Footnote OTD

Ancient Athenians could not fetch beer from the fridge of the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University

– from note 15 to Nigel Simmonds (1995), “The analytical foundations of justice”, Cambridge Law Journal 54(2)

(In context it’s actually a very good point.)

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I don’t remember Guildford

It’s Edward Lear’s bicentennial this year. I’ve always had a fondness for Lear. I grew up reading his poems; the Complete Nonsense was one of the first books I read cover to cover, and almost certainly the first book of poetry. It paid off; when I took the Cambridge entrance exam – back when you could get into Cambridge by putting on a performance in the entrance exam – I answered a question about the Romantics by writing about Lear’s verse. I may have been inspired by a running joke in John Verney’s novel Seven Sunflower Seeds in which Berry, the narrator, is told to read the whole of [King] Lear for an essay, gets the wrong end of the stick and sets about reading the whole of [Edward] Lear – the limericks, the long poems, the stories, the travel journals… (Great writer, John Verney.) I saw Lear – as did Berry and presumably Verney – as an overlooked poet of yearning and melancholia, with a late-Romantic suspicion of society and belief in the solitary imagination.

There was an Old Man in a boat
Who said, ‘I’m afloat, I’m afloat!’
When they said, ‘No! you ain’t!’
He was ready to faint
That unhappy Old Man in a boat.

They do tend to do that kind of thing. Here’s George Orwell on Lear:

“They” are the realists, the practical men, the sober citizens in bowler hats who are always anxious to stop you doing anything worth doing. For instance:

There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,
Who danced a quadrille with a raven;
But they said, “It’s absurd
To encourage this bird!”
So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.

To smash somebody just for dancing a quadrille with a raven is exactly the kind of thing that “They” would do.

Getting the bit between his teeth, Orwell goes on to suggest that “the whole theory of authoritarian governments is summed up in the statement that Pobbles were happier without their toes”. Nonsense isn’t just nonsense; even the limerick about the Old Person of Basing has a subtext:

There was an Old Person of Basing,
Whose presence of mind was amazing;
He purchased a steed,
Which he rode at full speed,
And escaped from the people of Basing.

Orwell:

It is not quite arbitrary. The funniness is in the gentle implied criticism of the people of Basing, who once again are “They”, the respectable ones, the right-thinking, art-hating majority.

In similar vein, Michael Rosen (whose post inspired this one) writes:

nonsense is not without any sense. It nearly always creates something new which doesn’t tally with aspects of the world or aspects of texts which we regard as normal or conventional. So it frequently offers parallels, parodies, inversions and distortions. I guess we find a lot of this funny or attractive because it breaks up the world or texts we live with under compulsion and necessity.

He’s not wrong – Orwell wasn’t wrong either. But I feel that this argument, like Orwell’s, misses or underrates something very important about Lear’s “nonsense” work, and about “nonsense” works in general (although I think we now have other names for them). (Just as my own teenage idea about Lear as an Arnoldian post-Romantic is an interesting angle, but plainly isn’t the whole story.)

I’m thinking of the element of play, which may have no point at all or even be ostentatiously pointless. Consider Lear’s limericks, with their famously near-identical first and last lines. W.S. Gilbert couldn’t be doing with them and wrote this brilliant parody:

There was an Old Man of Dundee
Who was stung on the arm by a wasp.
When they said, “Does it hurt?”
He said, “Not very much,
It’s a good thing it wasn’t a hornet.”

(Best recited quickly.) But I think Gilbert’s sarcastic worldliness was also a way of being tone-deaf or missing the point. Put it this way, going nowhere is what Lear’s limericks do. Take that Old Person of Basing: reduced to its essentials, what his poem says is

There was an Old Person of Basing
Who made his escape from Basing

The poem undoes itself, in other words – by the last line there isn’t an Old Person of Basing. It reminds me of children’s rhymes that end by deconstructing themselves, or of this short piece by the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms:

There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.

He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either.

He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn’t have any insides at all. There was nothing to speak of! So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about.

We’d better not talk about him any more.

The movement of thought is ostentatiously, extravagantly pointless, as if to say: “I’m telling you something worth hearing… oh, no, I’m not! I’m making sense… oh, no, I’m not! I’m talking… oh, no, I’m not!” A lot of nonsense work (although I think we now have other names for it) performs this kind of defiant doodling and rug-pulling; Edward Lear certainly did.

We can see what’s going on a bit better if we insert Lear into his tradition: what I think of as the great tradition of Basingstoke. (Lear never actually referred to Basingstoke in his verse, but the Old Person of Basing is close enough; it’s about a mile and a half, to be precise. Moreover, Basing has priority over Basingstoke, historically if nothing else; Basingstoke is first recorded (in the tenth century) as Basinga stoc, which translates as “satellite settlement dependent on Basing” or more loosely “Basing New Town”.) Back in 1997, Michael Dobson noted the recurrence of Basingstoke in his LRB review of a collection of nonsense verse. Take this, from the “Water-Poet” John Taylor (so called because he made his living as a wherryman):

This was no sooner knowne at Amsterdam,
But with an Ethiopian Argosey,
Man’d with Flap-dragons, drinking upsifreeze,
They past the purple gulfe of Basingstoke

(“Upsifreeze”, apparently, is an adverb meaning “to alcoholic excess”.) A couple of decades later an anonymous poet invoked Basingstoke for no apparent reason at all:

When Basingstoke did swim upon the Thames,
And swore all thieves to be just and true,
The Sumnors and Bailiffs were honest men,
And Pease and Bacon that year it snew.

Basingstoke seems to have been a byword for solid English mundanity, whose appearance instantly accentuates the nonsensicality of nonsense verse, even at the time of the Civil War – which is remarkable in itself, given that the town saw a lot of action during the war: Basing House was Royalist, Basingstoke itself Parliamentarian. (You won’t find Basing House on the map now.)

But it didn’t end there. Back – or rather forward – to Gilbert, a writer who knew how to play with words but was never quite content just to play. He strikes me as a conflicted writer, somehow. (Yes, it’s Taking Victorian Comic Writers Altogether Too Seriously Week at the Gaping Silence!) I get the feeling that Gilbert could write so well, so quickly and so playfully that he distrusted his own fluency and wanted to puncture it somehow. In Ruddigore the character of Margaret, otherwise known as Mad Meg… well, I’ll let her tell it:

Margaret. …when I am lying awake at night, and the pale moonlight streams through the latticed casement, strange fancies crowd upon my poor mad brain, and I sometimes think that if we could hit upon some word for you to use whenever I am about to relapse – some word that teems with hidden meaning – like “Basingstoke” – it might recall me to my saner self. For, after all, I am only Mad Margaret! Daft Meg! Poor Meg! He! he! he!
Despard. Poor child, she wanders! But soft – someone comes – Margaret – pray recollect yourself – Basingstoke, I beg! Margaret, if you don’t Basingstoke at once, I shall be seriously angry.
Margaret. (recovering herself) Basingstoke it is!

Using Basingstoke as a cure for nonsense, while maintaining perversely that it teems with hidden meaning, seems typical of Gilbert. (As Dobson points out, the character of Mad Meg was based on Elvira, the intermittently sane heroine of Bellini’s I Puritani, whose madness derived ultimately from the English Civil War – the war between, among other places, Basingstoke and Basing. Coincidence? Probably.)

Can we extend the Basingstoke-nonsense connection into the twentieth century? We certainly can, and things get more interesting when we do. Here (in full) is Henry Reed’s 1941 poem “Chard Whitlow”, a parody of T.S. Eliot:

As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four,
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.
And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)
To see my time over again— if you can call it time:
Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,
Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded Tube.

There are certain precautions— though none of them very reliable—
Against the blast from bombs and the flying splinter,
But not against the blast from heaven, vento dei venti,
The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;
And the frigid burnings of purgatory will not be touched
By any emollient.
I think you will find this put,
Better than I could ever hope to express it,
In the words of Kharma: “It is, we believe,
Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump
Will extinguish hell.”
Oh, listeners,
And you especially who have turned off the wireless,
And sit in Stoke or Basingstoke listening appreciatively to the silence,
(Which is also the silence of hell) pray not for your selves but your souls.
And pray for me also under the draughty stair.
As we get older we do not get any younger.

And pray for Kharma under the holy mountain..

What connects this quiet and precise parody to the older nonsense tradition is its dogged absurdity, the care which Reed takes to speak in Eliot’s late voice while saying almost exactly nothing. (As we get older we do not get any younger – and I love the image of the poet in front of a Third Programme microphone, solemnly apostrophising the listeners who have turned off.) Parody very often has this quality of nonsensical play; one way, and one of the more enjoyable ways, to undermine the text you’re parodying is to keep the form and remove the sense. You’re reading something dignified and meaningful and then… oh no you’re not; the rug is pulled, and you’re just reading some meaningless doodles. Some of the best – and funniest – comic writing is in the form of parody, in my experience – Dwight MacDonald’s Faber anthology of parodies is one of my very favourite books. It’s a form that gives the writer endless scope for going wrong, writing differently… writing nonsense.

Monty Python eventually got round to Basingstoke, too, but it took them a while. It was the third episode of the final series, and everyone was getting a bit tired by then, so there’s something rather laborious about the result.

