...ruffles...

Bez’s Celebrity Big Brother win gives me reason to tell my favourite Bez story.

Years of lurching from one disaster to another Tony Wilson’s punk rock brainchild, Factory Records, was going to the wall. Two things could save them, New Order’s new album Republic and the Happy Monday’s fourth album, Yes Please. There were doubts that New Order could stop arguing long enough to record anything. The Mondays were Wilson’s last chance.

The Monday’s were deep in a hellhole of smack addiction. Surrounded by gangsters and drug dealers Sean Ryder simply wasn’t conscious for long enough to complete the album.

Wilson decided to get the band out of Manchester so he sent them to Jamaica. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, you might say. The band spunked tens of thousands of pounds on cheaper, purer crack cocaine, selling items from their studio to raise the cash. The wolves continued to bark at Wilson’s door.

Wilson needed Yes Please; the Monday’s needed money so Ryder took the master tapes hostage. Despairing, Wilson pawned his children and wired the money to Jamaica. Ryder handed the tapes over where the relieved Wilson played them, they were half finished instrumentals with no vocals.

The madness continued. Bez, bombed out on smack, hired a jeep to drive across the island. Travelling down a one way track he came across another jeep coming the other way. Swerving, he turned the jeep over. He broke both his arms and was rushed to hospital. The doctors put both arms in solid casts fixed so that his arms were sticking out as though pinned to a crucifix.

Feeling he was missing the party, Bez quickly discharged himself and decided to get out of the madness (presumably his maraca parts were sorted). He took a holiday on the other side of the island.

Still in his plaster casts he was drawn to the fun that could be had riding the ‘flying bananas’ which were popular with tourists. Despite being unable to hold onto the straps the world’s greatest Mancunian went for a thrill a minute ride…

Where he hit a wave, was thrown into the air, landed in the water he broke his broken arms.

Both of them.

Again.

Within a week.

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Labels: Music

Last night Channel 4 mapped the Michael Jackson’s compulsive attraction towards young pre-pubescent boys in, er, Michael Jackson’s Boys. Inevitably the story of Jordy Chandler raised its head. The programme investigated the FBI's in-depth enquiries into the allegations. One ‘source’ said…

“They took pictures of his front private parts, his back private parts, his side private parts…”

Excuse me? Michael Jackson has side private parts?

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Labels: Music

Leave meeting in Angel Islington at 6.30
6.35 Catch cab to Marylebone
Crawl across London in cab, whilst driver tells you about the suicide on the Marylebone flyover (they had to wash blood and bones off the road and everything).
Arrive at Marylebone Station at 6.46 see that next train departs at 6.58
Buy orange juice and pistachio nuts
Put ticket into barrier, pull out after it’s rejected
Look at ticket, realise that you’ve managed to buy a Travelcard which doesn’t cover Zone 1
Head for ticket inspectors
Wait for ticket inspectors to finish dealing with about 60 tourists
After 5 minutes of waiting decide instead to buy a Zone 1 ticket just to get you through the barrier
Go to machine, select appropriate ticket
Put debit card in
Take card out after it’s rejected because you can’t use it twice on a ticket machine in the same day
Go to cash machine to get cash out
Wait in queue
Withdraw £20
Go back to machine
Select ticket and put £10 into slot
Pull £10 out after it’s rejected
Put same £10 into slot
Pull £10 out after it’s rejected
Put another £10 into slot
Pull this £10 out after it’s rejected
Put it in again
Take it out again
Miss 6.58 train
Walk up to ticket inspectors
Look confident, wave invalid tickets in the air, proceed onto platform
Finally board next train at 7.30
Arrive Amersham at 8.15
Get changed in car park
Depart car park at 8.22
Go to Tesco to get Petrol
Realise you need the toilet
Drive to Tesco shop and go to toilet
Head for Beconsfield
Join M40
Listen to Pete Tong
Listen to Westwood
Turn Westwood off after 15 minutes as he doesn’t appear to have played a single record not completed a single sentence even though his music and talking have been constant.
Join M23 at Junction 7
Stop at Pea’s Pottage Services for Burger King
Eat Burger King
Feel ill
Set off towards M23
Turn back as Coke passes straight through and toilet is needed again
Go to Pea’s Pottage Services toilet
Get back in car
Put half cup of Coke in cup holder in glove compartment
Depart Pea’s Pottage Services
Drive over small bump
Spill Coke all over car
Turn back to Pea’s Pottage Services and collect napkins
Set off towards M23
Join A23
Arrive in Brighton at 10pm
Drive to seafront
Park at NCP
Check into Quality Hotel
Leave Quality Hotel, head north
At Traffic lights turn right
At HSBC turn left
Komedia is on your right
Arrive at Komedia at 10.35 (and the show ended 20 minutes ago)

