’ll be interesting to see if any of my choices end up in the countdown. Roll on the 26th!
On Monday (Australian time) the Pope died. So did my parent’s dachshund Rudy who managed to make it to 21, which is not just extremely good going for any dog but pretty close to the longest recorded lifespan for any dachshund.
Rudy was a good boy, but what about Pope Francis?
In my personal opinion Francis was one of the better Pontiffs of recent times – keeping in mind that the bar for Papal decency is simultaneously pretty low and disturbingly difficult for so many of them to reach. He made some good statements and implemented some good policies, while not being outstandingly horrible to the Vatican’s usual punching bags. With an institution as ancient, hidebound and prejudiced as the Catholic Church that’s about the best you can hope for.
So now the race is on for a new Pope. Unfortunately the prophecies of Saint Malachy have now run out, so we can no longer have fun speculating on which Cardinal best fits whatever nonsensical aphorism he (or a 16th century forger more likely) scrawled down. The big question is whether a progressive (for the Papacy of course) like Francis will make the cut, or if there’ll be a conservative backlash and we end up with someone only slightly to the left of Attila the Hun. There’s also the increasingly traditional speculation over whether they’ll choose someone from the global south, or go with yet another European.
Time will tell I guess. However the dice fall, as long as they don’t elect anyone named Peter the wider world will probably be alright.
Anyway, here’s the song I always think of whenever a Papal conclave rolls around.
Alan Titchmarsh: This is a holly, but it’s not spiky, it’s a small leaved form named Ilex crenata…
Me: Ilex crenata! Prowl off! Jump an prance! Ilex crenata! Prowl off! Jump an prance! Ilex crenata gal prowl off! Gal yuh fi jump an prance!
While stumbling out of bed towards the shower this morning my brain told me I should rewrite The RCMP (1965) by obscure Canadian satirical band The Brothers-in-Law to be about the BPRD from Hellboy.
I strongly suspect that people who drink don’t have to put up with this kind of nonsense.
In my close to half century of listening to music there are two sequences of notes that – from the very first time I heard them – affected me so deeply that I can only presume they speak directly to whatever twisted and shriveled thing within me that passes for a soul.
The first may be found in a number of tracks by the British music/art/prankster duo of Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, known by a variety of names such as the JAMs, the KLF, K2 Plant Hire and the Timelords. A pattern of seven notes, played twice, repeated in several keys baroque style, I first heard it in Last Train to Trancentral (Live from the Lost Continent) from the album The White Room at 2:13.
It had appeared earlier however on the Chill Out album in the ancestral version of Last Train, Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard. It features twice, at 2:04 and 4:29.
Finally it can also be heard at 2:23 in Go to Sleep – the intermediate version of Last Train from the unreleased original version of The White Room.
The other sequence is the guitar riff from Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Love Missile F1-11. There seem to be dozens of mixes of the track (I’m personally aware of at least five) so I’ve picked one where the riff is particularly apparent, occurring in its full form at 2:51.
I cannot say what it is about either sequence that speaks to me so deeply, but should heaven exist and should I end up there I would not be at all surprised to hear either of them while passing through the pearly gates.
The last humans to leave Low Earth Orbit were the crew of Apollo 17 in December 1972. Rock band Van Halen was founded in 1973. This means that NASA just missed the opportunity to play Van Halen in the Van Allen Belt.