Fawcett Sir, we all know the facts of this case; that Sapper Walters, being in possession of expensive military equipment, to wit one Lee Enfield .303 rifle and 72 rounds of ammunition, valued at a hundred and forty pounds three shillings and sixpence, chose instead to use wet towels to take an enemy command post in the area of Basingstoke …
Presiding General Basingstoke? Basingstoke in Hampshire?
Fawcett No, no, no, sir, no.
Presiding General I see, carry on.
Fawcett The result of his action was that the enemy …
Presiding General Basingstoke where?
Fawcett Basingstoke in Westphalia, sir.
Presiding General Oh I see. Carry on.
Fawcett The result of Sapper Walters’s action was that the enemy received wet patches upon their trousers and in some cases small red strawberry marks upon their thighs …
Presiding General I didn’t know there was a Basingstoke in Westphalia.
Fawcett (slightly irritated) It’s on the map, sir.
Presiding General What map?
Fawcett (more irritably) The map of Westphalia as used by the army, sir.
Presiding General Well, I’ve certainly never heard of Basingstoke in Westphalia.
Fawcett (patiently) It’s a municipal borough sir, twenty-seven miles north-north east of Southampton. Its chief manufactures …
Presiding General What … Southampton in Westphalia?
Fawcett Yes sir … bricks … clothing. Nearby are remains of Basing House, burned down by Cromwell’s cavalry in 1645 …
Presiding General Who compiled this map?
Fawcett Cole Porter, sir.
Presiding General (incredulously) Cole Porter … who wrote `Kiss Me Kate’?
Fawcett No, alas not, sir … this was Cole Porter who wrote `Anything Goes’.

And so wearily on. I think part of the problem is that, while the sketch has floated free of its parodic moorings – at least, it’s hard to see what this would be a parody of – it doesn’t have the free-ranging inventiveness of the best nonsense. (Even that sober Henry Reed poem has its stirrup-pump and that quietly ridiculous age joke.) But Basingstoke abides.

Parody – and the über-parody of absurdism, parodying form as well as content – was one place where nonsense found a home in the twentieth century. The other major stream of twentieth-century nonsense derives from Surrealism; in his piece on Lear, Orwell writes in passing:

Until Surrealism made a deliberate raid on the unconscious, poetry that aimed at being nonsense, apart from the meaningless refrains of songs, does not seem to have been common.

Much freer associations of ideas and images have been possible in poetry since Surrealism – and perhaps, in English poetry, since Dylan Thomas in particular; he could rattle off the bizarre combinations of imagery without a care, and on some accounts without much thought either. (A. J. P. Taylor recalled that he once saw Thomas revising a draft of a poem by methodically crossing out all the adjectives and replacing them with alternatives chosen at random – “Makes it more interesting for the readers, see?” On the other hand, Thomas was having an affair with Taylor’s wife at the time, so this perhaps isn’t the most reliable testimony.) Nonsense has come back in under the banner of the ‘surreal’, in poetry and especially in song lyrics. In the present day, when song lyrics are described as ‘surreal’, I think a lot of time what we’re hearing is what an earlier age would have called nonsense. That said, it’s arguable that nonsense always had a home in songs, if you looked in the right places – i.e. not too high up the cultural scale:

The grey goose and gander went over the green
The grey goose went barefoot for fear of being seen
For fear of being seen, my boys, by the light of the moon
Rise early tomorrow morning all in the same tune,
Rise early tomorrow morning all in the same tune!

The collector who noted down the earliest version of this song (in 1891) added: “Many years ago, this used to be a favourite song round about Leeds, though a very silly one. … Before railways and cheap trips acted like general diffusers of London music hall songs, suchlike ditties in country districts were common in the kitchens of quiet public houses .. I need scarcely say that this delightful production would be sung only after a certain degree of conviviality had been reached.” When better?

Whether it derives from capital-S Surrealism filtering down or subterranean folk nonsense seeping up, a lot of contemporary song lyrics are written in a ‘surreal’ register. When James Mercer sang

You’re testing your mettle
With doeskin and petals
While kissing the lipless
That bleed all the sweetness away

you could just about follow the train of thought if you tried (mettle/metal?/petals/soft/kiss/lipless/skull?/bleed/desiccate?…), but a large part of what makes the lyric work is the way the images bounce off each other without hanging around long enough to make sense: it’s a refusal to communicate, but a playful one that (paradoxically) invites the listener to join in. There’s a similar but more extreme effect in one of Paddy McAloon’s first Prefab Sprout songs, “Don’t sing”(!):

Like most I come when I want things done
Please God don’t let that change!
(The anguish of love at long range)
Should have been a doctor-O,
Then they could see what they’re getting.
Oh no, don’t blame Mexico!
They ask for more than you bargain for and then they ask for mo’, oh, oh
Oh no, don’t blame Mexico!
That’s a feast that the whisky priest may yet have to forgo, oh, oh
Rob me of colour and make me sound duller but never go away

“Don’t sing”, indeed – everything about that song is fighting against the condition of being a song (the ridiculously forced rhyme on “mo'”, the transparently fake folkie touch of “doctor-O”) – and fighting against the condition of having something to say or saying it intelligibly. (On the other hand, I haven’t read The power and the glory, which seems to be referenced here; it may all be in the book.) At the same time, with each successive line you’re right there with the singer, feeling what it’s like to have your mind full of stuff that doesn’t quite fit together.

Not that nonsense (which we now call by different names) is always about refusal and frustration. Sometimes it just lets the language play, takes it for a walk, lets it go… somewhere else. Take the Beta Band’s “To you alone” (lyrics, presumably, by Steve Mason):

She’s like the snow-capped trees in my jigsaw,
Loose at the seams with inferior dreams
She’s like a fool that you meet in the heart store
Hand in the pail and the blacker the veil,
The blacker the veil…

Hearing that, you know just what he means. Actually, no, you have no idea what he means, but you feel what he means. Or rather, you feel what he’s doing, even if you can’t begin to say what it means. It’s an Escher castle in words – an impossible construction, one that can’t really exist; and yet there it is, between your ears.

One final example:

I often dream of trains when I’m alone
I ride on them into another zone
I dream of them constantly
Heading for Paradise
Or Basingstoke
Or Reading

I often dream of trains when I’m awake
They ride along beside a frozen lake
And there in the buffet car
I wait for Eternity
Or Basingstoke
Or Reading

Robyn Hitchcock, who else. It’s striking that the insistent real-world detail of “Basingstoke or Reading” makes the image more dreamlike, more nonsensical: “Paradise or Basingstoke” on its own would just be bathos, and would have an artful, deliberate ring to it. The prosaic phrasing of the second verse – the first line especially – comes with a similar kind of depth charge of strangeness.

To envisage the world as it is, and yet entirely other –

Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four,
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.

The grey goose went barefoot for fear of being seen
For fear of being seen, my boys, by the light of the moon

Presiding General Who compiled this map?
Fawcett Cole Porter, sir.

When Basingstoke did swim upon the Thames,
And swore all thieves to be just and true

On the Coast of Coromandel
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
Two old chairs, and half a candle,–
One old jug without a handle,–
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,
These were all the worldly goods,
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò

– that’s nonsense (although we generally now have other names for it). It’s a form of mental exercise, I think. Above all it’s a form of play, and requires no more justification than that. For a moment, as the poem or the song occupies your mind, you’re thinking differently, experiencing the world differently, making sense of it differently. Or, for a moment, not making sense at all. Just for a moment.

Kadoodle-oodle-skippety-wee!

As long ago as Long Ago, and as Long Ago Again as That, the City of Peking in the Ancient Land of China rang with jubilation and rejoicing; for a Son and Heir had been born to the Emperor Aladdin and the Empress Bedr-al-Budur
…
the Grand Vizier summoned a Special Meeting of State in the White Lacquer Room of the Imperial Palace. You may judge for yourself the importance of this Meeting, when I tell you that His Gracious Majesty the Emperor Aladdin presided over it Himself. Others present included the Lord Chamberlain; the Prime Minister; two Senior Generals from the Palace Guard; the Master of the Horse; the Mistress of the Robes; and an Unidentified Friend of the Master of the Horse.
…
‘Your Majesty!’ began the Grand Vizier imposingly. ‘Also Lords and Ladies of the Imperial Court! Also the Friend of the Master of the Horse. We are met here this evening to give Formal Voice to our Humble and Unworthy Joy at the birth of a Son and Heir to our Celestial Emperor of all the Chinas’

Thus chapter 1. In the next chapter, time having passed in the mean time, Aladdin’s son and heir comes of age, a topic discussed at an equally important meeting attended by the Prince himself and both his parents:

‘Your Imperial Majesties!’ began the Grand Vizier, imposingly. ‘Also, Your Imperial Highness! Also, Lords and Ladies of the Court! We are met here (all except the Friend of the Master of the Horse, who has been sent to his Room till Tea-Time) to give formal Voice to our Humble and Unworthy Joy at the Very Important Event of the Coming of Age of the Heir Apparent’

From Noel Langley, The Land of Green Ginger (1937 and 1966). It’s uncanny.

