It’s a clear black night, a place remote, Robert Stack is on the corner in a pale trench-coat, Got the mystery cases that remain unsolved, Robert Stack is gonna lay out some trails gone cold,
He’s got all the reports, tracked the witness down, Who didn’t think that it could happen in their own hometown, He’s droppin’ all the facts ’cause it’s not too late, For Robert Stack and Unsolved Mysteries to investigate…
I did not invent it. I wrote it down in order to get it out of my brain.
Shelly Winters, Scary Go Round
Every now and then Triple J – the youth radio station I listen to despite no longer being a youth and radio being a dying medium – holds what they call “Requestival”, which is where they play nothing but songs requested by listeners for an entire week.
This leads to some… strange juxtapositions. For instance a few days ago One Day More from Les Miserables led immediately into Push the Little Daisies by Ween, which is likely something that has never happened previously in the entire history of music, and – if God is merciful – will never happen again. As I type, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell is transitioning to Middle by DJ Snake, so you get the idea of the kind of thing that can happen.
The other kind of thing that can happen is being woken up to the sounds of Billy Ray Cyrus and Achy Breaky Heart, which is what I had to suffer this morning.
Frankly it’s amazing that I got up rather than rolling over and going back to sleep for ever.
In any case this horrid occurrence reminded me of the parody version of said song that my brain insisted on producing 30 years ago when Billy Ray first foisted his infamous crime against music upon us. It is not a good parody. It is, in fact, one of the very worst things I have ever written, and the only reason I’m posting it here is – Shelly Winters style – to get it out of my brain. It is deeply shameful and not healthy for children and other living things, so I recommend you stop reading here and go back to your life with your consciousness unsullied.
Still here? Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
You can smell my knees, Smell anything you please, You can smell my trousers any day,
You can smell my breath, And choke yourself to death, I never really liked you anyway,
But don’t smell my arse, My farting, barking arse, It’s something that you gotta understand,
‘Cause if you smell my arse, My farting, barking arse, I might blow off and kill you man, Oooooo!
Being old and ugly enough to hate on young peoples’ music without shame I would like to nominate Tion Wayne’s IFTK as the worst track of the year.
Call me an old fogey if you lie but in my day looping a La Roux sample and muttering over the top of it while randomly shouting “BLUGH!” would get you laughed off stage, not critical acclaim and a hit single.
But, times change and it’s inevitable that they eventually change so much that you become incapable of understanding them. Or to put it another way…
I used to be with it! Then they changed what ‘it’ was! Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’, and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me!
Abe Simpson
So, you may well disagree with, or even be offended by, my opinion, but remember…
It has recently come to my attention that filming for Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 has concluded and – in what can only be described as an appalling lapse of judgment – director James Gunn has failed to consult me on what retro songs should be used on the soundtrack. It’s inconceivable! What is the man thinking?
In the face of such madness I have no option but to post the songs that should be featured, in the hopes that Mr Gunn comes to his senses. So please enjoy what I am calling the completely unofficial Guardians of the Galaxy Awesome Mix Vol 2.5!
1: Run Runaway – Slade
It’s axiomatic that the opening scene of a Guardians film needs a kickass track and what’s more kickass than the rumbling drums and wailing guitars of Slade’s faux-Scottish anthem about fleeing in terror (and – for some reason -chameleons)? Hell, open the film by having the Guardians fleeing in terror from space chameleons, it’ll be downright diagetic! (Note: I may not actually understand what ‘diagetic’ means).
2: Our Man in London – CCS
Not only does this have exactly the kind of swinging big band sound the Guardian soundtracks are famous for, the lyrics talk about rocket ships and space-age heroes. It’s a natural inclusion!
3: Zero – Alastair Riddle
Is there anything more retro-futuristic than synthwave? Yes! The synthpop music of the 80s that synthwave attempts to imitate! And is there any synthpop more synth or more pop than hand crafted New Zealand synthpop? I say no, and offer this unfairly obscure gem by the David Bowie of West Auckland, Alastair Riddell, as proof!
4: Sugar Baby Love – The Rubettes
Every Awesome Mix needs a love song, and what better than this ridiculous bubblegum confection? Half the lyrics are “Bop Shawady, Bop Shawady-wady” and what could be more Guardians than that?
5: Prologue and Twilight – ELO
This would have worked spectacularly well at the start of Avengers: Endgame where Captain Marvel rescues Tony and Nebula, but the Russos unaccountably chose not to consult me. So I’m offering it to Mr Gunn instead. I mean Mr Blue Sky worked great in Volume 2, didn’t it? You can never have too much ELO!
