twenty eight degrees centigrade. warm and close*.

Sunday update

Breakfast: Mushroom omelette.
Lunch: Skipped it.
Dinner: Broad bean, bacon and bulghur wheat salad. Chocolate brownie. Nettle tea.
Music: Nothing specific. Radio Three, iPod on shuffle, uptempo mainstream dance crap at the gym.
Narrative:  Humid. This wretched British summer continues. When it stops raining it gets so sweaty you can't be bothered to move. Then the wind picks up and it pisses it down for three days. I want my money back. It used to be one of the things about living in this godforsaken dump that I actually didn't mind. We got four seasons, mostly temperate for nine months of the year, one decent month and two shit months. Now we get ten months of shit, one month of fucking shit, and 30 all right days spread randomly throughout the year, usually on Tuesdays in April or October or some other time that's of no use to anyone. Shite.

Anyway, welcome back to the Sunday updates.

 
Catch y'all soon. Have good Mondays.

*Like one of those creepy American families that put their kids in to beauty contests.

twenty five degrees centigrade. humid as all hell dammit.

The reason I was reading David Byrne's stuff in the first place was because I've been listening to a lot of Talking Heads recently. So in an arse-about-face sort of way, I may as well now tell you the Talking Heads story. Reason being, as my old Karate instructor used to say*, is that I find Talking Heads to be one of the most underrated well-known bands in the canon, and so I like to spread the gospel.

I got into Talking Heads in 1994, some three years after they officially split and six after their final album. I am nothing if not down with it, y'know? Or up with it. Or whatever. Anyway. It was summertime, and a friend lent me Sand in the Vaseline, a 2CD best-of that I was to hang on to for rather too long, until I finally bought the 1CD Once in a Lifetime best-of that Autumn (Sand in the Vaseline being, at over £20, rather too expensive for an impecunious 17 year old with a wont for getting wasted on cheap supermarket vodka every weekend).

It was also the first summer I fell in love, the first summer of getting wasted on aforementioned vodka, the first summer of working in London, Britpop, gigs, holidays sans parents, et cetera. All that good teenage rite of passage stuff. And so partly I associate Talking Heads with that time, with everything being new, exciting.  New people, ideas, directions. New feelings: adult passion rather than childish excitement, tenderness, jealousy, resentment, rejection, dizzying existential nausea.  All these things I wanted (and proceeded) to explore.

Talking Heads provided a literate, intelligent, humorous-serious soundtrack to these teenage excursions. The rhythms are clear, strong and funky. The guitars are lithe, expressive and struck with bell-like clarity. The voice quirky, but expressive and confident. Compare and contrast the turgid, distorted mush, the self-obsessed posturing negativity of later grunge. The weary, cynical, knowing nostalgia paraded by English bands of the time. Here I find a band you could dance to - properly,  not that self-conscious indie shuffle - but with lyrics about life during wartime, or heaven being a place where nothing ever happens, or love being a building on fire. Music with imagination. During a time where the grotesque egotism, unthinking hedonism and casual cruelty of what would become 'lad culture' were celebrated by a media class able to afford regular cocaine for the first time, it was a way for me to escape into that semi-mythical American world of freedom and opportunity. Intelligence, openness, hard work and enthusiasm became things that could be celebrated rather than reviled.

It didn't last of course, and as winter approached, my exhausted, ethanol-soaked heart fell piece by forlorn piece into a dark chasm of bitterness and fear from which it has never since entirely emerged. Now, ironically, I listen to Talking Heads with large doses of that weary nostalgia I used to despise so heartily. But still there are the rhythms, melodies, and the fierce, defiant, hopeful words of the intelligent man that I identified with so closely. And there is enough of that 17 year old left that I still want to get up and dance to a song about love being a building on fire.

I don't know what you think of Talking Heads. But whether you're familiar with them already, or whether they're a band you've never really paid much attention to (or indeed if you've never heard of them before), I would urge you to take another listen; and really listen, with that attention you usually reserve for important things. And make sure you're wearing your dancin' pants.

Links:

Allmusic

Talking Heads fansite

Once in a Lifetime video (YouTube)

Talking Heads on Amazon.co.uk

* as in: "you want to bring your elbow back round when you pivot... reason being, it'll break their nose and they'll likely let go of your arm...."

twenty degrees centigrade. cloudy.

It occurs to me that I missed my anniversary.

Medway Exiles Club (the blog) was born on June 16th 2004. So we're just over four years old. Dang but it doesn't seem that long. I guess it's the rate of change in your life slowing down. The plateau of your late twenties and early thirties. If we'd had blogs when I was sixteen, things would have been different; but then again I would have posted a whole pile of shite to be embarrassed by, so maybe it's for the best.

Anyway, enough of that, I only stopped by to pass on a link to David Byrne's blog, which is fun and interesting and worth sticking on your feed list.

Have good weekends.

twenty one degrees centigrade. clear.

Yeah so we have a new layout. I'm just playing around at the moment so don't be surprised if stuff keeps changing round a bit. I'm still unimpressed by how clumsy all this stuff is. In particular the sidebar editing, which is shot to hell. An absolute dog's dinner. Dammit Jim I'm a writer not a web designer. I'm persevering though. Let me know what you think.

twenty one degrees centigrade. cloudy.

Squarespace, my blog provider and host, updated their software yesterday. We are now on version 5. I just typed a big long entry, and it crashed when I tried to post it. Great.

Oh, and they've removed the button for justified text formatting. Great.

Not impressed.