Update What I really find hard to comprehend is the glacial pace at which this story’s moving. Liam Fox seems genuinely not to have any idea that he’s done anything wrong, and the government hierarchy seems pretty nonchalant as well; the idea seems to be that he’ll be hung out to dry if and when the story becomes too embarrassing, which by implication it hasn’t done yet. Perhaps it’s deliberate news management; certainly it’s made life difficult for the BBC news, which has been left without any editorial stance on the story, other than noting that suspicions continue to grow that Fox may at some time possibly have done something that people might consider wrong in some way. This page is comedy gold; I like the 11.35 quote from Nick Robinson to the effect that Fox is telling people he’s the victim of a “hate campaign”. I may be out of touch, but I don’t think Liam Fox is hated by anyone who doesn’t know him personally – he’s not that important. If he’s the victim of anything, it’s a “WTF did you think you were doing (and who are you anyway)?” campaign. Interesting line of defence, too:

friends have also rallied round to help defend his corner, telling Robinson Werritty was a “a groupie who kept turning up pretending to be something he wasn’t”

(A ‘that’ would have helped there. Robinson Werritty – who’s he?)

The point here is that, even if that were true (which I don’t believe for a moment) it would still suggest that Fox was a bumbling incompetent who should be sacked pronto. Werritty “kept turning up” and helping himself to a seat at the conference table – and he just let him sit there? Why, exactly?

Final (genuine) quote from Fox, asked to identify the unnamed friend who was staying over the night his flat was burgled:

For the sake of clarity,
it wasn’t Adam Werritty.

Kadoodle-oodle-skippety-wee!

The real thing, yeah

[Crossposted from Oh Good Ale]

Following the lead of several beer bloggers, here’s what would be on my ideal jukebox.

I’ve got quite mixed feelings about background music in pubs. (I exempt music sessions and singarounds, which are about making music rather than having it in the background, and which don’t invite an audience: if you’re listening, the chances are you’re also playing or singing.) The only kind I can’t stand is the kind that’s too loud to hear yourself speak; I don’t even like that kind of volume in a club for as long as I’m not actually dancing, and in a venue where you can’t dance it seems downright perverse. I’m not crazy about piped music, or amplified live music for that matter, where it’s loud enough to be intrusive; too much of that and you start hankering after silence. But relatively quiet music can make a good backdrop to a drink and a chat.

The big exception to the rule about intrusively loud music is the jukebox, which I appreciate at more or less any volume. Really, the jukebox is commodity capitalism in musical form: it delivers music in discrete packages, each of which can be purchased for the same fee, and by doing so it generates both demand and competition: if you don’t like what someone else has put on, put your hand in your pocket and buy your own choice. All the same, there’s something liberating – empowering, even – about being able to turn your desire for music so quickly and easily into effective demand: a good jukebox lets you dredge up the song that’s going through your head, be it a B-side or a buried album track, and fill the room with it almost instantaneously. It’s not a million miles away from the buzz of singing a new song at a singaround – although obviously in that case there’s more effort involved, and no money changing hands.

Anyway, here are some songs I’ve filled rooms with in the past and hopefully will do again.

Van Morrison, “Astral Weeks”
“Where immobile steel rims crack, And the ditch in the back roads stop…” What’s it mean? What’s he going on about? Half a minute later it doesn’t matter. Bliss.

the Rolling Stones, “You can’t always get what you want”
For a long time I couldn’t pass the Crescent in Salford without going in, and I couldn’t go in without putting this on the jukebox. (To be fair, I only went down that street about once a week.) “I went down to the demonstration, To get my fair share of abuse…” Them weret’ days.

Wizzard, “See my baby jive”
The greatest single ever released. If it doesn’t lift your mood a bit you may be dead.

Radiohead, “Paranoid android”
Sometimes it’s not about lifting the mood. “From a great height… From a great height…”

Mott the Hoople, “All the young dudes”
This single had almost mythical status when I was growing up, largely because nobody I knew had a copy. If you ever found it on a jukebox, what a song. My friends and I were fascinated by the spoken passage that you can just make out in the fade – “I’ve wanted to do this for years… There you go!”

David Bowie, “Sound and vision”
I think we don’t always hear how weird this single is. It sounds as if the elements of a pop song have been shuffled and then put back together; they’re all there but nothing fits properly. It’s only let down by patches of downright ineptitude – he should have got rid of that saxophonist.

the Phantom Band, “Throwing bones”
Today on this programme you will hear gospel, and rhythm and blues, and jazz. And folk, and angsty singer-songwriter introspection, and quite a lot of Krautrock. And Scottish accents.

the Pet Shop Boys, “Left to my own devices”
There had to be some Pet Shop Boys (at least, when I’m in a pub there often is). “Being boring” and the wonderful “What have I done to deserve this” were strong contenders, but this won out – the eight-minute album version, of course. (You may detect a theme emerging here. By my reckoning these eight tracks come in at 47 minutes.) Strings by Trevor Horn, rap by Neil Tennant:
I was faced with a choice at a difficult age
Would I write a book, or should I take to the stage?
But in the back of my head I heard distant feet:
Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat.
You can’t say fairer than that.

You what?

At the end of the first series of Doctor Who after the handover from Russell T. Davies to Steven Moffat, we can detect a subtle but definite difference in the way Moffat and his predecessor think about the character and his canonical backstory. As scripted by Moffat, the Doctor still has a gift for inserting chunks of plot exposition into action scenes. (And it is a gift. The other evening on Dollhouse there was a scene in which a group of characters ran between two action scenes while shouting bits of plot at each other; they looked as if they were running between two action scenes shouting bits of plot at each other, which is to say that they looked ridiculous. The Doctor can bring it off, and has been doing so since the Jon Pertwee era. I suspect there’s a manual somewhere.) What’s changed is the substance of the plot that gets expounded.

Davies:

Ha! Of course! The Daleks have managed to invoke the protection of the Covenant of Horg, which was laid down by the original rulers of Gallifrey just before the Dark Time (very bad time, that was – very dark). The Time Lords took on the Covenant, and its powers were sealed in the Signet of Harg, which was lost in the first skirmish of the Time War. Or… how could I have been so stupid! The Signet couldn’t be lost – it was forged within the Omni-Vorticon on the Anvil of Hurg, and hence it was eternally pinned to a single point in space-time! Which means that… we’ll have to hurry. You two, run down that corridor and keep running. I’ll stay here and pull some levers; I’ll be all right, I’ve got a fire extinguisher. Now go!

Moffat:

Ha! Of course! The Daleks have managed to detonate a cataclysmic explosion within the heart of space-time itself! All that’s preventing it from destroying the entire fabric of reality is that the explosion is timed for one second in the future – but that second is growing weaker with every moment that passes, and our reality is being bombarded with explosive time-rays. Or else… how could I have been so stupid! The detonation occurred before the removal of the Daleks from this plane of existence, which meant that we were safe as long as nobody thought about the Daleks! Now that we’ve remembered them, they’ll recover their physical form any second now, and the entire fabric of space-time will explode. Which means that… we’ll really have to hurry!

Davies’s scripts could have been written for Vince, the Doctor Who anorak from Queer As Folk (in a sense I suppose they were written by Vince). After an info-dump like that, you could imagine someone like Vince freeze-framing the DVD and ferreting through his Who reference data – “but that would mean… wait, this would have to have been before the founding of… oh, right, yeah, it would fit.” Moffat’s, not so much. The fact that Moffat’s not writing ‘nuts and bolts’ sf doesn’t matter – Who has always been on the fantasy end of the genre, a kind of frequently-earthbound space opera. What is new is that he doesn’t seem to have much interest in ‘maps and timelines’ sf either; he seems to be steering the series out of space opera altogether and into something altogether more impressionistic and psychological. Less Left Hand of Darkness, more Lathe of Heaven.

Which works for me. As, much to my surprise, does Matt Smith, who grew on me rapidly over the course of the first episode and had made the role his own by the middle of the second. David Tennant was good, of course, but his trajectory in the series was very much the established dramatic lead on an upward path – go in with Casanova and Blackpool, come out as a star. Christopher Ecclestone was good, too, but his career was also established to the point where he couldn’t do anything with Who other than become a star in it, which he didn’t seem to want to do. In Matt Smith, for the first time since the revival, the Doctor is played by someone who doesn’t come trailing his showreel: he’s not a star in the making, he’s… the Doctor. He’s also been reminding me a lot of Patrick Troughton, who is probably the best of the old Doctors for any new Doctor to emulate. (I still remember odd bits of Troughton Who from first time round. I started watching when William Hartnell was playing the Doctor, although ‘watching’ almost certainly means ‘not being taken out of the room because my parents didn’t want to miss it themselves’.)

Karen Gillan proved herself in that extraordinary final episode – starting with that really extraordinary pre-credits sequence (“Right, kid. This is where things start getting complicated.”) – and, for one story at least, it looks as if the Doctor will be operating with two companions. That really takes me back, to those days when Peter Purves bestrode the screen like a hairy-kneed colossus, in a doomed attempt to compensate female viewers for the claim on their menfolk’s attention of Louise Jameson in a fur bikini (are you sure about this? – Ed.) Roll on Christmas – or if you’re Russell T. Davies, roll on the Feast of the Birth of the Nazarene Theohominid.

Mullet with headlights

I stumbled across this video the other day:

I’m a sucker for the old subtitle gag, and this is a particularly good example. It made me laugh like a drain, but then it got me thinking… thinking…

FX: repeat audio with echo and fade, visuals wibbly-wobbly and dissolve

about the song… Bloody hell, Jim Steinman! I’ve never been a fan of the work of Meat Loaf, or ‘epic rock’ in any form – I remember thinking “Born to Run” was a dreadful old pile of clichés the first time I heard it (and don’t even mention “Freebird”). But you’ve got to admit the man can write. I mean, the repeating “Every now and then” thing made it a bit easier for him, but those are seriously long lines, and plenty of them. The song as a whole may be the musical equivalent of a five-tier wedding cake consisting entirely of costume jewellery and American cheese, but the structure of the lyrics is interesting and actually quite ambitious. Try singing a whole verse if you don’t believe me.

