I'm loving Maths & English by Dizzee Rascal at the moment.I was a big fan of Boy In Da Corner, but wasn't particularly impressed by Showtime I think Maths & English is a return to form, and both of the singles released to date - "Sirens" and "Pussyole (Old Skool)"; - are crackers. Dizzee has a deft turn of phrase and is about the only UK rapper that I can listen to these days. "Old Skool" has that great James Brown "whoo yeah" sample from "Think" by Lyn Collins, which you can't go wrong with. It's actually a toned down version of the song "Pussyole" off the album -- a song apparentlyl telling the story of Dizzee's falling out with Wiley, who abandoned Dizzee when he had been stabbed. "Last one swinging, first one running...".
Joan Jett
Recently a learned friend of mine, Jim Zespy, met up with Joan Jett. Yep, there he is, grinning like a fan-boy out of his myspace page. Don't you just envy him?
Joan is a special person, without a doubt. I can't remember when I first came across the Runaways. I think it must have been in high school, when their songs were featured in the TV movie Dawn, Portrait Of A Teenage Runaway. (Worthy of another post on it's own, Dawn was a 1976 made-for-TV movie starring Eve Plumb of Brady Bunch fame, and part of a "teens-in-trouble" genre that began with Born Innocent, featuring Linda Blair, in 1974. These are the things that informed my teens.) I was just on the cusp of leaving my middle school innocence behind, having moved from Georgia to New Jersey. I had started reading Trouser Press magazine. It was all downhill from there...
Anyway... JJ.
So I became acquainted with the Runaways and picked up The Runaways and Queens Of Noise. This was around 1981 or so, about the same time I was discovering Girlschool. By then I was a punk, or more specifically a hardcore kid, but there weren't any noisy or loud girl punk bands yet, so I turned to the rock chicks for inspiration. In 1981, after Bad Reputation but before Joan released I Love Rock And Roll, I was living in Miami and really starved of stimulation. I went to see Joan play at a some imminently sketchy biker bar in Fort Lauderdale. A bunch of punks had turned up for the show, and the bar's regulars weren't all that welcoming. At some point the inevitable fight broke out, only it turned into a bar-wide brawl with furniture being thrown and a lot of blood being spilled. I remember losing a pair of brass knuckles in the fray - not that I was a hard ass, but some hard ass had given me a pair of knuckles, and I thought it might be a good time to try them out. I was wrong. I managed to get out of the bar in one piece but had to double back in my car to save a few skins who were really about it be killed in the parking lot. We were chased by bikers for about a mile but hid in a trailer park and lost them. I'm not making this shit up. My car at the time was a beautiful 1976 Ford Gran Torino - those were the days.
I Love Rock And Roll and Bad Reputation were important albums to me at the time. They had all the rebellious devil-may-care attitude that any teenager was looking for, killer choruses, and Joan was hot. Debbie Harry had first made me consider lesbianism, and now Joan Jett was closing the case. I saw her play again, after the big hit, and took my uber-cool stepmother with me, and she loved it too. It wasn't cool to like Joan Jett and Minor Threat, but I did.
Later... much later, in fact, I began to understand more about Joan's history and began to respect her even more. In fact, Joan's history was just about as punk as it comes. She formed the Runaways with Sandy West when she was 15, getting Kim Fowley to manage them. When the Runaways unraveled, she started a solo career, and recorded her debut album in 1980. When it was rejected by 25 major labels she started her own label, Blackheart. Pretty fucking punk for 1980. She is credited as being the first female artist to run her own label. She certainly beat Ian MacKaye to the punch. Heh heh.
Southern nearly got to release Sinner, her most recent album, and put out the rest of the stuff on the label for her in Europe. It didn't work out. Her producer/manager/business partner Kenny Laguna is a smart dude - he's been in the business for ages (literally - since Tommy James and the Shandells), and he wanted the moon and the stars, with no compromise. He's a smart cookie, I wish I could have made the deal work for both of us. It was a shame, I would have loved to be the company to really break Joan in Europe like she deserves. She's got incredible credibility, but she's never really had the backing she needed over here. And Sinner, btw, is a really amazing record. Fantastic covers of "AC/DC" by the Sweet and "Androgynous" by the Replacements. Her tongue is firmly in her cheek where her sexuality is concerned, and I like that. I hope she really is dating Carmen Electra, too. What a hot couple!)
