The late nineties shared house. No longer the preserve of the shabbily-jumpered dossers and wastrels favoured by Coronation Street and Brookside, it is now an inconsistently-heated haven for young professionals wondering how they will ever be able to afford a place of their own following the introduction of student loans. They are as close to responsible and ambitious adults as anyone could reasonably expect them to be, and despite the harmonious living arrangements they all have one foot on the property ladder and one eye on moving up, moving on and moving out. There’s the moptopped indie kid, usually to be found out watching either Supergrass and/or Super Furry Animals or in watching a comedy show that everyone else starts watching three weeks later, secretly harbouring a deep resentment that he can no longer wear his Adidas jacket and Dunlop Green Flash all day long. The ladette, already racing to success in the most respectable career of the entire household but seldom wasting a post-work second before cracking open a bottle of Memphis Mist and changing into her preferred combination of growing-out Louise Wener haircut, meticulously scuffed double denim and stack-soled trainers as hovercraft-like in their thickness as those favoured by Paul from The Magic Roundabout. The straight-acting gay bloke, attired somewhere between both of the above and with an intense love of The Chemical Brothers and The Charlatans that nonetheless gives way to full-volume caterwauling along to Celine Dion at moments of inebriated melancholy. The gay-acting gay bloke, seemingly unable to get ready for a night out without blasting out Japanese Boy by Aneka before emerging in outfits that would have given Julian Clary pause for thought. The gothy woman who does something in the NHS but nobody can ever quite remember what, up before everyone else and still up after everyone else and with a boyfriend whom everyone has met but nobody has ever seen. Each of them has multiple friends called Rachel, all of them sporting ‘a Rachel’, and delineable only by their chosen hue of Wella Shaders And Toners; the home hair tint du jour as memorably recounted by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch on Looks Unfamiliar here. The stereotypes exemplified by Rick, Neil, Vyvyan and Mike no longer apply, and as much as they all love Game On, comparisons to Martin, Mandy and Matthew would probably guarantee you audible shouts of ‘I’M NOT IN’ the next time you phoned. Despite their cordiality, the only occasion on which their disparate lifestyles converge is in the kitchen slash front room – equipped by law with continually falling down giant posters of Definitely Maybe and Leon – exceptionally late at night, chilling out in whatever shade of legality takes their fancy to the accompaniment of the likes of Portishead, Air and especially The Cardigans.
Quite what had informed this particular unwitting diversion into the world of arguments over who had eaten whose New York Bakery Co. Original Plain Bagels is, frankly, anybody’s guess, but it is always fascinating to notice the inadvertent and unintentional themes that somehow found themselves underpinning a procession of posts on this excursion through the archives. This time around we do indeed alight upon some thoughts about late-night listening to The Cardigans, as well as a look at This Life, the BBC2 drama series that everyone so fervently wished their shared house was like, despite the fact that in actuality it was more like the bits about going to the all-night garage in In Bed With Medinner, with the visits to the all-night garage usually taking place during the ad breaks in In Bed With Medinner to boot. Beyond that the ‘theme’ admittedly becomes more than a little tenuous. There is possibly a case for arguing that the celebration of the Brian Matthew era of Sounds Of The 60s recalls a time when listening to it necessitated straining to hear it with the volume on the lowest possible setting to avoid waking everyone else at six in the morning on a Saturday, and that mentioning Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth around that time would invariably cause a million passing bores to launch into ‘BE BAP BA DOODY BO DAP JAZZ AND JEWELLERY HA HA HA HA’ in their worst Bob Mortimer voice – although frankly that still happens now – but crowbarring in Paul Cornell on Looks Unfamiliar on account of the fact that he was at the same house party as you once or twice is probably pushing matters a little. Anyway, you can look on this collection as effectively a shared house of highlights from the archives, and if you want to donate towards the replacing of that jar of Kenco Really Rich that mysteriously ‘disappeared’ leaving only telltale smears of instant coffee granules on the cupboard base, you are quite welcome to buy me a coffee here. Now if you’ll excuse me, someone is betting me that she will never know, ’cause I will never show…