…also, about the singer… Given that it is a beast of a song, you’ve got to hand it to the artist formerly known as Gaynor Hopkins – she made a damn good job of it. (OK, you can’t hear the real vocals in that version – try here, or a live version from 2005 here (ratty video, awful accompaniment but great singing).) A proper belter, which goes for the song and the singer – nice to see she’s still working. Shame she didn’t seem to be enjoying the video, mind.

…and about that video. The video is a strange one. The song seems to be about romantic love envisaged in terms of insecurity and obsessive dependence; the singer’s experiencing a moment of desperate need, while at the same time yearning for her lover to transform her life utterly. (Well, we’ve all been there.) The video, storyboarded by Steinman and directed by Russell Mulcahy, is another matter. According to Some Guy On The Net, the video “drew inspiration from the 1976 film Futureworld“, but what this means is something of a mystery – nothing I’ve read about that film bears any resemblance to the video. It seems to be about a woman visiting a boys’ school to present prizes, and dreaming the night before that she’s lost in the school and surrounded by… boys! Posh boys! Fit boys! Posh fit boys! Posh fit boys fighting, tumbling, dancing! Posh, fit, half-naked boys dancing around her! (I think we can see where this is heading.) Then the next morning she gets suited up and does the cool authoritative adult thing, and it was All A Dream. Or… Was It?

It may be best not to over-think music videos. Tim Pope, appearing on the briefly-revived Jukebox Jury, opined that one video (not one of his) was “full of symbolism”. Symbolism? replied Jools Holland. What kind of symbolism? “Meaningful symbolism,” said Pope. This video is positively rammed with meaningful symbolism (the rendering of the phrase “bright eyes” is some kind of coup) – and the “boys’ school erotic fantasy” setup is certainly a concept, if it’s a concept you want. And if the execution is over the top, what else would you expect from the combination of Steinman and Mulcahy? The overall effect, though, keeps going past Over The Top and comes out in Downright Odd: a strange combination of relentless pace and disjointed cutting, together with facial expressions from Bonnie Tyler which range from blankness to mild disgust, give it a really nightmarish quality. A clue may be provided by Some Other Guy On The Net, according to whom

Bonnie Tyler refused to spray a group of young men with water during the filming of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart.’ Tyler admitted she called Mulcahy a “prevert,” which may be Welsh for pervert.

(“Prevert” is of course a well-established English-language usage, and may have French-language roots.)

Watch the video again (go on, I dare you) and it’s quite striking how Ms Tyler seems to be trying to keep her distance from the circumambient boys, to the extent of not appearing in the same shot as them any more than she has to. If Mulcahy had been working with a singer who was a bit more up for it, the video might have ended up looking less uncomfortable and less disjointed. (Just getting that shot of Bonnie Tyler making with the bucket of water – instead of the swimmers being hit by an anonymous bucket of water from stage left – would have changed the whole mood of the video.) On the other hand, it’s hardly surprising that a singer wouldn’t be up for it, considering that this is a song about romantic love envisaged in terms of insecurity and obsessive dependence – and not, for instance, a song about being unexpectedly surrounded by ninjas, Fonzie clones (“Fonzie’s been cloned!”) and flying zombie choirboys.

Which is where we came in.

Already in me

I can’t remember where I saw this linked, but this piece on cosmic dualism from 2004 is well worth reading. Apparently the Manicheans have had a raw deal:

as orthodox dualists, they believed that the forces of Good and Evil were not engaged in some continuous and messianic struggle, but rather that their contrasting presence was the very basis of the spiritual order. For the Manicheans, this dualism constituted the structure of the spiritual world that framed each individual’s relationship with reality. Everyone, they believed, would benefit from identifying the presence of Evil within themselves and should endeavor a personal journey to allow Good to dominate.

The War On Terror, in particular, is more Zoroastrian than it’s Manichean (and it’s not very Zoroastrian).

But the real reason I’m posting is because of an informative comment left by a reader:

The term “Manichean” is also one applied to a person from Manchester, England. Indeed, when I first saw the title to Skinner’s piece, that I thought that was to whom he was referring and wondered why those from Manchester would really care about American political elections, other than most casually.

Well, up to a point.

Relatedly, after the Roses fell apart somebody painted “RENI LIVES” in big letters on the old railway bridge down the road – which was accurate and supportive but a bit odd, given that nobody had suggested he was dead. A friend of mine said that somebody should add the words “ROUND HERE”, which would have made it equally accurate and more informative.

Your scholarly room

Lots of hits over the last few days from people looking for “market managerialism”, or sometimes “what is market managerialism”. No idea why that topic should be popular at the moment, or indeed what they’re finding here that’s relevant. Can anyone enlighten me?

Another recent search term is less hard to understand. Today someone found their way to this blog after searching for

very crude naked ladies pics

I welcome all new visitors, although in some cases I wouldn’t necessarily want to shake their hand. Come for the boobs by all means, but stay for the radical politics, music videos, autobiographical musings and bad jokes. But I must demur at “very crude”. All you can find here in that line is a couple of links to sensitive and artistic naked ladies pics, which are not the same thing at all. Apart from the naked ladies – that element is constant.

Constant, and rather odd when you start to think about it. More years ago than I care to calculate, I remember leafing through a copy of H&E belonging to a friend’s older brother with a mild, amused interest – oh look, there are some women with nothing on… and there are some men with nothing on… and there are some more women with nothing on! All vaguely shocking and transgressive – you knew that people generally took care not to be seen with nothing on – but it didn’t do anything for me (or to me). Then, a few months later, I was on a school skiing trip in Switzerland when I happened on an advert in a magazine featuring a naked woman in a Viking helmet, standing behind a waist-high shield and covering one breast. The effect of this fairly anodyne image was electric and instantaneous; it seemed to go straight from my eyes to my crotch without passing through my brain. Puberty had well and truly arrived, and henceforth the sight of a woman who was… you know… I mean, not wearing any… I mean, you know, in the nude… would turn my head and turn me on, more or less whether I liked it or not.

Realistically, our (my) reaction to p0rn – not to mention our concept of what constitutes p0rn – has to be something that’s learned, culturally-determined and culturally encoded (relatedly, see this discussion of the meaning of the words “naked woman” through history – “naked” has always meant “scandalously under-dressed” but hasn’t always meant “absolutely not wearing anything whatsoever at all”). Some years ago Susanne Kappeler argued that it’s all about sadism and power: a naked woman in a magazine is on display in very much the same way that a shot elephant or a captured slave might be displayed, as an invitation to the man looking at the picture to vicariously celebrate the power over women wielded by the man behind the camera. It’s alarmingly persuasive, but I don’t think it’s the whole story (and not only because there are female erotic photographers); there’s a weird quality of compulsion, even powerlessness, in the way men look at women. (I don’t believe that overrides the more conventional power relation described by Kappeler, though (pace Joe Jackson) – everyone’s more vulnerable naked than clothed, being watched than watching.) I also wonder, when did I learn that way of seeing? Not, surely, between the look-at-the-funny-naked-people half hour with H&E and the Oh. My. God. p0rn thunderclap in Switzerland.

Whatever is ultimately going on, the experience for me was – and, let’s face it, to a pretty large extent still is – an unthinking, automatic, instant reaction to certain images; images which are likely to work the same trick for other straight men. (That said, my ‘certain images’ aren’t going to be exactly the same ‘certain images’ as someone else’s. Pynchon takes this idea to its extreme in Gravity’s Rainbow, where he has a spy being sent a message written in an ink which will only become visible when treated with his semen – and accompanied by an image which calculated to induce immediate orgasm in him and him alone. Yow.)

Ultimately Tom Robinson was right about this (as about much else) – pictures of naked young women are fun. But they’re also odd: a culturally-determined image that’s also a law of nature (or that’s certainly how it feels). In the immortal words of a comic song I heard on the radio years ago,

Men like naked ladies –
The only exceptions are when
They’re either Guardian readers
Or they prefer naked gentlemen.

Well, one out of two’s not bad.

Later on we’ll conspire

Answer me this: after receiving gifts on Christmas Day, what is it that children proverbially do with them within 24 hours? Do they (a) break them or (b) give them away?

Fairly straightforward, I think you’ll agree. Now let me put to you a second and superficially unrelated question. When a man loves a woman, as we know, he can’t think of nothing else; he will, indeed, trade the world for the good thing he’s found. But if he should happen to entrust his heart, metaphorically, to someone undeserving of his affections, what is the uncaring female proverbially said to do with it? Does she (a) break his heart or (b) give his heart away to someone else (this could perhaps take the form of fixing him up with a friend)?

I think it’s clear that option (a) is appropriate in both cases. So if one were to write a Christmas song likening these two situations, it would be sheer perversity to write anything other than

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
And the very next day you broke it

See? See? It makes sense now! Honestly, if they’d got that right in the first place it could have been a big hit.