OK, so that’s just five songs, but they’re five awesome songs, perfectly suited for the final installment of the Guardians trilogy. And on top of that I don’t work for free! If Mr Gunn wants to hear the rest of my suggestions (which definitely exist) we’ll have to strike some kind of deal. Have your people call my people James, I’m sure we can work this out!
As is my way, I have once again become utterly captivated by a song. This time around it’s Zero by New Zealand’s own Alastair Riddell.
Now, some may say I’m late to the party, the song in question having been released 41 years ago, but I prefer to think of myself as making a deliberately delayed dramatic entrance. In any case I can hardly be blamed for not knowing a song that was only released in a foreign country and which (completely unfairly by the way) utterly failed to make an impact there. In any case it’s making an impact now, on me, and that’s what matters.
It is also my way to – when captured by a song – want to know the words so I can sing along and possibly even dance in an extremely undignified manner. These days this is pretty easy, as the lyrics to every song you could ever want are freely available online. Except it seems those of Zero. In digital terms the song barely seems to exist. This could not be allowed to stand, so I have done my best to transcribe it myself and present it here for the education and edification of the world.
Zero – Alastair Riddell
Zero has a way, she’s often bad, Plays round, I’m always sad, She knows what to do, She’s a royal pilot too, oh,
She stares into my eyes, Should see her lover’s eyes, She’s a light above, A light to guide, A light, What she knows,
Commander Zero, Hello Zero, I want you Zero tonight, Won’t you come in on my airwaves? Commander Zero, Hello Zero, A special feeling today, Well you ought to see the sparkle in her eyes,
Last night I dated Zero, I wanted her to see, That as no one else will do, The one she needs is me,
She laughed and shook her head, So foolish and serene, She looked so beautiful, Her flight suit was in green,
Commander Zero, Hello Zero, I want you Zero tonight, Won’t you come in on my airwaves? Commander Zero, Hello Zero, A special feeling today, Well you ought to see the sparkle in her eyes,
Zero, Zero, No one knows like Zero, She’s got the world in her hands, Zero, What am I going to do? (What am I going to do?)
Commander Zero, Hello Zero, I want you Zero tonight, Won’t you come in on my airwaves? Commander Zero, Hello Zero, A special feeling today, With your, Strange hair and, Strange eyes and, That’s why I love you,
Well, the hell-year of 2021 is over and done with and we can celebrate the start of hell-year 2022. Boo! Hooray! Boo! Hooray! Call me when you’re finished.
I did have big plans to get up super early this morning, get an Uber to the Camfield and enjoy the year’s first sunrise while walking along the river to Mends Street Jetty. But when it got to 1:00am and I still hadn’t fallen asleep I decided “screw it” and turned off my alarm. I’d rather start the year at least somewhat rested rather than try to get by on only three hours, no matter how good it might be get some healthy exercise and set an example to live up to for the next twelve months.
One thing I have done today is get my votes in for the Hottest 100. Rather embarrassingly it turns out that one of my favorite tracks of the year, MØ’s Nights With You, wasn’t in fact a track of the year at all. being released all the way back in 2017, so Cloudy Day by Tones and I got promoted up to my number 10 instead of 11. I also voted for Montaigne’s MBMBaM theme song My Life is Better With You which isn’t on the official list, BUT I DON’T CARE! My track of the year is Ziggy Ramo’s Little Things, and if that makes anyone uncomfortable then (to quote Phil Jupitus) Well fucking good!
Anyway, here’s the full list, alphabetically by artist…
(What? You don’t consider how stupid our calendar is on January 1st each year? What’s wrong with you?)
It is a truth universally acknowledged by all right thinking people that the Gregorian Calendar is a hodge-podge of terrible ideas smothered in a layer of well meaning but equally as bad hacks intended to force it into some semblance of functionality. The majority of the problems stem from the irrational belief of the Ancients that the universe is (or should be) some kind of clockwork mechanism where the movements of the celestial bodies all mesh together into a grand yet simple pattern – as opposed to the reality that they’re big lumps of rock and gas that whiz around doing their own thing with no obligation to match the neat mathematical models we humans prefer.
I make everything worse!
As such, the period of rotation of our planet (a day) does not fit evenly into the rotation of our moon around our planet (a month) and neither the day nor month fit evenly into the rotation of our planet around the sun (a year). Building a calendar on the assumption that they do causes horrible problems and results in said calendar drifting away from reality until people are planting their crops in the middle of winter and starving to death.
