Tales from the Bitface

"Leonard Cohen" by boygenius

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'What is your favorite song from last year?' I am asked by the daily prompt from Crucial Tracks.

'Favourite,' I say. The 'favorite' spelling reads like a made-up element from thirties SF, or some such.

But I'm avoiding the question. The thing is, what this tells me is, I don't listen to much new music these days. Or, when I do, it doesn't impinge, doesn't resonate with me, become something I go back to.

I spent a chunk of 2024 listening through a list from The Guardian, of the 50 best albums of 2023, in order to check out what was good and recent. I had already heard the PJ Harvey, the Gina Birch, and the Boygenius albums, all of which I liked.

None of the others made enough of an impact to count, sadly. That is, none of them got a second play. One, I think, I gave a decent chance, but couldn't even finish.

And anyway, they were all new works from the year before last, not last year.

So for the purposes of this prompt, I'm allowing 'new to me' to count. And while I love PJ Harvey, so you might expect one of hers to make the cut, I Inside the Old Year Dying is too much an album. It's its own unique thing, but I don't recall a specific standout track from it.

So I'm going with Boygenius and, in another acknowledgment of my lack of new-music-attention, their one that namechecks an old singer — one of my favourites.

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"Paradise By the Dashboard Light" by Meat Loaf & Ellen Foley

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I did not sing along to anything today, as the daily prompt asks. But I did find myself singing this Meat Loaf ditty, at least in my head. Maybe aloud, who knows?

Interesting that it appears as by Meat Loaf & Ellen Foley. Entirely appropriate, as it's a duet. But I don't think it was originally billed that way, and the modern approach would be to include 'Feat Ellen Foley' right in the title text. As I wrote about several years ago in Little, Feat...

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Oh my god, this film. This film is so, so good. Fantastic footage and sound from a gig that I've never even heard of before (though I think I've seen some of the footage). Great extracts from TV news broadcasts of the time, all sorts of great stuff.

Turns out there was an asylum/hospital/children's home kinda place where hundreds of kids with learning disabilities and other problems were kept in horrific conditions. Seeing the footage of it, I was reminded of the Romanian orphans that led JK Rowling to set up her Lumos charity.

John & Yoko learned about the place back in the day and set up the titular One to One benefit concert, raising money to help to provide better lives for those kids.

The strangest thing is that I've never heard about this concert before.

I will be watching this film again, you can be sure.

"No More Heroes (1996 Remastered Version)" by The Stranglers

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Today's prompt is 'Share a song that changed your perspective on music.'

I'm gonna have to go back to 1977 for this one. That year may not surprise you, being as it was the core of the original punk days.

I was 13, as of August. 'No More Heroes' came out in September, Wikipedia tells me. I can't tell you when I first heard it, but I do know it was on a Sunday afternoon, after a week in which my friend Brendan had strongly urged me to get into punk.

It came on the radio, and it was the first punk song I heard.

The Stranglers were less punky than the Pistols, Clash, Damned, etc, of course, being older and to some extent, bandwagon jumpers. But who gave a fuck about that when they made a song as good as this?

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This has a slightly interesting connection to home for me. Just last week we were walking past St John of Hackney churchyard, a common route from the Narrow Way home, when we stopped to look at a plaque outside the Hackney Mortuary. It describes the top-secret military operation the film is named after. The dead body that was used to deceive the Nazis was stored at the mortuary for three months. You can see a picture of the plaque at the Wikipedia page for the mission.

So why not watch the film? It's an interesting story, it's got an impressive cast, and it's on Netflix.

Good thing about that last, because we'd have been mildly annoyed if we'd had to pay extra for it. Trouble is, it's not very good.

It's not terrible. Two-and-a-half stars from me means it's OK, but just barely. On another day I might have given it three. The problem might be with us: knowing the story in advance could remove all tension, except from the romance subplot. But no, I think that was OK. I think it's more that sometimes the various parts of a film — which is a complex thing to create, after all — don't come together well enough, for reasons that are hard to define.

"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" by The Beatles

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My earliest musical memory might be this. I was well under five, maybe only three. My gran — my mum’s mum — was staying with us because she wasn’t well. I walked into her room with my big sister, singing.

Says gran, ‘Is he swearing?’ My sister had to explain that I wasn’t saying, ‘Oh bloody’ something.

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"London Calling" by The Clash

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It seems wildly unlikely that I — or indeed, anyone — could have a single ‘favourite song’ throughout high school. Not least since ’high school’ itself is not a commonly-used term here in the UK. Though my secondary school did actually have ‘High School’ in its name.

Secondary school lasts six or seven years, though (true, back then, some got out after four, but even so). Who’s going to keep the same fave for that long, especially during such formative years?

At the start, if I had a single fave, it would have certainly been by The Beatles. By the end it would have been The Clash or Stiff Little Fingers.

So let's go with 'London Calling', a Clash song that mentions The Beatles, albeit negatively: 'phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust.'

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"Another Girl Another Planet" by The Only Ones

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What is a song that instantly energizes you?

I feel I should answer that with something relating to Star Trek, but that’s the wrong kind of ‘energize’ (or ‘energise’, as I would spell it).

Although ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ does sound like it could be about Captain Kirk.

I’ve heard it described as Peter Perret’s love song to heroin, but also seen a more recent interview where he said it wasn’t about that.

Anyway, if you want to get me on the dancefloor, this one’s chugging intro is always a good bet.

‘Space travel’s in my blood,’ after all.

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"If I Can't Change Your Mind" by Sugar

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The prompt was 'What song do you wish you had written?' So many, of course, especially since I used to play guitar very badly and sing in bands, and I have written a few songs.

But for some reason, the one that popped into my mind was 'If I Can't Change Your Mind' by Sugar. Bob Mould's work after Hüsker Dü was varied, but this track off Sugar's first album is just glorious.

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Outstanding drama based on the true story of a Brazilian family's experiences under the dictatorship in the 70s and beyond. Eunice Paiva's husband, Rubens, is taken in by the military. She, too is detained for several days and questioned, though released. One of her four daughters is also taken, but released after a night.

But Rubens is never seen again, his body, like that of many of his countryfolk, never found.

Sad, yet life-affirming, as it's about the resilience of the family, and Eunice's strength as a mother. She went on to become a human-rights lawyer.

Recommended.

Absolutely loved this jazz-fueled documentary about the events running up to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, first and short-lived prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1972.

It's a bleak, dark story, but so well told, and with such a great soundtrack, that you rarely feel anything other than pulled along by the narrative.

Which itself is kind of a piece of jazz in the way it's structured. The style has some similarities to Adam Curtis's work in its use of archival footage and the way it lets text, sound, and images overlap and interact. Though Curtis uses a voiceover narrative (or at least did in the one I've seen, while Johan Grimonprez here, does not, simply letting everything speak for itself.

Great, stylish sixties spy story, with Michael Caine. He's a man who cooks! and makes coffee in — get this — a cafetière (french press to our American friends). Très Moderne!

More to the point, British scientists have been giving up their roles and/or disappearing mysteriously. The word 'defecting' is never used, The USSR is not mentioned explicitly. But this 'brain drain' is harming Britain's defensive capabilities. Harry Palmer joins a team that is investigating the disappearance of the latest scientist.

The plot isn't all that good, to be honest, it's a bit bumpy in places, not as coherent as I'd like. But the overall style of the thing, the way it plays to fears of mind control and brainwashing, and the general verve with which it's done, get it a high mark from me.

Really fun romcom from 1940. It cleverly keeps you guessing about who's going to get together with whom till very nearly the end.