Update It has been brought to my notice that there are strong reasons to object, even in theory, to the notion of a daily round of Christmas-themed celebration. The obvious objection to a daily Christmas is that this would rapidly have adverse effects in terms of exhaustion, obesity, alcohol poisoning and so forth. However, these effects could easily be mitigated, or even eliminated, by simply varying one’s level of indulgence in Christmas cheer and jollity, over the weeks and months of perpetual Yule. A less tractable problem is presented by the irreducible necessity of preparation. When, under the daily-Christmas regime, would any of us have time to buy food, presents, cards, bottles of winter ale, bags of Bombay mix and other such essential accoutrements of the season? I feel that this objection has considerable force, and would therefore propose that any future songwriter working in this thematic area should write something along the lines of

I wish it could be Christmas every other day

Once again, I think you’ll agree that this would represent a considerable improvement.

Ho ho ho.

No fear, cavalier

Airmiles was quoted in the LRB the other week:

it was clear soon after 9/11 that the Bush administration … believed that the awesome demonstration of American military muscle would intimidate present and potential enemies everywhere. The administration had its own intellectual cheerleaders and experts on the Middle East: Bernard Lewis, for instance, whose pet conviction that ‘in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force’ was validated by the swift capitulation of the Taliban. Iraq was logically the next target. As the columnist Thomas Friedman told Charlie Rose, what the Iraqis ‘needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.”’

Which part of this sentence? Well, the grammar, for a start – it seems to make the most sense if you take out that first ‘you know’ and substitute a question mark for the comma after ‘society’, but there are a few possible readings.

If the word order is mangled, the sense is pretty clear: what Iraq needed wasn’t liberation so much as harrowing, to be carried out by a kind of frat-boy Khmer Rouge. (“Suck on this”, by crikey. What is it with fellatio and humiliation in American rhetoric?) It’s just a dream – the US Army doesn’t have the manpower to go house to house, from Basra to Baghdad; it’s hard to imagine an army that would. But that basic unreality lends it power – once you start thinking if only we had ten times as many men on the ground, then our boys could sort it out! you’re not going to look kindly on any attempt to set limits to what the troop numbers actually are, or to what the troops can actually do. Fantasy lawlessness has a way of eroding real-world law.

Coincidentally, the same day I read that, I saw Lord Bingham’s response to Lord Goldsmith in the Telegraph:

In his full written advice to the Prime Minister of March 7, 2003 — not made public at the time — Lord Goldsmith QC considered that resolution 1441 could, in principle, revive the authority to use force contained in resolution 678 and suspended, but not revoked, by resolution 687. At that time, though, it was not clear to him whether the use of force required merely a discussion by the Security Council or a further resolution.

Summarising Lord Goldsmith’s reasoning, Lord Bingham said: “A reasonable case could be made that resolution 1441 was capable in principle of reviving the authorisation in resolution 678, but the argument could only be sustainable if there were ‘strong factual grounds’ for concluding that Iraq had failed to take the final opportunity. There would need to be ‘hard evidence’.”

Ten days later, in a Parliamentary written answer issued on March 17, 2003, Lord Goldsmith said it was “plain” that Iraq had failed to comply with its disarmament obligations and was therefore in material breach of resolution 687. Accordingly, the authority to use force under resolution 678 had revived. The former judge then quoted the conclusion to Lord Goldsmith’s Parliamentary statement: “Resolution 1441 would, in terms, have provided that a further decision of the Security Council to sanction force was required if that had been intended. Thus, all that resolution 1441 requires is reporting to and discussion by the Security Council of Iraq’s failures, but not an express further decision to authorise force.”

Lord Bingham was not impressed. “This statement was, I think flawed in two fundamental respects,” he said. “First, it was not plain that Iraq had failed to comply in a manner justifying resort to force and there were no strong factual grounds or hard evidence to show that it had: Hans Blix and his team of weapons inspectors had found no weapons of mass destruction, were making progress and expected to complete their task in a matter of months. Secondly, it passes belief that a determination whether Iraq had failed to avail itself of its final opportunity was intended to be taken otherwise than collectively by the Security Council.”
…
After reading a draft of Lord Bingham’s speech, Lord Goldsmith said he remained of the view that his conclusion was correct. “I would not have given that advice if it were not genuinely my view,” he told the telegraph.co.uk law page. Why, though, did his views appear to harden between March 7 and March 17? “Having rightly expressed caution in my earlier advice, I had formed the view during the week before the 17th that it was my job to express a clear judgment one way or the other.” Civil servants and military commanders had wanted a clear answer. “Either it was lawful or it was not,” Lord Goldsmith explained. “It could not be a little bit lawful.”

As an aside, Bingham seems unimpressed by the ‘I really believed it’ defence:

“Lord Goldsmith emphasises that he believed the advice which he gave at the time to be correct — which I have not challenged — and remains of that view.”

(Emphasis added.) I guess it’s a backhanded tribute to the anti-war movement – all those ‘Bliar’ posters must really have hit a nerve. But Bingham’s right to dismiss it as a side-issue. In law, “I didn’t mean to do it” is a defence of sorts, but an “I genuinely thought it was a good idea” defence would get you nowhere.

The big question here, and the one which really goes to Goldsmith’s competence as a legal advisor, is that last one: Why, though, did his views appear to harden between March 7 and March 17? Goldsmith’s explanation is superficially plausible but, on a closer reading, alarmingly unsatisfactory. Yes, it was his job to express a clear view about the proposed attack, and no, it couldn’t be a little bit lawful – but that’s not to say, as Goldsmith implies, that legality is an on/off property which is either present or not. A judgment on the action’s legality – not whether it would be lawful in some absolute sense, but whether it passed a threshold above which it would be lawful enough – was always going to be made. Between the 7th and 17th of March Goldsmith seems to have decided, firstly, that he was going to make that judgment himself rather than leaving it to the politicians; and secondly, that he would make it on the basis that the action would be legal unless it was clearly illegal: a little bit lawful was lawful enough. It’s debatable whether it’s appropriate for the government’s senior lawyer to spare the politicians the complexities of legal advice by offering them a simple yes/no recommendation, particularly on a decision of this importance. But it’s staggering, even now, to realise that in making this recommendation he didn’t err on the side of caution, treating the action as illegal unless it was clearly legal. Accepting for the sake of argument that removing grey areas was part of Goldsmith’s job, the question here was surely “is it more or less white?”, not “is it not entirely black?”

It gets worse. Why did Goldsmith adopt an aggression-friendly reading of resolution 1441?

Having spoken to those who negotiated the terms of the resolution, Lord Goldsmith was sure that the need for a further determination had been deliberately omitted. US diplomats would not have agreed to resolution 1441 if they thought it allowed other members of the Security Council to block military action by requiring a second resolution that might be vetoed.

Brian sums up what Goldsmith’s suggesting and is appropriately sceptical:

[The government] argues that during the secret negotiations of the text of resolution 1441, Russia and France and other Council members originally wanted the resolution to specify that the Council should take a further “decision” on what to do if Iraq continued to fail to comply with its obligations: and that by agreeing to abandon that language in favour of a requirement that the Council should merely “consider the situation” (as in the text eventually adopted), they accepted that force could be used by any state without the need for a further “decision” by the Council. There is no public record of the “negotiating history” of 1441: all we have is Lord Goldsmith’s account of it, based on his private discussions with the British and American participants. [A] public inquiry should seek to establish whether the Russian, French, German and other governments agree with this interpretation, which seems at first sight far-fetched: as Lord Bingham said, it “passes belief”.

But I think scepticism’s only half of the story. Let’s assume for the moment that Goldsmith’s account is true, or at least that he believes it to be true. (As I said earlier, I don’t think proclaiming yourself not to be a liar is a defence against anything very substantial, but it’s a defence that’s readily available to almost anyone; as a result, challenging someone’s sincerity is a good way to give them an easy win.) What does it tell us about how Goldsmith approached his job? Here’s a lawyer ruling on the legality of an action, basing his decision explicitly on three UN resolutions (678, 687 and 1441). Lawyers interpret legal decisions; it’s a large part of what they do. But Goldsmith’s interpretation of the crucial resolution 1441 isn’t based on a natural-language reading; it’s not based on precedent, either, or even on the lawyer’s standby, the appeal to the interpretation of a ‘reasonable person’. Goldsmith arrives at a borderline perverse reading of 1441 – one which the text of the resolution barely supports at all – on the basis that, if the Americans had subscribed to any other reading, they wouldn’t have let the resolution pass. In short, Goldsmith’s reading was driven by his knowledge of what the US government wanted. A drive to war in Iraq was well under way, fuelled and even to some extent steered by proto-fascist fantasies like Friedman’s. Goldsmith’s approach, on his own admission, was not to bring the law to bear on the drive to war, but to take the drive to war as read and interpret the law so as to fit it. This strikes me as a disgraceful abdication of duty (to the law, not to the government – he served them faithfully). It’s only surprising that he admits to it so readily.

Meanwhile in another part of the forest, a legal authority I’ve got rather more time for at the moment is Nigel Simmonds, whose Law as a Moral Idea is currently giving my brain some useful exercise. This rather lovely formulation is from the book’s Preface:

I am also indebted to [names omitted]. A more intelligent author could perhaps have accommodated their various criticisms and insights, to the considerable improvement of the book’s argument. This author, however, has had to rest content with the imperfect pages that now lie before the reader.

I must remember to borrow that.