(We correct for this kind of thing with tricks like leap days, which is where we save up all the left over bits of days at the end of a solar orbit and then shove them back into the calendar once they add up to a full day. This is actually a pretty good solution, although sticking them at the end of the second month is the kind of thing only a lunatic would consider sensible.)
The mismatch between the solar year (365.2425 days) and lunar month (29.53 days) is responsible for the horrible mess of our calendar months. Four of them are 30 days long, seven of them are 31 days and one is 28 days (or 29 when we need to shove in one of those leap days). This is stupid.
And to add to these problems we went and invented the week – a period of seven days that doesn’t match up with the month or the year. The result is sheer insanity, requiring complex calculations to figure out what day of the week a given date falls on, and making vast sums of money for the calendar printing industry.
Enough! I cry! A new calendar is desperately needed, and I – in my supreme intelligence (not to say arrogance) – am the one to create it!
As such I am pleased to here present the Wyrmworld Calendar!
The Wyrmworld Calendar (WYC) consists of 13 months – the twelve we currently use plus Hektober – each of exactly four weeks long (28 days). The first day of each month – and the first day of each year is a Monday, so you never need to buy a new calendar.
This comes to 364 days, which leaves 1.2425 days over a year. The one full day is Yearsend – a special day inserted between Sunday Hektober 28th and Monday January 1st that isn’t part of any month and doesn’t have a day of the week. The remaining 0.2425 days are saved up as per the current leap year system, and when a leap day is required it’s added as Leapday between Yearsend and January 1st.
So, that takes care of the years, days and weeks, but how do the 13 months of the Wyrmworld Calendar line up with the moon? Well, they don’t. The moon makes everything way too complicated and can go frunk itself. We are human beings, not fish!
The Battle of Thermopylae was (2022+480)-1 years ago!
With the cycle of days figured out we now need to set an epoch. The Gregorian Calendar Epoch – BC/AD or BCE/CE – is just terrible, You have to count backwards for anything interesting in ancient history and then you have to account for there being no year 0. How old would Cato the Elder be if he were still alive today? He was born in 234 BCE so we need to take the current year of 2022 and add 234 and then take away 1, so he’d be 2,255. What year would he have had his 724th birthday? So we take 234 away from 724, but then we need to add 1, so 491 CE? THIS IS CONFUSING!
The sensible answer is to push the epoch back beyond recorded history so all the numbers that matter are in the positive. Cesare Emiliani’s Holocene Calendar does this with the neat trick of setting the epoch to 10,001 BCE, meaning we just add 10,000 to the current CE/AD year. The Wyrmworld Calendar is not afraid to steal good ideas, so we will do the same! So the current year is 12,022 WYC and Cato the Elder was born in 9,767 WYC. Easy!
(The battle of Thermopylae was 9,521 WYC in case you were wondering…)
Finally, exactly when is the new year? We currently celebrate new year at an arbitrary point in the Earth’s orbit and this offends me. The new year should be tied to something meaningful. The logical choice is a solstice or equinox. To minimise confusion we’ll use the (Gregorian) December solstice, and for reasons of convenience reference the Gregorian 2021 solstice of December 21st. The solstice shall mark the last day of the year, with the next day January (WYC) 1st.
So, adding it all together today is Thursday January 11th 12,022 WYC. I expect the world to start using this far superior calendar immediately!
I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to vote for in the Hottest 100 this year, but I have a list of candidate tracks and have thus decided to force them upon everyone while I make up my mind. So here, in no particular order, I present the UNQUESTIONABLY (by which I mean ‘extremely questionably’) best songs of 2021!
