Something for the Weakened

Until I’m in the head space that will facilitate some sort of constructive outpourings here, why not try reading this if you haven’t already. Even though I’m a decade younger, I’m currently having similar concerns – not due to my own children, thank Christ, but because of the potential downsizing of storage space that might await me shortly. Excuse me now, I must go and fret.

Apologies for irregular bursts of shit spouting. Massive post I want to write, but really can’t as it will inevitably lead to some massive offense. Might write it and slap it up in a year’s time or summat. Other then that, minor personal upheavals coming soon that I won’t bore you with either, but have led to my not having much else forced onto my cortexes. Proper fun will resume shortly. Thank you for your patience.

I’ve just been pointed towards this by site designer/hoster and brother of mine. Doesn’t look like anything particularly contentious does it? Well keep scrolling down. About a third of the way down you’ll find some comment on the album design work of David Vigh, which looks pretty good to my eyes. The album he’s designed is for a chap I must admit I’m pretty unfamiliar with named Michael Morph (I assume his albino brother goes under the moniker Michael Chas). Now look ye at the album’s title. Something for the what? Is that a Weakened I see? By jove, I think it is.

Now as you’ve probably guessed, Morph is not one of my pseudonyms – I don’t have any plasticine based ones as far as I know. I should also say that I realise that I own no sole rights to the duff pun that this whole endeavour hangs upon. The Lovely Dan Haythorn was first there in using it as an album title and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it as a track title used by some dodgy sounding US college rock band (can’t look it up now – writing this on the fly). So, should you be a fan of Michael’s, hello, I am not in any way affiliated with him. If you are him, hello my pun brother.

We should start a gang.

Having conducted extensive tests, I can now report that pork Rogan Josh really doesn’t work. However beef is a reasonable substitute for the lamb.

Here we go again. If you don’t understand by now, there are nine more of these things that give an explanation. Have a look at them. Today there’s something which might actually interest people, featuring an appearance by someone well known for actually making music for once. Wrap your lugs round this, my monkey faced children.

Tony Ferrino & Björk – Short Term Affair

As I’m sure most of you already realise, Tony Ferrino was the Portugese Eurovision runner up created by Steve Coogan in the late ’90s. Probably the least successful character in Coogan’s career as character creator, the public never really latched onto Ferrino in the same way they had with Paul Calf, Alan Partridge or even Duncan Thickett. There are probably a fair few reasons for this, though chief amongst these I would say is that the whole thing was played a little too straight – where the writers seemed to think that creating a carbon copy of a particular type of fading ’singing sensation’ was enough, rather than layering some actual gags on top. This was the problem with the TV special Phenomenon, broadcast on New Year’s Day 1997 in a prime time slot on BBC2. The mockumentary that followed two days later, hidden away in a near to midnight slot, is a remarkable piece of work, gag packed and featuring Peter Baynham on some of his best televisual form. Unfortunately, due to the indifference and disappointment the first special was met with, hardly anyone bothered to watch the actual funny performances. As far as I can recall, neither have ever been repeated on terrestrial television and, fairly unsurprisingly, the BBC didn’t commission any more shows starring the character. A video was released, which I think I picked up from a remainder bin eighteen months later for a couple of quid. The shows have never been given an independent DVD release, but do appear as part of The Coogan Collection, which I am forever on the brink of buying, but am still waiting for what I would call “the right price”.