Entire and manifold

Autocomplete blog meme. Simple procedure: type each letter of the alphabet in the address bar (one at a time, obviously) and see which blog comes up first. The result should be a map of your personal blogosphere, or at least those bits of it you’ve visited recently.

I saw this on a blog somewhere years ago – apologies if it was yours. I tried it but didn’t blog the output, because at the time it seemed too obvious; the idea that it might change over time hadn’t occurred to me.

Anyway, here’s my list, excluding any letters for which no blog home pages came up (visits to specific posts don’t count).

A is for Aaronovitch Watch
B is for Blood & Treasure
C is for The Cedar Lounge Revolution
D is for Dave’s Part closely followed by Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
E is for Eine Kleine Nichtmusik
G is for The Gaping Silence (fortunately)
I is for Idle Words
K is for The Early Days of a Better Nation
L is for Mac Uaid
N is for The Quiet Road
P is for Private Secret Diary
Q is for qwghlm
S is for Socialist Unity, Splintered Sunrise, Stumbling and Mumbling and Smokewriting in that order
V is for The Virtual Stoa
Y is for Alternate Seat of TYR

And I nominate… anyone who wants to put themselves through all that. I have to confess, as an exercise it was rather less interesting than I’d hoped. But it’ll be a good one to revisit in a year or two, if I’m still blogging by then.

Over to you, if you feel like it.

Chemistry class

I think the real problem was that I’d finished the gin a couple of nights before. Obviously gin wouldn’t be a good alternative to vodka, but if it had been there on the shelf it would have reminded me that there were alternatives to vodka, and then I might have thought of using brandy. Which probably wouldn’t have worked as well as vodka, but would certainly have been better than what I did use.

But let’s start at the beginning. I changed schools at the beginning of the third year (year 9 as it is now), with the consequence that I missed a year or eighteen months of Chemistry. By the time I joined, the teacher had got the basics sorted out and was onto the reactivity of the halogens. I remember that because of the way the lessons worked: for the first half of the lesson the teacher would dictate a couple of pages which we would all take down, after which he’d get us to do an experiment demonstrating some aspect of whatever it was. So my first introduction to Chemistry (and for that matter chemistry) consisted of the phrase ‘The Reactivity of the Halogens’. I made sure I spelled it right, if nothing else.

I gave up Chemistry at the end of the third year. By then I’d learnt about Hydrogen having one bond and… er… other elements having more; the building-block aspect of molecules quite appealed to me for a while. But I’d never really found my way around the periodic table – or, more importantly, got any sense of why I might want to. Frankly, I don’t think the reactivity of the halogens was a good place to start.

By the time I left school I was OK on solids and liquids (we’d done them in Physics); I knew about some things being radioactive and most things fortunately not; and I knew that the pH scale measured acidity (or possibly alkalinity) (or is it both?), although this was partly thanks to that Peter Hammill album. Other than that, what I knew about chemical substances was very, very limited. If you were to ask me to name a solvent and a lubricant, for example, and tell you the difference between those types of liquid, I would have been at a loss.

Not now, though; I’ve got it all worked out now. If you’ve got a bit of gunk clogging up a mechanism, a solvent and a lubricant will both get the mechanism working again, but in different ways. The solvent dissolves the bonds that make the dirt stick together and stick to the surface it’s stuck to, so you end up with bits of dirt distributed uncloggily through the solvent. The lubricant leaves the dirt in place, but introduces a low-friction medium between the dirt and the workings, which enables the workings to slide over the dirt without getting stuck. With a solvent, the dirt at worst gets broken down and spread out, at best gets wiped up along with any remaining solvent. With a lubricant, the dirt and the lubricant both stay there, but the mechanism doesn’t care any more.

(Incidentally, I read somewhere that water would be a good lubricant, as long as whatever it was lubricating was cool, water-tight and uncorroding. And water’s obviously a reasonable solvent, as in washing. Is there some sort of scale that goes off either way with water in the middle, like with acids and alkali? Come to think of it, why is it a ‘pH’ scale anyway? It’s not actually something to do with Peter Hammill, is it?)

Anyway, about the brandy. The first time I ever saw someone clean a really dirty LP – at what was then Lashmar’s in Croydon, possibly when I sold them my Saturnalia LP – it was with cotton wool and vodka. I was mightily impressed and started sneaking my parents’ vodka for the purpose. (Not enough for them to notice, unfortunately – it would have made a much better story.) Some time later I discovered that you could buy little red bottles of ethyl alcohol for just this purpose. But if you don’t often play LPs, you don’t often need to clean an LP. So yesterday, when I was mid-way through ripping one of my Talking Heads albums and discovered great patches of encrusted god-knows-what making big crunchy noises, I couldn’t lay hands on my little red bottle.

What to do? We keep vodka in the house, but at the moment it’s quite a nice vodka (it was a present). We’re out of gin (which would be a bit sticky anyway), and for some reason – possibly because of the absence of gin – brandy didn’t occur to me. So I used WD-40.

Much later – after wiping off the excess, wiping off the rest of the excess and wiping off as much of what was left as I could get at, waiting half an hour in the vain hope that it would evaporate, then starting again – I realised that WD-40 is a lubricant rather than a solvent. Consequently it’s been quite happy to sit in the grooves and not go anywhere. It hasn’t even had any effect on the big crunchy patches of encrusted god-knows-what; they are less noticeable, though, as the whole of side 2 now sounds like an archive recording of one of Edison’s earlier cylinders.

Fortunately I was able to get hold of MP3s of the album, so I’ve now got very nearly what I was trying to achieve in the first place (an LP on the shelf and an album on the Mac). And I know – or rather, I’m aware of – slightly more about chemistry than I was aware of knowing before. Or perhaps I should say, I’m slightly more aware of what I don’t know.

Not enough protest songs

Yes, this is a very fine song (and this is a very fine version of it, which I hadn’t seen in 25 years).

You see Robin,
I’ve been searching for the young soul rebels.
I’ve been searching everywhere, I can’t find them anywhere – where have you hidden them?

How we laughed.

The strange thing about “There there, my dear” – and about Searching for the young soul rebels, the album it closes, and about the work of Dexy’s Midnight Runners in all their various incarnations – is that it’s brilliant all the same. It’s embarrassingly earnest in a puppyish teenage way, it’s tiresomely arrogant and pugnacious (also in a puppyish teenage way), and it’s clumsy and awkwardly executed. But it’s brilliant all the same. Searching for the young soul rebels is a wonderful, life-enhancing album – I wouldn’t go quite that far for the other two, although I wouldn’t be without them – and this is a glorious track.

And it’s not just down to that extraordinary Stax sound. The lyrics – if you can find them written down – are… well, they’re embarrassingly earnest and clumsily executed and basically pretty dreadful in several different ways. But they’re brilliant all the same.

Not convinced? Here, because I feel like it, is the annotated “There there, my dear”.

Rrrrr-Robin, hope you don’t mind me writing, it’s just
There’s more than one thing I need to ask you.

After beginning with the old General Johnson trill, Kevin comes in on the wrong beat here – Rob-IN hope YOU don’t MIND – but it’s OK by the end of the first line.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, you’re so anti-fashion – so wear flares
Instead of dressing down all the same

“Why not wear flares?” in the published lyrics. It’s a good question, but I don’t think anyone’s that anti-fashion.

It’s just that looking like that I can express my dissat-
Robin, let me explain,
But you’d never see in a million years

Shame about ‘dissatisfaction’. We’ll see more of Kevin’s ruthless way with line endings later on. Now shush, there’s a good bit coming up.

Keep quoting Cabaret, Berlin, Burroughs,
J.G. Ballard, Duchamp, Beauvoir,
Kerouac, Kierkegaard, Michael Rennie…
And I don’t believe you really like Frank Sinatra.

Seriously, how good is that? The fourth line is one of the all-time great put-downs. (I did once see a copy of Songs for Swinging Lovers lying prominently around in the flat of an irritatingly hip friend, and a Dexy’s poster on the wall. Unfortunately I only thought of the line later.) The other three lines are pretty good, too (Michael Rennie!). A couple of things about that long, ridiculous list are worth noting. One is that, despite the line-cramming that goes on elsewhere, the scansion here is fine; Kevin even has time to fit in a quick ‘brrr!’ between Beauvoir and Kerouac. It obviously wasn’t just dashed off. The other is its odd, self-contradictory quality. Dexy’s first single “Dance stance” uses a similar list as a demonstration of how much they know and you don’t: Never heard about – Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan, Sean O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill, Edna O’Brien and Lawrence Sterne… (“It’s as if a gang of punks had taken the Irish Academy of Literature hostage and used the Stax headquarters for barricades”, as this site says (I think).) Here, though, Kevin’s reeling off a list of obscure and pretentious references as a way of criticising someone for using obscure and pretentious references. The song’s playful and self-mocking – almost despite itself – at the same time as being deadly serious.

Robin, you’re always so happy, how the hell?
You’re like a dumb, dumb patriot.
You’re supposed to be so angry, why not fight?
Let me benefit from your rage.

“How the hell do you get your inspiration?” in the published lyrics; also “benefit from your right”, which doesn’t make much sense. I was convinced when the song came out that it was addressed to Ian Page of the (relatively) prominent mod revivalists Secret Affair, mainly I think because of this verse. (Apparently it’s addressed to “NME indie bands”, which makes more sense of the Burroughs Ballard ect ect.)

