Look Mum No Points

If coming first in a competition to slide dangerously downhill at the fastest possible speed can’t be made into a metaphor for 21st century Britain, then journalists aren’t doing their job properly

Rush, the 7" edit in particular, was a "Park Outside The Nearest Record Shop And Buy Immediately" moment when it came on the radio as I was driving through Watford one Saturday afternoon. It was a record I played at Blow Up's first ever night a couple of years later. Totally made for that night.

The Sputniks were guilty of projecting forward what was going on around them rather than thinking what might be possible. Or something. I've only had one coffee and I've already devoted quite enough time to Love Missile F 1-11!

BAD were a much better proposition in the long run as futurologists - they ended up doing the brilliant proto Britpop Rush (which actually sounds like it was remixed by Fatboy Slim while he was still a Beat International) and the absolutely on the money I Turned Out A Punk.

They'll have a job with my Facebook account. I haven't posted there for over a year. I did have someone ask in a DM if everything was ok, but nobody else gave a flying one. Meta probably think I'm dead already.

Links to the same article! Great minds thinking alike...

"And now you can do the whole thing with just a laptop". Well, yes you can. But what a glorious ramshackle racket the Sputniks were. A cartoon glam vision of how the mid 80s saw the near future.

In my old job I spent a memorable day miming to one of our single releases inside a giant Toblerone of mirrors. The results were astonishing youtu.be/QOJm9QQzYt0?...

It's a wonderful thing. And there is always incredible new old music to discover. Loads of it.

No excuses for creepiness but given his output at the time I think Jimmy Webb, the songwriter, hadn’t had the best time in matters of the heart. Check out the Fifth Dimension’s Carpet Man for more of the same weird bitterness.

Spirit, there, basically confirming my theory that any of the acts mentioned in Doctor Rock by Apple is worth owning records by.

-on 45rpm vinyl behind the decks at a party on a Thames riverboat in very choppy waters, and keep the floor going.

It absolutely is & can be a proper job. Unlike being a newspaper columnist which is, I suspect, money for old rope. I could do his job in a heartbeat. He couldn’t do mine, unless he’s ever worked out how to seamlessly blend the start of You Cant Do That by The Beatles & Helen Shapiro’s Shop Around-

It's the reason they stopped making them. That and the '73 oil crisis.

Fast flash...passenger!

The aesthetics of E-Type Jaguars are truly something, but I wouldn't drive one-or ride in one- for all the tea in China. Passenger or driver, at any speed over 30 a crash is almost always fatal. Obviously the plan is not to crash, but even so you can't help it if someone else steams into you.

I’m really cynical about Reform. It’s such an obvious grift. It’s a The Producers of politics. Winning an election is totally not what they- or their backers- want. What they want are headline grabs, likes & subscribes, money flowing in- and other parties panicked into enacting policies they like.