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Labels: General me

OK, it’s not Ghandi, it doesn’t even have the emotional texture of Dodgeball, but Team America – World Police is as funny as your mum starring in a blaxploitation flick. Using Thunderbirds style marionettes gives Trey Parker and Matt Stone licence to do things that wouldn’t normally get near a mainstream cinema. Alongside songs about AIDS (whether you’re gay, straight, white or spade, everyone’s got AIDS) and hard core pornography is a clear ridiculing of the breast beating Americans and bleeding heart liberals that Hollywood is otherwise scared to touch at the moment. Every time Team America is deployed to save the world they’re accompanied by red neck soft rock soundtrack which goes “America, FUCK YEAH!” It says it all really.

Along side is the typically brainless South Park stupidity. Terrorists communicate with each other using a combination of just three words – Mohammed, Jihad and Dakadaka. Kim Jong Il is a Dr Evil type character with a daft evil plan for world domination. He talks by switching his Rs and Ls round (like what Koreans do). Whilst you shouldn’t, you can’t help laughing every time he says Herro Everlybody! His song, Ronery, is truly touching. Of course there’s endless jokes that can be drawn from the limitations of marionettes (stupid walks, imprecise movements, strings everywhere) they use every one, about six times each.

As a piece of satire, I’m not sure how clear the message, if there is one, really is. There’s something to do with pussies (liberals, depicted by Hollywood Actors) don’t like dicks (Flag waving Americans) because dicks fuck pussies, but dicks also sometimes fuck assholes (evil dictatorships) and if they didn’t we’d all get covered in shit, and that pussies aren’t that far from assholes anyway. There’s something there, but I don’t know.

It’s not big and it’s not clever, but it’s very big and very clever. Hmm.

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Labels: Films

I often concern myself over the utter drivel written on this site, I'm comforted in the short term by occasionally reading those blogs written by teens exclusively in txt msg language. However this opening paragraph from this article is actually written a by paid professional journalist.

"According to figures released by the Football League yesterday, only nine clubs in League Two did not pay for the services of a licensed agent in the second half of 2004 and Oxford United were not one of those."

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Labels: News

How out of touch can the royals be? Do they not understand this country at all? Do the people they claim to represent mean nothing to them? I mean, who the hell goes to a “Natives and Colonials” party anyway? Have these people never head of Vicars and Tarts.

According to GMTV, The Jews have accepted Prince Harry’s apology for wearing a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party last week. Well done The Jews, all 300,000 of you!

I believe the conversation would have gone something like this…

“Hello… Harry who?... Oh he’s The Ginger right?... as a Nazi you say? … accept his apology for what?... Right, whatever, ‘spose so, go mad, now can I go its quiz night down at the Red Lion”.

Apparently William went as a Lion, well done Wills, what a jolly good chap he is.

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Labels: News

Let’s face it, if Bez entered the boat race he’d deserve to win it, his victory in Celebrity Big Brother should be assured. I never got the chance to see the Mondays in full flow, but I did once see a shambolic Black Grape gig at the Town and Country Club.

We were in the balcony and could see right into the wings of the stage, the Grape’s backing band came on following a shouty support slot from Kaliphz, who had a brief but bright career as an Asian Agit-Hip Hop unit until they spoilt it all by hooking up to record a single with Prince Naseem.

The band struck up one of those signature Mondays style ramshackle grooves. It went on for an age, round and round, chugging a dirty funk. After about four minutes, it seemed that Shaun Ryder and Bez weren’t actually going to turn up. Just as it seemed the gig wouldn’t happen, from the wings, a dancing monkey appeared in the gloom. Bez grooved into view shaking his maracas as though he’d freaky danced his way all the way down the M6 from Manchester. The place went ballistic, but the rapture didn’t break Bez’s rhythm as he continued across the stage, halting occasionally to do a little back step or a freestyled trot on the spot. Eventually he reached the far side of the stage squatted to shake his maracas at a couple of enthralled fans. Then he rose and, still without breaking his rhythm, danced straight off the other side of the stage.