You know the only way to change things is to shoot men who arrange things

Ah, Baader-Meinhof chic. Takes me back.

Robin, I’d try and explain
But you’d never see in a million years.
Well, you’ve finished your rules, but we don’t know that game,
Robin, I’d listen to your records but your logic’s far

“Far too lame” in the published lyrics, but since Kevin’s tried to get a whole couplet into the space previously occupied by “Robin let me explain” he’s forced to swallow a couple of words before the next line. Which is:

And I’d only waste three valuable minutes of my life with your insincere

“…with your insincerity” in the published lyrics, but Kevin wisely doesn’t attempt that. So we’ve got “And I’d only waste” instead of “But you’d never see”, and instead of “in a million years” we’ve got… um. Fourteen syllables crammed into five. You’ve got to wonder about the thought process that led to keeping ‘valuable’ in there. And respect it, frankly – he’s the one stuck with singing it.

Then we’re into the spoken section:

You see Robin,
I’ve been searching for the young soul rebels.
I’ve been searching everywhere, I can’t find them anywhere – where have you hidden them?
Maybe you should…
Maybe you should welcome the new soul vision!
Welcome the new soul vision!
Welcome the new soul vision!

Of course, he doesn’t mean that ‘maybe’, any more than Andrew Anthony really thinks he may be wrong, but from Kevin you don’t mind the equivocation so much. The obvious induction is that that’s because Kevin’s talking about a nebulous lifestyle statement involving sixties music and woolly hats, whereas Andrew Anthony is talking about matters of great political moment, but I’m not sure that’s it. They’re both ultimately talking about their own beliefs, and putting their own credibility on the line.

In this sense, protest singers aren’t all that different from columnists and other professional opinionators. All of them take the risk of looking like egotists, eccentrics or both – the compensation is that they can win the audience round anyway if their act is good enough. (‘Good enough’ here can mean persuasive enough, new enough, strong enough. Beyond a certain point it can even mean egotistical enough, or eccentric enough; I think this is the tightrope Martin Amis has just fallen off.) And if it’s not, not.

But you don’t know me

I don’t know Tilda Swinton. At all.

There are, of course, many people I don’t know; the list could be extended more or less indefinitely, potentially forming the basis for a rather unchallenging game (“Yeah? Well, I don’t know Charles Kennedy, Jason Orange or Hufty from the Word…”) The point about Tilda Swinton in particular is that, if you stopped me in the street and asked me if I knew her, I’ve got a horrible feeling I’d say Yes. (At least, I used to… Well, when I say ‘know’, I met… actually no, I never actually met… sorry, what was the question?)

Obviously, the image of anyone you’ve seen a lot on the screen can get painted on the back of your mind, to the point where they seem as familiar as a friend or neighbour (“In the street people come up to Rita/It’s Barbara Knox really but they’re still glad to meet her” – Kevin Seisay). I suppose something similar’s going on here, assisted in this case by the fact that I was at the same university as Tilda Swinton for at least one year; I even saw her in a college theatre production once, playing opposite a friend of a friend of mine. (I think. It may have been someone else.)

I’ve never even had any contact with Tilda Swinton, if it comes to that. I did once try to get in touch with her, for a series of brief interviews we were running in Red Pepper at the time. A friend gave me the number of a friend, who she thought had known her and might be able to put me in touch. I duly phoned the friend’s friend, who was a bit taken aback and suggested that if I wanted to speak to Tilda Swinton I should probably go through Tilda Swinton’s management. Nothing ever came of it.

In short, whatever fantasies I may half-consciously harbour, the real world is unanimous on this one: I don’t know Tilda Swinton, at all. I’ve got a friend who’s got a friend who may once have known her, and I had a friend at college who had a friend who may once have acted with her, but none of that adds up to anything.

Or it didn’t, until LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a social networking site for people who want to make their social network work; it’s designed to enable members to exploit “the professional relationships you already have”. You join LinkedIn by writing a ‘profile’ (a c.v., more or less). You then ‘build your network’ by exchanging emails with existing members of LinkedIn who you already know; the software helpfully provides lists of LinkedIn members who are, or were, at your workplace, former workplace or university. When your emailed invitation has been accepted, the user you invited becomes one of your ‘connections’, while you become one of theirs. Ultimately you end up with a network “consist[ing] of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals”. ‘Thousands’ is no exaggeration: after a month’s membership I’ve got 41 ‘trusted friends and colleagues’, and many LinkedIn users have five or ten times as many. It adds up, or rather multiplies out: if you count “[my] connections’ connections, and the people they know”, I’m connected to over 200,000 people. Woohoo.

There are two main ways to make money out of social software – adding advertising or charging a fee for a premium service – and I’m generally in favour of the latter. This is the route LinkedIn have chosen. Annoyingly, the result in this case is not simply that fee-paying users benefit but that free riders are penalised. The profiles of users outside your network are only shown in full if you’ve got a paid-for account, which can be frustrating. Worse, the highest echelons of power-networking users can opt out of receiving common-or-garden email invitations, so that they can only be contacted using the network’s ‘InMail’ facility – which is, of course, only available on paid-for accounts. There’s being linked in, and then there’s being linked in. I suppose this says something about the nature of the service they’re providing: a professional social network is one with lots of people excluded from it.

The bigger question is what LinkedIn actually provides (apart from the warm glow of knowing that somebody else has been excluded). I wrote last year that tagging, for me, is more an elaborate way of building a mind-map than anything to do with bookmarking pages and finding them again; I’m interested to see that Philipp has reached a similar conclusion (“Let’s put it straight: Using tags to find my bookmarks later just doesn’t work. I give up.”) Similarly, I suspect that one of the main benefits of LinkedIn – at least for us non-power-networkers – is the capacity it gives you to contemplate the scale and plenitude of your own network: all those people I know, sort of! I mean, I know someone who knows them, or else there’s a friend of a friend who knows them… So I sort of know them, really, don’t I, just a bit?

But Tilda Swinton’s not on LinkedIn. So I don’t know her at all.

Cooler than being cool

I happened to watch Matt Weddle’s acoustic cover of “Hey ya” today, courtesy of whoever posted it on YouTube. The video’s great, if you like watching bearded men playing acoustic guitars. After watching it I spent a happy five minutes reacquainting myself with the video for the original song, which is still a very fine piece of work – as, indeed, is the song. I don’t think Matt Weddle does anything very exciting with it, but he does demonstrate – almost by a process of elimination – that the song’s extraordinary catchiness doesn’t derive from the gospel backing singers or the sproingy bass line or that strange keyboard riff or the handclaps or the back-chat, fun though all of these are. Take all of those away and you’ve still got a song that loops round and round in a way that seems somehow wrong, to the point where it takes up residence in your mind like an unsolved crossword clue.

I think it’s a matter of an unexpected chord change, and in particular of an unexpected bar of 2:4. This, interestingly enough, is a feature which “Hey ya” shares with another infuriatingly memorable song – as you can see below.

One, two, three, four!

1	2	3	4
	My	baby	doesn’t
Post-	man	Pat,
1	2	3	4
mess	around	be-	cause she
Post-	man	Pat,
1	2	3	4
loves	me so	and	this I
Post-	man	Pat	and his
1	2
know	for
black and	white
1	2	3	4
sure…
cat…

Coincidence? You be the judge.

Some time, maybe

I’ve been away for a week & come back to a letter from my MP, Tony Lloyd. Who writes:

Whilst I do not think there should be a blanket policy for all Iraqis working for the UK Government, we need to give proper consideration to the many Iraqis whose lives are at risk. It is important that they are given asylum as protection as well as gratitude for risking their lives for the UK.

As Alex said the other day, the debate seems to be moving on to the definition of the word ‘many’. Which is a good start.

I also missed this when I was away:

Mr Cameron told the Today programme: “We are not going to deal with anarchy in the UK unless you actually strengthen families and communities in the UK.”

David Cameron was born on 9 October 1966 and was educated at Eton and Brasenose College, Oxford.

Honestly. These youngsters, they know nothing…

Too much more

Welcome back* to Imprecise Song Lyrics Club.

This evening our featured lyricist is Mr Paul Weller, one-time tunesmith with popular beat combo the Jams. In his song “Porcelain gods”, Mr Weller writes:

Too much will kill you,
Too little ain’t enough

On first reading both propositions advanced here seem intuitively valid, but – I put it to you – are they? Certainly, too much over-proof rum or carbon monoxide or acceleration into a bend will tend to kill you, but does this proposition hold more generally? I think not. In some cases, too much will simply result in a stomach ache or an overdraft, or in the decision to call a taxi when you had intended to walk.

No, Mr Weller: too much will not necessarily kill you. For greater precision, the lines in question should have been drafted as follows:

Too much is excessive,
Too little ain’t enough

Very little there with which anyone could argue, I think you’ll find.

*To anyone for whom this comes as the second or subsequent post with this theme, perhaps because they are reading it in a period in the future relative to the time of writing.

Name isn’t Rio

I used to buy a lot of singles as a way of checking out new bands, & hyped new bands in particular (occasionally I still do). Trial by single is quick but brutal; once they’re in it, bands tend not to make it out of the “tried it, didn’t like it” box. They have, after all, been found guilty not only of being uninteresting, but of inducing me to waste money – and persuading a gullible press to make them look more interesting than they were. Shocking, really.