And so we come to the song included. With Coogan’s previous projects being massive hits, there was presumably a lot of expectation of Ferrino following that trend. Thus a tie in album was produced. Released in February of ‘97, it did not trouble the top 40 (I can’t find it’s highest placing) and soon vanished from the shelves of all good stockists. I picked up my copy from my local late, lamented second hand record shop near the turn of the millennium for over twice the price I paid for the video – that’s inflation for you. As the entire character concept seemed to have grown out of Coogan’s ability to bang out this kind of pop tune and (perhaps) some level of love for that musical style, the music on there reflects these tendencies. Like the show that inspired them, the album Phenomenon is not particularly gag heavy, though does feature the occasional piece of lyrical amusement; The Valley of Our Souls’ repeated refrain of “Our Souls,” amuses my puerile mind (say it out loud if you don’t get it); the claim to have “whored my way across Asia/With Sacha Distel” is one of many comical celebrity slanders in What Is Life?; the voice of the object of Tony’s affection in Lap Dancing Lady still elicits a mild smirk from me. There are some pretty much devoid of mirth too – the all too faithful cover of Tom Jones’ Help Yourself contains one joke that’s not terribly funny and Silence of The Lambs, an ode to Hannibal Lecter, seemed dated even then. I would say that Short Term Affair is one of the more amusing, which is a merciful blessing s something without Björk wouldn’t have been as interesting to you.

In the original TV version (I’m going to assume it was recorded before the album was), the au pair’s part was played by Kim Wilde, which intrigues me in light of her having been stung by Chris Morris a few years before. Only a tiny fragment of their interview appears in The Day Today, where Morris asks her what she thinks about the new government measures to clamp the homeless. It’s fairly clear that she’s unaware that she’s involved in a proto-Brass Eye celebrity stitch up, so her later being in on Coogan’s in-character extravaganza makes me wonder whether she’d forgotten his Day Today involvement, disassociated him from Morris’ work or had just been a good sport over the whole thing (not much was used after all and it only showed her as, at worst, being a bit gullible). Who knows, probably only Kim and Steve. Her delivery isn’t quite as impressive as Björk’s – her Englishness and age make her slightly less believable as an au pair, and her closing wails are inevitably far less impressive than the Icelandic piskey’s. The video’s easy enough to find on YouTube, should you be interested in comparing and contrasting.

The album version is credited to Coogan and Steve Brown, a mainstay of the comedy song racket throughout the 80s and 90s. Intriguingly, the music credits on the video go to Brown and Martin Coogan, Steve’s brother and front man of the Mock Turtles. He receives a couple of writing credits on the album, as does former Packet of Three star Henry Normal, who co-founded Baby Cow productions with Coogan. Looking through the musicians assembled to appear, none really stood out as familiar to me, but having done a spot of research, some of them could actually be quite well established.The Jim Mullen credited on guitar could well be a Scottish jazz legend, bassist Gus Goad seems to have been in post punk outfit The Look while other guitarist Paul Cuddeford seems to have gone on to score bits for the Hairy Bikers and Derek Acorah. As one would expect, none of them actually mention their work with Ferrino, though drummer Raymond Weston does mention working with both Björk and Coogan (in that order, obviously). There’s even a nice in joke of giving Glenn Ponder a piano credit – Ponder being the band leader Steve Brown played in Knowing Me Knowing You. Quite where Björk’s involvement came into things, I have no real idea. If memory serves, she was spending an awful lot of time in the UK in the mid90s, so must have been aware of the Iannucci crowd as they were coming to prominence. Whether she was asked to be involved or offered her services, I have no idea, though it’s not especially important.

So what’s to like? The attention to detail is as meticulous as ever in Coogan’s work, so the pastiche is played dead straight, making it almost believable. There are some pretty funny lines – the reference to fish fingers, the repeated imploring in the spoken word section, the line that precedes “Every lie” are all pretty good (trying not to spoil them for those yet to listen, should such people exist). Coogan’s vocals hold up pretty well, but are inevitably eclipsed by the strange sounds emitting from Björk’s larynx. The pair teamed up to perform the song on that year’s Comic Relief, which is also fairly easy to find on YouTube. It’s a decent version, though I prefer it without a laugh track on top, plus it looks a little to me like a prerecorded insert being shown to an audience, rather than a properly live recording, though I could be wrong. Coogan performed live as the character for a few years at the start of the nothingies, but didn’t use him on his most recent live dates. I’m inclined to think the he’s retired Tony for good now. Probably for the best really.