And that was it, Bez went home, one Ecstasy induced circuit, the best performance of the night, and he was done. Or so it seemed. He did return several songs later, presumably having carried on in the same direction until a roadie turned him back towards the stage. When he eventually came back, he took up station on the edge of the stage. He didn’t break his rhythm at any point for the next two hours, he even danced to the silence in between songs, demonstrating some of his best moves as it happens.

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Labels: TV and radio

Baz brings up a good point in my top 50 CD’s, (aside from the fact that I have both Coldplay albums in my top 50, which seems odd even to me) he questions my Queen selection. Which brand of overblown pompousness do you prefer?

Early Queen Era?
Begone with you you shod and shady senators
Give out the good leave out the bad evil cries
I challenge the mighty titan and his troubadours
And with a smile
I'll take you to the seven seas of Rhye

Or

Mid-Late Queen Era
You say smile I say cheese
Cartier I say please
Income tax I say Jesus
I don't wanna be a candidate for
Vietnam or Watergate
Cos all I wanna do is
Bicycle bicycle bicycle

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Labels: Music

With this furore surrounding the BBC’s decision to show Jerry Springer The Opera on telly, I’ve a bit of a guilty secret to tell you about the show. Jerry Springer The Opera has been running in London’s fringe theatre district of “The West End” and all over the country for years. What’s more, the show is inspired by a television programme that’s been subverting viewers of a on a small terrestrial channel called ITV since the mid-nineties.

I think I should tell Mediawatch. This underground campaign to teach people to swear must be stopped.

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Labels: TV and radio

The things you do on a Christmas day, my fifty favourite albums, OF ALL TIME [thunderclaps, lighting strikes]…



1. Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back
2. Depeche Mode - 101
3. Goats – Tricks of the Shade
4. Orbital - Brown
5. Stone Roses - Stone Roses
6. Happy Mondays - Pills Thrills and Bellyaches
7. Coldcut - Journey's By DJ
8. Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine
9. Carter, Jon - Live At The Heavenly Social
10. Radiohead - OK Computer
11. David Bowie - Hunky Dory
12. Leftfield - Leftism
13. Radiohead - The Bends
14. Nirvana - Unplugged
15. New Order - Republic
16. Dr Dre - The Chronic
17. New Order - Technique
18. Massive Attack - Protection
19. Depeche Mode - Violator
20. Nirvana - Nevermind
21. Portishead - Dummy
22. Smiths - The Queen Is Dead
23. Oasis - What's The Story Morning Glory
24. Beatles - Abbey Road
25. Beatles - The White Album
26. Smiths - Louder Than Bombs
27. Run DMC - Raising Hell
28. Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique
29. Massive Attack - Blue Lines
30. Cypress Hill - Black Sunday
31. Coldplay - Parachutes
32. Bjork - Debut
33. Orb - Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld
34. Carter, Jon - Viva Bugged Out
35. Beatles - Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band
36. Stevens, Cat - Teaser and the Firecat
37. Sugar - Copper Blue
38. KLF - The White Room
39. Streets - Original Pirate Material
40. Pharcyde – Bizarre Ride to the Pharcyde
41. Queen - Jazz
42. Blur - Park Life
43. Pop Will Eat Itself - This is the day, This is the hour, This is this
44. De La Soul - 3 Feet High And Rising
45. Coldplay - A Rush Of Blood To The Head
46. Radiohead - Pablo Honey
47. Public Enemy - Fear Of A Black Planet
48. Depeche Mode - Songs of Faith and Devotion
49. Charlatans - Between 10th & 11th
50. Stereo MCs – Connected

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Labels: Music

At the risk of losing all friends and/or respect, this was pretty much written about me and my childhood. I often ask people what they do on Saturdays because mine are largely dictated to by going to see Oxford play; it’s been like that for years. I’m not sure what others’ do when they wake up on Saturday morning. Without a similar affliction, what occupies their spare time?

It wasn’t always like this, when I was small the whole weekend would be taken up by Subbuteo exactly as it’s described in the story. Generally I would play on my own, partly because I couldn’t abide others’ interpretations of the laws of the game (high powered flicking wasn’t allowed, nor was waggling your goalie from side to side – when did you last see a goalkeeper running from post to post at 500 miles an hour to save a shot?) mostly, I played on my own because I wanted to play more often than anyone else.

Friday nights was the, ahem, Friday League. This was years before SKY’s Monday night football or Super Sunday. The Friday League consisted of six teams including Walketon Rovers (pictured left, looking angry) and Wolvenal (pictured right, looking surprised), who I resurrected from my dad’s childhood (Wolvenal being a mix of dad’s favourite teams – Wolves and Arsenal).