The result has been a definite thumbs down to Dark Star, Genelab and Nylon Pylon, among others. Going further back, there was this young Irish band about whom Dave McCullough, my favourite Sounds writer, was wetting himself – not the Virgin Prunes, the other one. So I bought their first single, but it didn’t do a lot for me. And that was pretty much it for U2. (I wonder where that single is now.)

With that in mind, I was a little disappointed to see that – according to iTunes – my copy of the Arctic Monkeys’ first album has the following track listing:

Fortunately what you actually hear while it’s playing is the edgy, hyper-literate Yorkshire racket we know and love. Presumably somebody’s hacked Gracenote – which seems, appropriately, like a very punk thing to do, give or take thirty years’ worth of technology.

I don’t know, though. The Arctic Monkeys’ cover of “Where the streets have no name” would be something to hear. Perhaps this could be the track listing for that difficult third album.

Not too much more

4% of 568 is 22.72. Hold on to that thought.

A ‘unit’ of alcohol is actually 10 ml; if you’re a man, your recommended weekly dosage amounts to a bit less than a pint of gin, or rather more than half a pint of cask strength whisky, or rather less than half a pint of pure alcohol. Don’t drink it all at once.

But what, I hear you ask, what about beer? I refer the honourable reader to the answer previously supplied. A pint of bitter at 4% alcohol by volume will contain 22.72 ml of alcohol, or slightly more than two and a quarter units. Two and a quarter isn’t all that handy as figures go, but it’s a lot handier than 2.272. Apart from anything else, two and a quarter translates nicely to the improper fraction 9/4, which is handy. Say, for the sake of argument, that you want to know the strength (in ‘units’) of a pint of something at 4.5% a.b.v. (e.g. the Marble Brewery’s renowned Ginger Marble), or indeed something at 6% (e.g. the Marble Brewery’s hard-to-find Special Ginger Marble, which I tasted last Friday). Simple: all you need is fractions. First you calculate the ratio of 4.5% to 4%, which is (9/2) / 4; invert the second term to get 9/2 * 1/4; multiply out to get 9/8. Then you just need to multiply that original 9/4 – the number of ‘units’ in a pint of 4% a.b.v., you’ll remember – by the 9/8 ratio; you end up with 81/32, which is as near as dammit 80/32 or 5/2. Two and a half units, in other words. (For the 6% the ratio is 6/4 or 3/2, meaning that when you multiply out you get 27/8, or nearly three and a half.)

This, I’m sure you’re saying at this point, is all very well, but what about situations when I may want to sample a wide variety of drinks of different strengths? What if I were to visit the Stockport Beer and Cider Festival, whose programme boasts an impressive 120 beers, a startling 34 ciders and a frankly alarming 18 perries? (This isn’t advertising – the festival was last weekend.) Oh, you might say, I can always carry on drinking while I’m feeling pleasantly drunk and stop when I start feeling unpleasantly drunk, but experience warns that this may not always be sufficient to ward off inebriation-related mishaps such as stopping for ghastly fast food on the way home, stopping for a drink on the way home (how could that have been a good idea?), falling asleep on the bus and ending up in Bolton, feeling thoroughly ill for the rest of the weekend, etc. To which I reply, think of the units. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you know from experience that three pints at 4.5% is a decent evening out, four pints is chancy for mid-week, five is a bit rocky the next day and six is definitely too much of a good thing. (I do remember managing seven once; I don’t remember how I got home, though.) Then multiply out by the units, two and a half per pint. So ten is fine, twelve is time to slow down and if you reach fifteen you should have stopped already.

Then – and this, frankly, is the clever bit – you work out what concentration of alcohol you’d have to be drinking to reach your selected limit in half a pint. We know that a pint at 4% contains 9/4 units, from which it follows that half a pint contains 9/8. So to get ten units in half a pint, the level of alcohol by volume would need to be (10 / (9/8)) * 4, or 10/1 * 8/9 * 4, or 80/9 * 4, or as near as dammit 9 * 4: 36%. Then all you need to do is tot up the percentages of the halves you drink (no shame in drinking halves at a beer festival; most of the people there were drinking from lined half-pint tankards), and stop when you hit 36. Or, if you’re aiming for 12, do the whole thing again and… stop at 42.

I worked all that out in the stands at Edgeley Park, gazing into the distance and vaguely trying to separate out crowd noise, traffic noise and aeroplane noise, between a half of the aforesaid Special Ginger Marble and one of something with the uncompromising name of Blackcurrant Stout. (Unfortunately, this tasted exactly like you’d expect, say, Murphy’s and black to taste. I can’t say I wasn’t warned.) In the event I was slightly disappointed by the beer range, although I can’t quite put my finger on why. On one hand, the range was just too big – you might not go in expecting to sample everything, but with 120 beers on offer over three days even the most dedicated ticker would have to leave the great majority untasted. And you’ve got to try a rarity like the Special Ginger Marble, and the odd novelty, and the odd strong beer like Phoenix Earthquake (7.3% and very nice indeed), not to mention the odd cider or perry – and how many bitters does that leave room for? At the same time, the mainstream ales were very big on the hoppy style and rather light on the darker, more malty bitters. All very Manchester – rather more Manchester than Stockport, in fact – but still a bit disappointing. I felt alternately spoilt for choice and stuck for choice. On the cider and perry front, on the other hand, spoilt was the word. I ended up skipping the cider and trying two perries, in one case because I was intrigued by the name: Stinking Bishop. All rapidly became clear: the taste is interesting – not unpleasant if you don’t mind being reminded of ripe Brie while you’re drinking your perry – but the smell… Yes, this is in fact a perry which stinks. Well done, Minchew’s. The Blakeney Red perry from Gwynt y Ddraig was rather fine, on the other hand, despite the name of the brewery translating as Dragon’s Fart. There must be something about growing pears that brings out a sophisticated sense of humour.

I worked all that out – and I stopped at 35.7, because I’d been feeling tired – but I only realised much later that most of the calculations had been completely wasted. Let’s say that I’m aiming for the equivalent of four pints at 4.5%; to find the half-pint equivalent, I just need to multiply 4.5% by the ratio of four to a half, or 8. So you can get to the same result with a lot less mental arithmetic. But really, where’s the fun in that?

Searching for something to say

Time for a bit of pure self-indulgence; I’m doing the 20-first-line thing again. Only with 25 (thanks Rob), and with a whole bunch of songs either missed out or included for completely arbitrary reasons. (So I skipped some albums which appeared in the earlier attempts, but not all of them.) The difference from the previous two attempts is essentially that this is 25 songs I actually like.

1. “When your world is full of strange arrangements and gravity won’t pull you through”
   – ABC, “The look of love” (Justin)
2. “Well I remember when you used to look so good and I would do everything I possibly could for you”
   – Love, “Bummer in the summer” (Chris)
3. “Summer was gone and the heat died down”
   – Nick Drake, “Time of no reply” (Justin)
4. “Sometimes I feel so happy, sometimes I feel so sad”
   – the Velvet Underground, “Pale blue eyes” (Larry)
5. “As I was walking all alane”
   – traditional, “Twa Corbies”
6. “You’ve got to hope for the best, and the best looks good now baby”
   – Spiritualized, “Do it all over again” (Unity)
7. “They stumbled into their lives”
   – Blur, “Fade away” (Justin)
8. “Everyone’s too nice to me, the way Vincent Price would be with midnight coming on”
   – Peter Blegvad, “Special Delivery”
9. “D’you lay with a shallow girl?”
   – James Yorkston, “I awoke”
10. “Your railroad gauge, you know I just can’t jump it”
    – Bob Dylan, “Absolutely Sweet Marie” (Alex)
11. “Who could find him, the sidewinding Indian?”
    – Spiritualized, “Do it all over again” (actualfactual)
12. “Moon is giving sunshine, clouds are full of wine”
    – Laika, “Marimba song” (Unity)
13. “Boy, do you hear me say, do you hear me say now?”
    – the Concretes, “You can’t hurry love” (actualfactual)
14. “This old world may never change”
    – Fred Neil, “Dolphins” (Jim)
15. “Sonically we’re in control”
    – Leftfield, “Original” (Unity)
16. “I want, him wants, you want, who wants, he wants, I want, him wants, I want”
    – Happy Mondays, “Do it better” (actualfactual)
17. “They’re nice and precise – each one begins and ends”
    – Buzzcocks, “Fast cars” (actualfactual)
18. “Drag boy dog boy dirty numb angel boy”
    – Underworld, “Born slippy” (James)
19. “Why this uncertainty? It’s not clear to me – would you rather be independent?”
    – Pet Shop Boys, “One in a million” (Unity)
20. “Spring was never waiting for us, girl”
    – Richard Harris, “MacArthur Park” (Lisa)
21. “So you lost your trust, and you never should have”
    – Coldplay, “See you soon” (actualfactual)
22. “It’s the darkest time of year”
    – Robyn Hitchcock, “Winter love”
23. “Thinking of all the times you missed digging it in, you can’t resist”
    – Ed Kuepper, “By the way”
24. “First time, I did it for the hell of it”
    – SFA, “Something for the weekend” (Alex)
25. “Brown Eyes and I were tired”
    – Brian Eno, “St Elmo’s Fire” (Unity)

Have at it.

Update 13th July: that’s your lot. Well spotted, all.