"this is not a love song" - angelou

"we can sit and talk all night, spectate and philosophise but there's no rehearsal this is the real thing. so lets just say that you got it wrong and this is not a love song"



the monkey bar was one of those places that just had to exist. by day a scratty cafe, by night host to an eclectic range of gigs and club nights. i have a strange range of happy memories of it - the gig i played there was enhanced by the singing of drunken dutch sailors, the dub night had an open african drumming circle in the upstairs room and there was psycho's.

every third thursday a weak comedian would compere an acoustic night. i saw a lot of these gigs, but the only one that is specifically memorable was seeing angelou.

now, as you may have noticed, if you give a girl a guitar i am weak around her, and if you give a pretty and talented girl a guitar i am literally putty. they sung a complete set of soul-shatteringly lovely songs, threw in the best cover of buckley's hallelujah i have ever heard and were funny and endearing between songs. holly even seemed really sorry for having to take money from me in return for a copy of their cd afterwards.
it was an evening of beauty and i walked home in a daze that night with autumn thinking about turning into winter around me.

"richard" - billy bragg

"how can he go on when noone answers the adverts in his mind?"



nadine baggott knows all about pentapeptides.
barry scott shouts about making pennies shiny.
carol vorderman knows all about loan sharks.

but none of them can compete with that "editor" from the advert in the late 90s whose conversational opening gambit "i get hundreds of letters about thrush" throws up far more questions than it can ever hope to answer.

"dhc" - the dance hall crashers

"the world's a mess some people always say. well you know they're right, but who am i to say? we keep on living and we take it all in stride 'cause if we worry too much we'll never stay alive. "


there are some bands who call themselves ska-punk because they have a horn player and a fondness for the offbeat. but one of the reasons i like the dance hall crashers is that they actually seem to know about ska. i hear vocal harmonies and techniques that i hear in the selector and the bodysnatchers, and im sure if i was more knowledgeable about the "real" ska of the sixties i could think of examples of those techniques being used then.

i generally hate songs that imply things will be ok if you just dance, hence my predominantly negative attitude towards disco. but this one is just so catchy.

"tide is high" - blondie

"it's not the things you do that tease and wound me bad, but it's the way you do the things you do to me"



whenever i listen to the best of blondie (the proper 1981 one, not any of the crummy later pretenders) i am always disappointed when this song comes on. im not even sure that i dont like it, i just know im impatient for "in the flesh" to kick in.