The players who played for these clubs were drawn from that year’s Pannini Sticker Book, apart from Mark Flint, England and Rovers Captain (notable because he was badly painted) who was made up all by my own.

Saturday morning’s, apart from the arrival of that week’s Roy of the Rovers, was the big cup competition, the (oh, god help me) Saturday Cup. This was followed by the big European night on Monday when, usually, Walketon or Wolvenal, would take on the giants of the scene. For some reason these weren’t Juventus or Real Madrid, but teams like Widez Lodz, a Polish side who dominated my competitions.

There were some classic games, I still remember Rovers’ keeper being sent off in the first half of a European cup quarter final versus Antwerp (who had the most potent striker at the time – Van Der Somebody or other). The striker stepped up to take the resulting penalty, thundering it against the bar. What followed was a legendary Rovers rear guard, without the benefit of a keeper, which saw an unlikely victory and them proceed into the Semis. I always had a sense of fair play; I wouldn’t offer any bias and my favoured teams won as much as they lost.

I completed about 10 seasons and a couple of World Cups in total (champions of the World – Sweden followed by Brazil, England once knocked out in a dramatic semi-final by, erm, Wales). Then I got smart, introducing a UEFA Cup competition on a Tuesday and a couple of additional divisions of the Friday League, played on Thursday. Like SKY, I got greedy, and the quality of the football and the spectacle got diluted. It was the beginning of the end, I tried to speed through the minor competitions by playing games on the Commodore 64, or through some elaborate dice game, but it never worked. The legend collapsed around my ears and I moved on. I hope Rupert Murdoch and the FA are reading the sorry tale.

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Labels: General me

Sorry, a gratuitous, isn’t my two-year-old niece funny post…

On running into a room full of people… “Hello anybody”
On the spectacular London New Year fireworks… “Look, fireworks, wow… and… WOW”
On being tucked into bed… “Put the blanket on me, but you can’t sleep with me because that would be dangerous”
On god knows what… “If you close your eyes like a rabbit (or possibly a carrot) your shoes will disappear.”

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Labels: General me

1. Felix Da Housecat - Devin Dazzling and the Neon Fever
2. Burgess, Tim - I Believe
3. Spinbad, DJ - Frabriclive 14
4. Orbital - Blue Album
5. Armand Van Helden - A New York Mix Odessey
6. Jurassic 5 – Power in Numbers
7. Krafty Kuts and Yousef - Circus Meets Chibuku
8. Basement Jaxx - Kish Kash
9. Kasabian - Kasabian
10. Goldie Lookin' Chain - Greatest Hits

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Labels: Music

My best ever Christmas haul was the year I got a six foot snooker table, it was complemented by a number of other presents including Subbuteo, Lego, portable radio and the Roy of the Rovers annual to make it the best ever. This year, I reckon was the best since then.

Amongst the booty was a juicer, perfect for my attempt to become healthier through the aid of kitchen appliances alone. I got some diddy Altec Lansing speakers for my iPod from Emma. There was a didgeridoo from Kirsty, allowing me to finally fulfil my ambition to play an acoustic version of Aphex Twin’s techno classic, one of my all time favourite tunes. Talking of which, Spanx tracked down a mint and rare as hen’s teeth vinyl copy of Tricks of the Shade by the Goats – a favourite album (3rd in fact, but more of that later).

It was comic strips ahoy as I got a full set of Boondocks books and one of Matt Groening’s Big Book of Hell. If that wasn’t enough, I also got The Snow Patrol mix CD The Trip, with Freelance Hellraiser on the knobs, Hot Fuss by the Killers and Medulla by Bjork.

Along with some cool Christmas knitwear, a t-shirt with a lego version of Mr T on it and a copy of Top Spin, sometimes receiving is better than giving.


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Labels: General me

I wouldn’t say that Grandma’s house was hot on Christmas day, but mum did tell dad to put the leftover turkey in the car so that it wouldn’t over cook in the central heating. F'real.

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Labels: General me

One of my biggest regrets is that I don’t see enough of my friends. It’s not that we make it easy for ourselves, Katie and Australia Jo live in Australia, Penny and Mike are in Jersey, Jules has spent the last couple of years shuttling between Nottingham and New Zealand. Everyone is busy, so it usually takes a wedding to get everyone in the same room at the same time.

