THESE GHOULISH THINGS...

Partial as I am both to dressing up as a Goth and gratuitously terrorising the elderly, it may come as some surprise to note that I am not doing anything Halloween-related tonight. However, if anyone fancies a genuine fright I would heartily recommend a peculiar establishment called Garlic and Shots on Frith Street. It is a Swedish Metal bar which also serves food, and operates under the following maxim:

"No dishes are served without garlic. You can always order extra garlic, but never less. As you leave the restaurant you should feel like you've been garlic marinated. This is our mission from God."

What it neglects to mention is that by the end of the night you will be quite literally sweating garlic, and will have to be quarantined for a full six weeks before being deemed fit to re-enter normal society.

Also worth trying out are their range of 101 different flavoured shots... My personal favourite is Bloodshot, which comprises double Vodka, tomato, chilli, spices and (yep) garlic. Far greater men than I have capitulated under its fiery intensity, so I'm told...

THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF STEVE COOGAN

Saw A Cock and Bull Story on Friday. It's Michael Winterbottom's take on The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, anarchic 18th Century novel beloved of the literati. Or rather, it's a film about the filming of Tristram Shandy, via some whimsical tangents and extrapolations into the private life of its star, Steve Coogan. It's a very funny film and also features the brilliant Rob Brydon, a man who, much like Chevy Chase, has a face seemingly designed to make people laugh.

Afterwards Coogan and Brydon did a Q&A, the former playing it fairly straight whilst the latter gooned around in the background (hey, straight guy/funny guy, they could be onto something there...)

In a rare moment of candour, Coogan admitted that the rather unflattering portrayal of him in the movie was pretty close to the truth, claiming that he preferred to focus on character flaws and neuroses because it made things more interesting... As an admission, it's either brave or foolish, probably a bit of both, but as the best British comedies of the last few years (Nighty Night, the Office, Peep Show) have demonstrated, human fallibility is a virtually inexhaustible source of comic material...

SUBMERGED IN KITSCH

This weekend’s dollop of wickedly unadulterated kitsch is Congratulations, Eurovision, where the great European public get to vote on their favourite Eurovision winner from the past 50 years.

Sadly, it looks like ABBA won’t be reuniting to perform 'Waterloo' at the event, even though it's a shoe-in to walk away with the title… On the plus side, Irish entrant Johnny Logan, a man who holds the dubious distinction of having won the Contest twice, will be performing in Copenhagen, alongside Brotherhood of Man, Bucks Fizz and Dana International.

I've always had a soft spot for Logan, whose crooning 80's schmaltz could have been invented to appeal to the mawkish middle-aged eurocrats who sat on the Eurovision panel. 'Hold Me Now' was only the second single I ever bought (after 'The Final Countdown', since you're asking) and still evokes memories of Tizer-fuelled school discos...

Eurovision started to become unstuck for me once they gave the general public the vote in the 90's, thus demystifying the process and turning it into just another bland popularity contest. Democracy merely diluted its appeal, and if there was one thing ever likely to kill interest in the Contest stone dead, it was credibility...

WORLD: SHUT YOUR MOUTH

Was delighted to discover the hitherto unknown thrills which can be had from adding a site meter to your blog. As well as being able to track how many hits your blog gets, you can also find out which sites people were referred from, and what country they come from.

Up to this point I had quite reasonably assumed that the only people who might be even vaguely interested in the inane and random ramblings of a jaded new media dilettante would be friends whose daily existence principally comprised of surfing the Net aimlessly for something, anything to detract from the tedium of their shitty and unfulfilling office jobs. Not so. Today, for instance, 9.09% of my traffic was from the Asian Continent, a statistic made only marginally less impressive once you calculate how many people that figure actually represents (you do the math). It truly is a humbling experience.

(Jesus, has it really taken only one and a half weeks of blogging to turn into one of those socially-retarded cyberfreaks who marvel at the minutiae of web data capture programs? I really need to get off-line...)

SCHADENFRAUDE

Loved the story about Lisa Scott-Lee holding the British record-buying public to ransom with her threat to quit pop forever if her new single didn't enter the top 10... It has that winning mixture of breathtaking self-delusion and jaw-dropping hubris that only the rich and (semi)-famous can ever truly hope to attain... Sadly, it looks as if her decision to go for the nuclear option has backfired spectacularly in this instance...