I’ve never been to Cleveland, nor is it terribly likely that I will ever cross it’s city limits. Yet I feel like I know it to some extent. This is pretty much solely down to the work of Harvey Pekar, who died at the start of this week. Unsurprisingly the net has been awash with obituaries, tributes and reminiscences since then, so I shan’t try and rehash any of those. For those of you unaware of the great man’s work, I point you in the direction of Tom Spurgeon’s extensive obituary to give you a feel for who the man was and the immense importance of his writing. Here, I shall merely offer a reminiscence of my first encounters with his output.

The local comic shop always had copies of American Splendor in it. From when I first went in, they were there, peeping out of the magazine sized section. Placed amongst the old 2000AD back issues, the moldering copies of Speakeasy, Strip, Blast and the like, were these images of a balding man angrily addressing the reader about some sort of perceived slight or minor grievance/grumble with the world. Being only fourteen or fifteen at the time, these didn’t really seem like the sorts of things I’d be interested in, so I carried on flicking, trying to find the Revolver Romance Special (still looking – if anyone has one, I will gladly take it off their hands).

The years passed and the comics stayed where they were. Going by some of the obit’s I’ve read, I don’t believe Harvey was self publishing by this time so these would be exactly the same comics cluttering up the back issue boxes all this time. As I began to learn more about the underground scenes of the late sixties, early seventies and what they influenced in the late eighties, early nineties, I would have had to have been blind not to have spotted his name cropping up again and again. I found myself reading the likes of Joe Matt’s Peep Show (was it really thatJesse Armstrong who had a letter published in one issue? (or was it Sam Bain? One of them anyway. Potentially)), Seth’s Palookaville and various other autobiographical pieces (okay, Seth was faking it, but I don’t think i knew that at the time), but was still yet to try anything Pekar had turned his hand to. The time had come.

I’m not sure which issue it was that I picked up, but am reasonably sure the cover featured Harvey in a yard strewn with dead leaves, possibly shaking his fist, perhaps just gesturing with his arm in some manner. Whichever, he looked pretty surly. Getting it home, I seem to remember it going close to the bottom of my ‘to read’ pile, it wasn’t published by Vertigo after all, but eventually I got there. If I’m honest, I found it pretty hard going. I’d experienced a fair amount of the underground by then – I managed to pick up nearly an entire run of Weirdo from those self same back issue boxes – but nothing could have prepared me for Harvey’s work. The mundanity of it all unsettled me. At least Seth was on some sort of ‘quest’ (imagined, but still) and Matt’s candor over his selfish and onanistic habits were amusing, but this was so based in the normalcy of everyday life, that I couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about.

Except for one page. It was drawn by Chester Brown, someone else who was no stranger to the autobiographical comic and whose work I was familiar with at the time. Not sure how many times he collaborated with Harvey, this being the only one I’ve seen, but it was rather special. The strip depicted a phone conversation between the pair, Harvey asking Chester to draw a strip for him, possibly about the conversation they were having. All pretty mundane sounding, until you get to the final panel when Harvey asks Chester “You’re not going to bre drawing yourself as a bunny in it are you?” This was something Brown had a tendency to do in those days and indeed throughout the strip Chester had been drawing himself as a tiny rabbit holding onto the phone with both paws. It’s a wonderfully written strip and I almost certainly haven’t done it justice here.

I concluded that there was some good stuff in American Splendor, but that maybe it wasn’t for me. I can’t have been much older than twenty-three and was still wanting escapism from my reading, not the tales of a fifty year old man in the heart of the States. My attitude has changed significantly since then and I’m happy to have several of the American Splendor collections sitting on a shelf next to my bed. It took me a while to truly understand Harvey’s world (as Spurgeon noted, it really doesn’t feel right to refer to him as ‘Pekar’), but it was helped by growing into a similar one myself. It truly is a shame that he’s gone.

Though it is spelt Splendour.

INT. RECORD SHOP. DAY.

A male customer is browsing through the Monkees section. A female assistant approaches.

ASSISTANT: Is there anything I can help you with?

CUSTOMER: Actually, yes. I’m looking for Head.

She looks offended, not that he notices.