Let’s go dreaming of blue skies in California with BONES – TELENOVA
A bit of 90s post-grunge indie feel with SMILE – WOLF ALICE
The new theme for MBMBaM by one of Australia’s own. MY LIFE IS BETTER WITH YOU – MONTAIGNE
Some laid back, Beatlesque vibes with I’M FINE – ASHE
This is just straight-up good music. HOUSE BURN DOWN – KING PRINCESS
Always was, always will be. Sovereignty was never ceded. LITTLE THINGS – ZIGGY RAMO (feat. PAUL KELLY)
The kind of party track we could all use a bit of after this year. CLOUDY DAY – TONES AND I
We went to California earlier, now let’s hop across to COLORADO – MILKY CHANCE
When that base kicks in… LIVE TO SURVIVE – MØ
One of our best musical story tellers. BRUISES – RUBY FIELDS
The man deserves a good amount of the criticism he gets, but remember that he’s mentally ill, AND that he can still put out an amazing bit of music now and then. JAIL – KANYE WEST
So rude!! But it’s catchy as hell and that’s what matters. WET DREAM – WET LEG
Well it sure sucks to be you JOSH – PEACH PRC
A real soulful one here. NIGHTS WITH YOU – MØ
Another very catchy track. HURTS TO LOVE YOU – CARLA WEHBE
OK, now I’m off to buy some last minute supplies, fully masked as the virus has got into the state just in time for Christmas. Watch out! COVID’s about! But before that – given what day it is – I must follow my yearly tradition, even though it has nothing to do with the Hottest 100.
For probably the last 25 years a fragment of music and a snatch of lyrics have been haunting the back of my brain.
It’s an energetic piece. The vocalist sings words along the lines of You can roo-ooo-ooo-oam in your own way with a four note descending scale on “roam”. Then there’s a rather 80s style guitar riff, and the lyrics repeat – You can roo-ooo-ooo-oam in your own way…
Emperor Charles V of Spain in case you were wondering
Now in those long ago days before YouTube and Google it was actually really hard to identify a song. If you wanted to look anything up you needed to go down to the local library and search through books, and while it was trivial to find information on, let’s say, Emperor Charles V of Spain, there were very few, if any, books cataloguing song lyrics. And if you did manage to find a book of song lyrics, how could you search it for a random snatch of words from the middle of a song? There simply wasn’t a way to do it.
So my only option was to rack my brain, hoping that some random neurons would connect in the right pattern to throw up some more details. And occasionally, over the years, they did. For instance, I was quite certain for a while that the song had to be “Roam” by the B-52s. I mean, the word ‘roam’ is right there! Careful listening to the radio and the eventual coming of digital music meaning the radio no longer had to be relied on however eventually showed that my random neurons were wrong, with the mysterious phrase appearing nowhere in the work – for all that I could hear Kate Pierson belting it out in my head.
With that possibility eliminated my brain went back to brooding and eventually suggested Transvision Vamp, who I had – frankly – completely forgotten even existed. Checking out their their discography led me to Baby, I Don’t Care.
Which was a slightly better fit – the backing vocals in the chorus actually sounded kind of right – but the bit I remembered still wasn’t there!
So I abandoned the quest. I decided that my brain had smashed together elements from the B-52s, Transvision Vamp and lord knows what else to create an entirely fictional fragment of music that never existed in the first place.
Oddly enough I’d been in this situation before with another fragment of music hiding out in the back of my brain. For years I was haunted by a small piece of violin that I was certain came at the start of a song, and spent just as many futile hours trying to figure out where it originated. I eventually concluded that it was a distorted memory of the start of David Bowie’s Sorrow and remained convinced of this until one wonderful morning when I heard it playing over the radio in the bakery opposite Bayswater railway station like some glorious beam of sunshine bursting into the greyness of the day.
I could only make out fragments of it – not enough to identify the song. But I heard enough fragments to know that there was only one band in history who could pull off such a combination of orchestra, synths, electric guitar and overlayed vocal harmonies, and later that day a search through the works of ELO revealed that the song that had been haunting me for decades was Sweet Talkin’ Woman.
So, imagine my shock and delight when on Sunday, doing my weekly grocery shopping in the Morley branch of a major supermarket chain, I heard the snatch of music that had eluded me for so long!
Yes they ri-ii-ii-ise in their own way!Yes they ri-ii-ii-ise in their own way!
It was history repeating! Another musical memory I’d decided was false unexpectedly revealed as genuine in a place of business! I found my way to one of the ceiling speakers and stood beneath it, memorising as much of the lyrics as I could make out over the hustle and bustle of the supermarket.
As soon as I got home I leapt onto the internet and started frantically typing in lyrics. In no time at all I had it pinned down and discovered that the song that had been haunting me for a quarter of a century was…
…by Daryl f’ing Braithwaite.
It’s Rise – the title track from Braithwaite’s 1990 album.
I was, and remain, not happy. And what’s even more embarrassing than being haunted for decades by the lead singer of Sherbet is that on hearing it I instantly remembered about 90% of the lyrics.
I’m honestly starting to suspect that the reason the normal people fry the memory centres of their brains with alcohol is specifically to avoid this sort of thing.