It reminds me a bit of when miserly tax-exile Tories like Buster Collins, Paul Daniels and Noel Edmunds threatened to leave the country if Labour ever got into power during the 80's... a promise invariably too good to be true... Wonder if Lisa will now stay true to her word? The smart money's on her performing a low-key u-turn six months down the line...

Watch out for other great promises cloaked as threats in the near future... Tony Blair threatening to resign if the press don't stop writing nasty things about him... Guy Ritchie saying he'll refuse to make another piss-poor mockney gangster flick unless the critics stop giving him such a hard time... Pete Doherty vowing to end it all in a speedball overdose if people didn't start to take Babyshambles seriously...

BRITPOP: THE MUSICAL

Anyone who has made even my passing acquaintance will know that I harbour more affection than is strictly right and proper for the much-maligned musical phenomena known as Britpop. Actually, when I refer to Britpop what I really mean is the halcyon era of British indie music between 1993-96, before the rot set in and the genre was comprehensively hijacked by the lumpenprole Luddite morons. The Britpop era was definitively chronicled by John Harris in his book The Last Party. However, for all his meticulous research and invaluable first-hand reccountals, in my opinion Harris clearly missed a trick: namely, the opportunity to turn the whole memorable saga into an all-singing, all-dancing musical revue...

Bear with me, the idea is not as ludicrous as it first might sound. Think about it, all the conventions of musical theatre are ticked: the belligerent factionalism (Blur and Oasis squaring up menacingly á la the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story), the torrid love triangle (Justine Frischmann as feisty femme fatale, toying with the affections of Britpop's alpha males like Sally Bowles in Cabaret), even an iconic-but-misunderstood martyr figure finally coming good after a largely misspent twenties (Jarvis Cocker Superstar anyone?)

I plan to make amends for Harris' glaring oversight by writing a vaudeville-influenced high farce based around the epoch, but am desperately scrambling for a winning title... Any ideas? A pun would be good, but failing that a suitably obscure lyric will suffice. Best suggestion wins a These Animal Men 'Speed King' skinny-fit tee...

On a related note, one of my favourite anecdotes from Stuart Maconie's Blur biog 3862 days: Graham Coxon's first encounter with a young Damon Albarn was watching him perform a gleefully exuberant 'Gee, Officer Krupke' in a school production of West Side Story. Don't know why, but this image never fails to make me smile...

Ten Great Moments in British Pop, 1993-96
1) Trouble in the Message Centre - Blur
2) Stutter - Elastica
3) Sofa of My Lethargy - Supergrass
4) Pink Glove - Pulp
5) Lenny Valentino - The Auteurs
6) Like A Motorway - Saint Etienne
7) Wishing I Was Skinny - The Boo Radleys
8) Insomniac - Echobelly
9) Metal Mickey - Suede
10) Come Out 2Nite - Kenickie

OPENING SET-PIECE

My previous band Grand Delinquents played our final gig on Friday night... I don't want to bore you with the details of how and why we split, and I suspect I'm probably not the best person to offer an impartial account of developments, but it did feel sort of like an end of an era. Comparisons to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire will doubtless sound slightly far-fetched, but in at least two areas there are noticeable similarities:

a) A lack of strong moral leadership and purpose
b) Final days marked by a descent into anarchy, corruption and chaos

So, I guess I'm Nero fiddling whilst indie burns (OK history pedants, it says here that Nero actually presided over the Roman Empire a good four centuries before its actual fall, but for the sake of a rather labored analogy can we let this one go?) but what could be more cathartic than a blog explicitly drawing out the battle lines for a future assault on the musical Zeitgeist? It was this or the Daily Telegraph's Ultimate Sudoku Challenge, and I've never added up to much with numbers...

Let me tell you a bit about Wrong Angle... The idea for an insurrectionist synth-pop collaborative with no settled line-up, and operating beyond the conventional boundaries of popular taste was first mooted back in the carefree spring of 2000 (and few springs managed carefree quite as effortlessly as that of 2000) Like most great ideas, and some pretty turgid ones too, it was mocked relentlessly, with all manner of charges, from 'pretentious guff' to 'unworkable pipedream of a deluded demagogue', leveled against it during its long and strained gestation... With the benefit of hindsight these criticisms now sound laughably accurate, and I hope, time allowing, to do justice to them all...

Wrong Angle believe that good taste is anathema to the soul, scholarship is the enemy of romance and epic folly is preferable to reasoned deliberation... let battle be joined...