And maybe the best thing of all... Joan is a huge Lungfish fan! Can you believe that?
Check out her "celebrity playlist" from iTunes:
- Cretin Hop - The Ramones Weird Tales Of The Ramones
- Rebel Girl - Bikini Kill Bikini Kill: The Singles
- Save Yourself - The Vacancies A Beat Missing of a Silence Added
- Bang a Gong (Get It On) - T. RexElectric Warrior
- Rebel Rebel - David Bowie Best of Bowie
- Sympathy for the Devil - The Rolling Stones Hot Rocks 1964-1971
- Waiting Room - Fugazi 13 Songs
- American Idiot - Green DayAmerican Idiot
- Speaking In Tongues - Eagles Of Death Metal Peace Love Death Metal
- Look Back and Laugh - Minor ThreatOut of Step
- Non Dual Bliss - Lungfish Talking Songs for Walking / Neckless of Heads
So yeah, I'm jealous of Zespy for sure.
JOAN JETT! Respect.
Cowboys in Cornwall
Holly & Me get into the spirits of things
Originally uploaded by
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Just got back from a long weekend trip to Cornwall, down to the infamous Tapestry festivus, which is organised by the very same folk that run the Tapestry club in London. Check em out on www.tapestryclub.co.uk. The weekend was eventful, to say the least. Started out with a humdinger of a hangover thanks to SIMON and the Twlight Singers. This made preparing for a weekend's camping quite, quite difficult. (See previous entry ref : never being prepared in advance.) So difficult, in fact, that it required turning the car around THREE times to get bits that I forgot. Essential items like cowboy hats, sleeping bags...oh, and the tickets for the festival. All of which means that by the time I have collected my friends we are leaving London...oh, three and a half hours later than planned. Which is all good because we are in SUCH high spirits and we've got cowboy hats on and we're in The Beast and we're YEE-HAWING our way out of London.
Which got us about as far as Euston underpass, which is where The Beast decided to stall and never be started again. Yes, right in the bit of the underpass where it's two lanes and no verge and it's rush hour and let me tell you something you might not know : when you break down in the middle of an underpass and block traffic, people REALLY LIKE TO STARE AT YOU. Then the cops come with their big flashy lights and sit behind you so no one rear ends you and then people stare even MORE. And think that you are a terrorist. And then more cops come with their big flashy lights and sit IN FRONT of you in case some one....errr.... reverses down the underpass into you at high speed. And eventually, the cutest, most helpful RAC man in the world comes and tows you out of the underpass and takes you to the nearest pub where he tries to fix your car but can't, and crazy people come and talk to you about how cool & rare your car is, ask you for directions to places that don't exist, stare at your car engine and don't say anything for 15 minutes, and ask you where you are from.
Then the cutest RAC man ever tells you that your distributor cap needs replacing and he can't get one and why don't you let the RAC tow you to Cornwall where someone can replace it for half the price they charge in London. And he helpfully points out that you can sit in the pub and get shitfaced until the recovery van arrives because now someone else is doing the driving. So we agree, settling instead on Somerset where we have mates who have a good mechanic. Then the cute RAC man tells you the recovery van will be here in an hour and drives off without asking for your phone number. And the van takes THREE hours to turn up by which point you are really are shitfaced and planning on turning the recovery driver into a sex toy for you and and your wicked mates to have your way with....
THEN he turns up and he's 90 years old, four feet tall and has such an indecipherable noise of a Scottish accent that you can't even amuse yourself by chatting to him about how they used to shag using cat guts for condoms back in the day...so you sleep off your afternoon drinking binge and arrive safe & sound in Somerset, oh... only seven hours after you had originally intended.
....and I haven't even gotten to the festivus yet. But I stink like a field full of old beer and it's late and I'm gonna go and sit in a hot bath and annoint myself with precious oils. So more tomorrow.....
xx