CUSTOMER: Isn’t everyone really?

And the rest just fails to write itself.

I am now in possession of a new old bicycle.

On the day of purchase, I realised that the frame was slightly taller than I expected.

Consequently I now have a mildly bruised perineum.

I’ll scan it in over the weekend so you can all share my pain.

…please inform them “There’s no mank in my spindle.” It’s a good phrase and it should be used more, by crikey.
And thus, I shall win.

Okay, it’s been a couple of weeks since the last one of these, so I will explain. With this series of posts, I’ve been delving into my vast collection of audio recordings, looking for items that are no longer commercially available in any way that benefits the original artists and which I believe to be worthy enough to share with you, the stinking unwashed masses. This time around, I’ve gone for something slightly different, so I present to you -

Armando Iannucci – Us and Them (click to hear)

This recording comes from the cassette version (hence the mild background hiss) of Iannucci’s book Facts and Fancies, the print version of which was released in 1997, with the audio book coming out the following year.The book is essentially a compendium of Iannucci’s newspaper columns, most of which were written for the Torygraph. Living with my parents in the years prior to the book’s release, their right wing reading habits first thing in the morning led to my often flicking through that particular rag of a morning. Apart from the telly page and the obituaries (morbid, I know, but often fascinating), Iannucci’s weekly columns were often a highlight, if I happened to remember which day they were supposed to appear on. Us & Them is obviously something else altogether. It’s far too long to have been a column piece and I’ve been unable to find any further information about it’s gestation online. Perhaps it was written especially for the collection, possibly it originally appeared in a another anthology, maybe it was just something he’d written, enjoyed and decided to throw it in there. My brief investigations have thrown up no answers, so I shall leave the speculation up to you.

The tape was, slightly oddly, released by the BBC, presumably off the back of the success of the Friday/Saturday/Election Night Armistices. This is in spite of the fact that (as far as I can ascertain) none of the recorded material was ever broadcast on the radio at the time. Portions of the book have subsequently been chopped up into fifteen minute sections and broadcast on Radio 7, but I don’t believe that any of it showed up on Radio 4 near the turn of the millennium. I can’t imagine much of it ever going out on Radio 4 back then as, even though there’s not much of it, the presence of a reasonable amount of coarse language would surely have ruled it out of Book of the Week status. I know 4 do drop the occasional f-bomb when the kiddies are at school, but I’ve never heard one in a long running series with an early evening repeat, such as BotW and can’t imagine Facts and Fancies falling into any other schedule slot. It’s even less likely that Us and Them featured in any of the broadcasts, being twice the length of all of the Radio 7 broadcasts and with no obvious point to pause it in the middle. The total running time of the audio book is two hours, while the five fifteen minute radio broadcasts add up just about an hour and a quarter, so logic dictates (to me anyway) that it never went out.

There are a few things that I really like about this tale. Iannucci’s voice always is one that always seems oddly soothing to me. A soft Glasgow accent, with vague Italian undertones, lilts into the ears, whatever it may be saying. The writing is as witty as one would expect, the splendid use of simile and the slightly peculiar turn of phrase being just two of Ianucci’s trademark flourishes displayed here. There is also what appears to be a gag about twenty-eight and a half minutes in that only works when being read out. I seem to recall it feeling like a minor twist in the tale when first I read it (around the turn of the century), but had to stifle a giggle when I acquired the audio version a year or so back. Whether it’s supposed to be amusing, or just becomes amusing because of who has been reading the preceding twenty-five minutes, I don’t know, but I think it’s great. It’s quite unlike anything else Iannucci’s produced – more sustained than any of his sketch work, though more fantastical than The Thick of It or Partridge, while still being so distinctively his own in tone.

I won’t patronise you with blathering on about Iannucci’s other achievements – if you don’t know what they are, then you really should. Should anyone be interested in hearing the other three quarters of the audio book, the ever excellent Dr. Gitfinger has the whole thing available for download. I can only hope that there’ll be some sort of proper audio version of Armando’s The Audacity of Hype.