Another heavily rewritten and updated import from my earlier shelved blog project The Memorex Years – essentially a series of reviews of the stack of C60s and C90s that once enjoyed rotation play on my Walkman before they were otherwise ignominiously discarded on account of their technical obsolescence – this look at The Cardigans’ sort-of debut album-ish had gone largely unnoticed on its original outing. This time around, however – and possibly on account of the fact that I had intentionally tried to introduce more of a sense of just how much this album had both soundtracked and had meant to me at something of a pivotal moment, and how intrinsically bound it was with late-night radio, long-gone lovers, nights out gone out askew on treddle and, well, chilling out in kitchens slash front rooms in whatever shade of legality took our fancy – it went absolutely wild in a manner hilariously at odds with the low-key moodiness of the music itself, attracting scores of appreciative comments including eventually from The Cardigans themselves. As well as of course blokes who had failed to read it properly seeing the words ‘Britpop’ and ‘The Cardigans’ in relatively close proximity and thoughtfully informing me that actually, they think I’ll find, The Cardigans were Swedish actually. Anyway, if you feel like reading it properly, you can find the original version of Come On And Love Me Now here and an expanded version with much more background detail including some tales of my days as a member of the The Cardigans Mailing List back at the very dawn of the World Wide Web in Can‘t Help Thinking About Me here.
Looks Unfamiliar: Paul Cornell – You Don’t Want A Less Powerful Mantra For Frippery Astral Travel
If you were ever – for some reason – looking for some form of encapsulation of what Looks Unfamiliar is actually ‘about’, then you could do a lot worse than to refer to Paul’s nomination of a number of books that he regularly borrowed from the library but did not seem to actually exist in the outside world, or indeed of those angular and off-script records that Terry Wogan kept plugging away with in direct contravention of the Radio 2 house style in the days before it became single-mindedly fixated on ‘anthems’. That said, I was definitely more excited by the opportunity to finally chat with someone about Phoenix Five, an early seventies budget-averting Star Trek-‘derivative’ which very slowly sauntered around the ITV regions in wasteland slots for much of the decade that followed, and the BBC’s frankly belief-beggaring early attempt at a Saturday morning show presented ‘by’ the controls of a starship Outa-Space!. Both of which I had admittedly chatted to Paul about many times before then, but sometimes the thrill is in trying to take all of this obscura to as wide an audience as possible; which, of course, is also precisely why unexpected but entirely appropriate cultural references are always worked into his scripts, novels and comic books to such tremendous effect. In short, this is an enormously enjoyable and often overlooked edition of Looks Unfamiliar that we really did have a lot of fun recording, and it also contained the first ever mention on the show of Vrillon Of Ashtar Galactic Command. There would of course be plenty more where that came from. You can find the full show here and the chat about Terry Wogan’s eccentric playlist choices in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.
Another reworked and repurposed version of an existing feature that proved to be much more popular the second time around, and not just on account of the fact that – much like, oddly enough, this instalment of Through The Square Window – it appeared immediately prior to the BBC announcing a repeat run of This Life, although it is fair to say that did not exactly hinder its popularity. Originally this was essentially little more than a series of relatively flippant observations made about the phenomenally popular mid-nineties houseshare drama on rewatching it after stumbling across a complete series box set in a charity shop, and although I had always liked it as it was, there was also a sense that more could have been made of it. It was, after all, a programme that had deeply resonated with its audience – house-sharers and non-house-sharers alike – in a way that poor old Skiboy never really had. So this time around it came couched in further context and analytical depth but also with a degree of personal experience straight from those Sneaker Pimps-soundtracked kitchens slash living rooms where bags of weed the size of that one Miles invested in and then promptly had to flush down the lavatory when the police called round on an unrelated matter never so much as crossed the threshold, and indeed in a markedly less upbeat and celebratory fashion the unavoidable account of what else happened on the day that I stumbled across that DVD box set, and the resultant new version of the feature was essentially what first gave me the idea for what eventually became Keep Left, Swipe Right. It also evidently struck some manner of a chord with the same degree of impact as Milly’s fist connecting with Rachel’s face as it is still attracting huge numbers of daily views even now, and I was personally particularly pleased when it was quoted by The Guyliner, although it is also worth noting that more than a few observers took oddly straight-faced exception to my attempted defence of Rachel alongside the equally unreasonably maligned Captain Black, Mike Teavee and Raggety. Well, if you don’t concur with the suggested going away of Rupert Bear, that’s your own lookout. You can find the original version of That Was This Life That Was here and an expanded version, with even more arcane trivia about the music featured in the show and some of the other less memorable youth-orientated television shows of the late nineties, in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.