Worryingly, Scuff 2’s main room was empty for quite a long time. But at least it was occupied by those I most wanted to see. We hadn’t seen Penny, who for the second year running turned up as a surprise, since the 24-hour mercy dash to Russ and Sam’s wedding in July. We hadn’t seen Willy and Leo since their housewarming, and we hadn’t seen Jules since she helped me with my foot at The New Year hideaway in Derbyshire. Nobody had eyeballed Andrew for over a year.

I kept reassuring myself that as we’d managed to get nearly everyone in the same room and that this was the success we were looking for. Penny, suffering from a dose of trapped wind, was able to get down on all fours and rock rhythmically to release the discomfort in the middle of the dancefloor with nobody noticing. The party wasn’t rocking quite how we’d envisaged.

It was kicking off on the ground floor, people were getting stuck in the bar – and damn them – enjoying themselves too much to explore the rest of the venue. Then the evening pitched down a notch as a kerfuffle involving a lost sister driving around London aimlessly unfolded. The whole thing was turning into a nightmare.

But, one thing my How To DJ Properly book talks about is patience, soul destroying though it was we kept cool and cranked the music up slowly from a bit of 60’s funk and disco, to some hip hop, a Spankee deep house set, a Ruffles slightly bigger house set. As the nonsensical breakdown for Felix Da Housecat’s Watching Girls Go By wound its way up, I looked up to see the room had suddenly become pretty full.

Someone came and asked to help us dig out some records – thanks, we said, but there wasn’t enough space. There are some people here “desperate to dance to Hey Yah by Outkast”. We’d play it, we said, he wanted to know when, where, how, why. We were on a role, and back in control of the night, I rebuffed him and he retreated.

Then Spanx called it, the time had come, it was time to make people dance. I pulled out Lose My Breath by Destiny’s Child, a gargantuan tune, a sign to say that we were onto a new level. Clearing the palette with Tipsy by J-Kwon we introduced some floor slaying Beyonce.

Thousands of pounds of investment in music and music playing paraphernalia, hundreds of hours perfecting our laughable mixing skills and it took Beyonce, Wham Rap, Deee Lite and, of course, Outkast to set the party alight. But that doesn’t matter when you’ve got the whole room smiling. People were dancing, standing on chairs, and erm, doing press-ups. We mixed up Wiseguys and Sugarhill Gang, sampled and looped up the opening refrain of House of Pain’s Jump Around so it opened with a 10 second screech of horns. At one point Spanx simply got bored of a tune, stopped it and put on something new. Liberation!

The tunes pitched up to Do Your Thing by Basement Jaxx as the witching hour approached. There was time for one more tune, and it was obvious which it was to be. I sampled up the opening blast of Beyonce, introducing it in time with the final thuds of the Jaxx. There was a whoop of delight from the dancefloor, somebody recognised a tune coming in. The Jaxx closed out and Beyonce, for the second time, went back on and everyone wigged out.

The landlord said we had two more tunes before he’d have to turn us off. But that was it, that was the peak, people may have wanted more, and we could have given them more, but they weren’t getting it.

We won.

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Labels: Music

When people ask where I’m from I say Oxford, even though I’ve never lived closer than 15 miles from the city. If pushed, I’ll say I’m from Thame, where I’ve lived longest, even though I’ve lived in Aylesbury for about five years. Most people have heard of Oxford, some of Aylesbury, few of Thame. Oxford is convenient shorthand for the region I’m from.

I find visiting Thame an anxious affair, walking down the High Street (the widest in the world, or something) is a rat run through the past. I find myself staring into the eyes of people my age trying to peel back about 15 years, through the wrinkles, fat and babies, to work out whether I went to school with them or not.

Not that I’ve ever bumped into anyone. What would I say if I did? Do I give bland platitudes? Potted histories? Reminisces? Or is it time to deconstruct shared pasts and really get down to it. I’m more confident, outgoing and, obviously, funnier than I was at school, do I return to the ‘type’ they once knew? I’m reasonably successful in what I do; do I tell these people? If I do, then will they think, as I do, how the bloody hell has he getting away with that, unless they’re proportionally more successful than I am, which they probably are. And what if they read this site… which I know some do.

Christmas, of course, increases the likelihood of an encounter as people return home to their family. Jacques Perretti’s article in The Guardian’s Guide on Saturday promised to empathise with my predicaments as he described what it was like to return home for Christmas. What’s more, Perretti is from Beaconsfield, not that far from where we live.

