You Compile Me

As anyone who has ever had the ‘pleasure‘ of listening to one will tell you, compilation CDs that are given away free with magazines are completely fucking rubbish. They only ever come in three stultifying flavours:

1) Impenetrable Mix CD
These promotional mixes are ‘put together’ by Soulwax, DFA, or whichever trendier-than-thou act the magazine has decided to pay in order for them to lend their name to the sorry spectacle. Invariably these mixes will feature countless songs you’ve never heard before as well as some that you have, sadly remixed beyond all recognition by truly woeful Dutch producers (eg. ’Franz Ferdinand - Do You Want To? - Max von Rust’s Rustpumper Dub’).

2) Unlistenable Taster CD
Compiled by devastatingly on-the-pulse journalists, who have most definitely scoured the genre/label/country in question for the very best new acts it has to offer and NOT just stuck a load of shit bands on a CD because the record company PR told them to. Usually made up of bands who make a worse sound than that of your own family being brutally murdered by a marauding sex lunatic, the only upside is that none of them will ever become famous.

3) Disappointing Festival CD
Hit singles! Bands you’ve heard of! Choruses! But wait… what’s this? ‘B-side’? ‘exclusive album track’? ‘previously unreleased’? The front of the CD might scream big names and summer anthems, but the back tells a different story. Devoid of hit singles, or indeed anything that would interest anyone but the most ardent fan of the bands involved, these compilations often provide little more than:

:: a Kaiser Chiefs B-side
:: the token dance track
:: the worst song off Oasis’ last album
:: a frankly-quite-embarrassing American rock song
:: countless indie dirges
:: something ‘esoteric’
:: a ‘previously unreleased’ song by a semi-popular band

Previously unreleased. Two of the most misleading words in the language. Sure, if it’s a rare Dylan recording that’s been sitting around in some virgin’s garage for thirty years, by all means pop a little sticker on it and tell the world. But if it’s a piss-poor demo by some two-bit Shoreditch indie merchants, perhaps the words ‘TOO SHIT TO SELL’, in bold capital letters, would be more appropriate.

However, there is a fourth type of free CD. A rulebreaker. A maverick. This is the type of CD that while listening to it you realise is actually quite good and which makes you wonder about how much you would be prepared to pay for it, hypothetically (obviously the name for this type of CD is a bit long-winded compared to the others, but it will have to do).

CDs that you realise are quite good and which make you wonder how much you’d be willing to pay for them (must work on that) are very rare, only appearing every few years or so. There was one given away with Arcade magazine, way back in the 90s, that really set the standard. It was a 27-minute promotional mix comprising the entire soundtrack for the game WipEout 3 (FYI, the ‘E’ in the game’s title was capitalised for hilarious “It’s the nineties!!!” drug reasons).

It might not sound like much now, but at the time it had everything: a nice concept, big name artists (pretty much every top dance act going had tracks in the game), good tunes and it was a neat bit of promotional tat to play around with. Better than a fucking ’console skin’ (read: big messy sticker) anyway, which was the free gift given away to promote the previous WipEout game.

Then the NME did a CD in 2001, called ‘The Soundtrack to the Summer’, which was brilliant because it came during one of the paper’s biggest-ever identity crises, meaning it featured music by, amongst others: Squarepusher, Sticky Fingaz, Oxide & Neutrino, DESTINY’S CHILD and The Strokes. Sadly, this brave “let’s rate music on the basis of whether it’s any good rather than who it‘s by” approach didn’t go down well with NME’s largely-Luddite readership and normal service was resumed, at least for the next couple of years.

The NME has just this week done a covermount ’compiled’ by Muse (hmm). It’s got songs by bands you haven’t heard of, live versions and album tracks by bands that you have, a ‘previously unreleased’ song, a tune that sounds like a band pretending to be a car (or something), SOME ACTUAL CLASSICAL MUSIC and no fewer than two - TWO - spoken word tracks… and yet somehow it still manages to be completely brilliant.

Probably because most of the songs - whether live, unreleased or sung from the mouths of nobodies - are as good as they are utterly bonkers. Daft primal rock (Death From Above 1979), recent electro (Does It Offend You, Yeah?), Far-Eastern beatboxing (Bjork) - this mix is a heavily-sagging bag of tricks. Even the previously unreleased track, by Muse themselves, is much better than being ‘too shit to sell’ - it’s a brilliant bit of Alien vs. Cowboy Wild West surf rock, and at least worthy of being an album interlude.

The spoken word tracks, by Lord Buckley (“he basically invented rap”) need to be heard to be believed. Even then you won’t believe them. Amazing, in a weird and slightly worrying kind of way. How many of the people who buy this week’s NME will actually listen to them in their entirety remains to be seen, but if you’ve got any sense, you’ll be one of them.

Is this real?

Either way, it’s very apposite and quite brilliant.

It also got me thinking which other mediocre soap stars could name their autobiography after how they are known to 99% of people (because who actually knows the real name of anyone in these ’continuing dramas’? Not me that‘s for sure.)