Other than the fact that it was essentially built up around some of the comments that I had made on a certain no longer worthwhile or functional social media site to mark Brian Matthew’s final edition as presenter of Radio 2’s Sounds Of The 60s early in 2017, I have scant recollection of what may have informed this other than that it was probably just a decent enough excuse to talk about Jake Thackray and Cleo Laine in a context where readers could actually also listen to the l0ng-lost singles that I was wildly enthusing about. That said, while Tony Blackburn has proved an engaging replacement presenter for entirely different reasons, it is sobering to read and indeed listen back to this now and recall a time when the show was appointment listening at an inhospitable hour on a Saturday morning – for most of this time there was no opportunity or facility to Listen Again either – purely because it avoided the obvious in favour of the obscure, the overlooked, the esoteric and most importantly the recently reissued, doubtless inspiring many a listener to go hunting for The Best Of And The Rest Of British Psychedelia or a Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick And Titch Greatest Hits or one of fifteen billion virtually identically titled Northern Soul compilations later that same day. It is debatable whether I would actually have even heard of, let alone heard, any of these singles back in the pre-Internet era if it wasn’t for Sounds Of The 60s and it seems a shame that there is so little of any form of equivalent anywhere on the radio nowadays. You can find the original version of Sounds Of The 60s here and an entirely new look at the show and its quiet influence in Can’t Help Thinking About Me here. Meanwhile, speaking of Cleo Laine…
Having been something of a fan of Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth ever since a teacher perhaps ill-advisedly attempted to engage a Bard-sceptic classroom full of eleven year olds by playing them Witches Fair And Foul, it has long proved a source of considerable dismay to me that virtually any mention of them will invariably provoke one of two reactions, usually from people that were not being addressed in the first instance. One is that GIF of Louis Balfour from The Fast Show going ‘Niiiiice’, and the other is the previously mentioned mediocre approximation of Bob Mortimer singing ‘jazz and jewellery’, both of which are not just irritating and reductive off-the-shelf unwarranted frames of reference but also seem decidedly out of place when applied to a duo who made a habit of infusing more humour into a single number than Oasis have managed across their entire career; it is also telling that none of them ever seem to have the wherewithal to make reference to The Two Ronnies’ baffling but nonetheless brilliantly observed ‘Chloe Loon and Danny Johnkworth’ sketch. Possibly having encountered one Balfour too many, I put together this guide to what anyone with a shred of a sense of musical adventure might appreciate finding in amongst their staggeringly extensive fifties, sixties and seventies discography and where, which seemed to go down rather well although – inevitably – there was the odd astonishingly original ‘Niiiiice’ or two amongst the responses too. It does sometimes help if you are able to read something before reacting to it. You can find Diggin’ The Dankworths here.
The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society
It’s probably not a good idea to leave it lying around in a shared house in case someone pilfers it and then claims never to have heard of ‘The Royal Society For The Prevarication Of Eva Green’, but if you have enjoyed any of the above then it would be well worth your while investing in a copy of The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society, a collection of columns and features available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.
Mystery Link! If you want to just go straight to a surprise page completely unrelated to any of the above, click here.
© Tim Worthington.
Please don’t copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.
Tim Worthington 