What started out with me thinking that I could just post the link and tell people that this was how I feel, ended with me wanting to hunt the dog down. Perretti paints an utterly fictitious picture of his home town. He has to give his train ticket to a ticket inspector “BY HAND”, he gets into a Nissan Micra Mini-cab driven by an old school chum (whose life consists of three marriages and a burnt down hotel, allegedly). He makes claims about people driving around in White GTi’s, that Christmas in the Home Counties is stuck in the 50’s and that the in-town entertainment consists of fighting and setting fire to each other. His final claim is that on returning to his local pub, the answer his old school mates give to the question how are things round here is “Alright if it weren’t for the Pakis.” The article was illustrated with a cartoon of three men drinking pints in Ku Klux Klan hoods.

I don’t know which train Perretti caught to get to this version of Beaconsfield but if it departed from platform 9 and three-quarters I wouldn’t be surprised. Beaconsfield is very much like Thame, a beautiful town, affluent, prime commuter belt. Broadly speaking the inhabitants are well travelled, educated, and liberal. These are all luxuries a town’s affluence affords, sadly this doesn’t satisfy Perreti’s jaundice view. There may not be the ethnic mix of, say, Brixton but the reasons are economic, not social. OK, so it hasn’t got a gay fetish Grime Garage club night, but it really isn’t the other world he paints.

Perretti paints a fictitious world – stations have automatic barriers, the mini-cabs outside the station are identical to those that sit outside every London club on a Saturday night. I’ve not seen a white GTi in years, nor a fight or fire. As for overt racism, I’m not naive enough to think that it doesn’t happen, but I live in the region, and don’t see it. He was either unfortunate… or lying.

Presumably this distortion is hiding the subtext that he wants everyone to know that he must be cool because he’s living in London. The kind of person who gets excited by going to work in his jeans, and living next door to black people (they’re so real… and nice…), he’s a Londoner because he can describe the tube map by the name of the line, not its colour on the map. Perreti wants us to believe he’s escaped from some middle class ghetto, forgetting that it’s he’s a product of the town. It seems that home is where the heart is, but not, necessarily, where your brand is.

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Labels: General me

The audience in the Creation Theatre Company’s version of A Christmas Carol was resolutely drawn from the Oxford boho elite, and us. The company have carved a neat niche for themselves by placing an ornate mirrored tent in the car park of Cowley’s BMW plant, some kind of post-modern art meeting commerce type statement, perhaps.

The tent is small and intimate; the cast charge around the packed audience. As Ebenezer is lead through his Christmas nightmare rain pounds down on the canvas giving the whole thing a highly atmospheric charge.

Good though it was it did feel like I was watching the DVD of the show, stuck on one of the special additional feature commentaries. At every turn Emma would lean over and whisper in my ear the equivalent movements from the Muppet version of the tale.

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Labels: General me

To prefix The Phantom of the Opera with the chillingly exacting qualifier ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber’s’ is not a good start for the ‘lavish film production of the smash hit west end snore’, but it is particularly difficult to articulate the a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e g-a-r-b-a-g-e the film turns out to be.

Of course, I should have known, I’ve seen Starlight Express, but with a clear blue print in Moulin Rouge, it surely isn’t that difficult to produce a modern musical film which is, at least, a decent waste of time.

Minnie Driver’s histrionics as diva Carlotta and Jennifer Ellison’s girly charm aside, the entire cast have been painted grey, unlike La Rouge which is spectacular in pace, rich in colours and bold in characters.

Most unforgivable is the appalling technical production – the dubbing and sounding mixing makes the songs flat and distant. The signature song – The Phantom of the Opera – should be a journey of horror, love, lust and beauty taken by the virginal soprano Christine into the menacing Phantom’s lair. Whilst the rest of the orchestration is classical, this song switches to a vague mid paced electroclash soundtrack which reaches its crescendo with a god awful pomp rock guitar solo. I found myself involuntarily crying ‘Oh God no’ at every agonising turn.

The director can’t decide whether the narrative should be played through song alone or with a mixture of speech included. It switches between the two approaches throughout finally deciding, wrongly, that the whole thing should be done sung. The story gets lost (you can’t hear the lyrics) and the supposedly touching, tender moments are more painful than having your testicles pulled. It makes you prey for double DVD box sets of extended versions of Scooby Doo 2 and Barbed Wire for Christmas.

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Labels: Films

Getting home from a hard day’s work and serenading your girlfriend with poetry.

OK, so the poet was Jay Z and the verse was “If you’re having girl problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but my bitch ain’t one”.

But you’ve got to say the sentiment is there.

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Labels: Music