Why not see if you can guess which soapstars these book titles might refer to?*

:: The Comedy Manc off Corrie
:: The One from Coronation Street Who Was Gay and Kissed Adam Rickett
:: The Wheelchair Guy Off Emmerdale
:: Eric Pollard
:: I Was In Doctors For Six Months
:: I Used To Be In Hollyoaks But Now I’m In Emmerdale

It even works for real celebrities too:

:: The Film Director Who Married Madonna
:: The Ginger One Out Of Girls Aloud
:: That Guy Who Spent Fucking Ages In Prison For No Reason Whatsoever

Amazing.

*because you’ve got better things to do, remember.

Olympics go fluoro

Gimme a two!
Gimme a zero!
Gimme a one!
Gimme… another two!

What have you got?

2012, goddamnit; you’ve got 2012!


The logo for the 2012 Olympic games has been revealed, much to the disgust of boring people everywhere, and it’s amazing for two reasons:

1) It’s pink.
2) It forgoes all that bollocks about somehow representing “the notion of sport” and the host city in favour of getting on with the very basic and important business of being pink.

There are other good points too. A quick glance at the logo means one can:

:: MARVEL at the angular design!
:: GASP IN SHOCK at the lower case text!!
:: WHOLEHEARTEDLY ENDORSE the pink and yellow colour scheme!!!

How very modern, I hear you say! How very ‘edgy’!

How very… 2007.

Better start hoping that current trends in fashion and design stay exactly the same for at least five years and that this ‘new rave’ thing turns out to be more than just a fad, eh?

Rihanna: attractive

Rihanna! She might not be able to sing particularly well or pronounce the word ‘umbrella’ but she is still incredibly sexy.

I came to this conclusion while watching a recent interview of hers where she basically spent five minutes taking the piss out of Alex Zane in her sultry Barbadian twang.

If you haven’t heard this woman’s (non-singing) voice, it truly is a thing of wonder.


From that moment I became convinced that Rihanna is the sexiest woman in the world and have since compiled a list of the sexiest things about her. It’s meta-sexy:

1) Sexy voice
2) Sexy hair (I know at least two people who’ve expressed a desire to copy it)
3) Sexy videos
4) Sexy ability to only look slightly ridiculous when playing on an Xbox 360 with a headset on (see picture above)
5) Sexy refusal to sing properly on her records
6) Sexy (and amazing) new album
7) Sexy starts to sound pretty weird the more you say it
8) Sexy clothes

A sort of book review

“Jon Ronson is a genius”, I tell my friends. There is a silence. My friends don’t read the Guardian. And nor did I until a couple of years ago. Even now I only do so sporadically, because it’s so ridiculously unwieldy, but that is beside the point.

It wasn’t until my final year at uni that I happened upon Jon Ronson’s columns and articles, which now sadly - thanks to a haze of third-year stress, drug misuse and a mournfully-recycled pile of Weekend magazines - are but a faded memory.

I instantly recognised in the columns the kind of neurotic, rabbit-in-the-headlights view of life that myself and many others share. I sought solace in their humour, and wondered at Ronson’s colourful depictions of everyday (and sometimes not so everyday) people and events.

‘Out Of The Ordinary’ is a collection of Jon Ronson’s work from the Guardian. Brilliantly (for me) it is also home to some of the very first articles of his I ever read (‘The Frank Sidebottom Years’, the hilarious and eponymous Out Of The Ordinary columns). Brilliantly (for everyone else) it is one of the best and most enjoyable reads one could possibly wish for.

Like football and dividing things by two, it’s a game of two halves. Part one is made up mainly of Ronson’s lighter side: in it he details trips to Lapland with his son (forged from an ill-thought-out pledge by Ronson to remain forever at his boy’s side - dressed as Santa); his time as a member of Frank Sidebottom’s Oh Blimey Big Band and a cavalcade of mishaps, misapprehensions and misanthropic neighbours in the columns that lend their name to the title.

Part two is a step into darker, more serious Ronson territory. This will be the side most recognisable to people who have seen his documentaries, like the excellent (and quite worrying) ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’. It begins with accounts of two trials.

The first of these is an illuminating insight into that of Major Charles Ingram, who was accused of cheating to win the million pound prize on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The second is an altogether more uncomfortable affair, focusing on the trial of convicted paedophile and former pop music mogul Jonathan King.

The final chapter in the book is entitled ‘Citizen Kubrick’ and concerns Ronson’s visits to the late film director’s estate in St. Albans. Without wanting to spoil too much of what the author terms the book’s ‘happy ending’, it is revealed that Kubrick, as well as being a brilliant director, was also a meticulous and masterful researcher.

Having read this book one gets much the same impression of Jon Ronson. A careful listener, squirrel-like accruer of facts and details, he never fails to squeeze every last drop of significance out of even the smallest minutiae, so that his readers come away feeling that they know something, well beyond the facts, of what he’s experienced.