Pixies vs Black vs Deal vs Twirl Bites

Let me start this by saying right now that I love the Pixies. Lots of people do; they are a seminal, game changing little band that flew under the radar for a while there. A proper cult. But I love Frank Black too. Frank Black & The Catholics in Sheffield, 2001 was one of the gigs of my life. But he’d just started being ok with Pixies songs again then so everyone was up for it. I can understand why it was a problem up until that point.

Black (nee Francis, nee Kittridge Thompson III) broke up the Pixies by fax. Harsh. But again, I can understand why things might have got to the point where he felt that was an option. Maybe somebody did something which made him feel backed into a corner. Maybe he was throwing a diva fit. Maybe Kim Deal ate his Twirl Bites.

Trompe Le Monde probably wasn’t the send off he’d hoped (in my opinion it is the weakest of their albums, although it has a couple of their best songs). And there you get the rub. “I’ve split up a great band and think I can go it alone, but – shit – now I need to go it alone and if it’s not as good as it was I’ll look like a massive tool” is probably what Black (nee Francis, nee Kittridge Thompson III) thought the next morning over his Wheetos. That’s a pretty scary thought and I think better of him for not taking the easy route, just rehashing what had gone before. All power to his elbow.

Now, it’s my opinion that Frank Black didn’t really get back into the swing of things until he started to re-embrace his back catalogue and accept what he was, chill out a bit. This was around 2001, Dog in the Sand was out and Joey was back on board to give it some cred. But his first couple of albums were hit and miss – complete polar opposites of songs sit next to each other. Dog in the Sand had a more consistent quality to it though, it’s a good album although it seemed to embrace a change of tone. I even heard Black (nee Francis, nee Kittridge Thompson III) on Radio 2 one Saturday morning offering to play Pixies songs because he was”…ok with that now”.

And it was amazing. It was like all the best bits of the Pixies and his solo stuff splurged together in a bad tempered, bald haze on the stage. Amazing, amazing gig. Everyone in that room was up for it. Even the guy that threw his shirt onto Blacks (nee Francis, nee Kittridge Thompson III) head for the stoppy starty bit at the end of Mr Grieves which caused Black (nee Francis, nee Kittridge Thompson III) to stop singing, turn his back until the song finished then storm offstage. It was a moment.

Then the Pixies reformed somehow, against all odds. To be honest, I felt that cheapened things a bit but I believe they initially agreed so Joey could send his kid to school so fair play. I went to see Black Francis when he re-emerged in 2008, in a three piece – I was looking forward to it, but he kept all the good songs for the pre-gig “precores” and just kept going on about how he’d gone to see Van Morrison who kept talking about his hits but never played any of them…while simultaneously never playing any Frank Black/Pixies hits. It was disappointing and - I can only imagine - intentionally ironic.

And I gave up a bit after that. But I’ve recently iPod’d all my Frank Black stuff and it’s still 50% genius so it’s worth mentioning in a blog.

Frank Blacks output since (and possibly even with) the Pixies has always been delightfully idiosyncratic. You never know quite what you’re going to get. He wrote Debaser for god’s sake. There are quite a few Black (nee Francis, nee Kittridge Thompson III) songs that I would rank in a mythical list of my favourite songs of all time. Why not listen to some Frank Black today?


Tweet me: @harrymedium

email: mediumharry@gmail.com

Harry Medium named his son after a song by Frank Black (Billy Radcliffe) and a Smiths song (William, It Was Really Nothing) – a fact that never begins to impress IamWilliam.

• 
  
  For anyone who likes lists, his favourite Frank Black songs are:
  
  Los Angeles
  Places Named After Numbers
  Old Black Dawning
  Calistan
  Men In Black
  I Don’t Want To Hurt You (Every Single Time)
  You Ain’t Me
  The Adventure & The Resolution
  I Love Your Brain
  Billy Radcliffe
  I’ve Seen Your Picture
  St Francis Dam Disaster
  Llano Del Rio
  I’ll Be Blue
  Chip Away Boy
  End of Miles
  I Will Run After You
  21 Reasons
  His Kingly Cave
  Whisky In Your Shoes
  Everything Is New
  Coastline
  Go Find Your Saint
  Honeycomb
  My Life Is In Storage
  (Do What You Want) Gyaneshwar

TV Themes

Now, I will happily admit to you that when I was a child I was also a pirate. The most flagrant disregard for copyright law was pushed in the faces of my horrified parents (who were so horrified they did an excellent job of seeming not that bothered) while I taped the songs I liked off the Sunday teatime chart rundown onto a C90.

This was back in the day when Top of the Pops* on Thursday night was the place to find out the new chart positions, so you could make a note of the numbers you wanted to tape and then be really well trained with your pause finger to avoid any unwanted Disc Jockey nonsense before and after the meat of the song on Sunday. Occasionally, you’d still get a bit of Bruno Brookes come through and make you wish he was dead, but it was the best way of doing it for me. I wish, wish, WISH I’d got him taped after he played the uncut version of Killing In The Name Of by Rage Against The Machine though – you could hear his career dying as he struggled for words and breath.

I got plenty of eclectic hits for free over the years, such as I Got My Mind Set On You by George Harrison (he won’t mind now), The Frog Chorus by Paul McCartney (he will always mind) and The Word Girl by Scritti Politti (he has a beard now). I’m not proud of that. But I am proud of that.

Before I was really old enough or cool enough to get into Mel and Kim** I taped themes off the telly. There were some brilliant themes out there, and I even taped a whole episode of Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles*** and listened to it. Once.

Some of my favourite themes still induce an almost pant-wetting level of excitement. Streethawk, by Tangerine Dream (included on the album Le Parc (1985), Streethawk theme fans!) is a favourite, but I also had

• The A Team


• Knight Rider


• Automan


• Blue Thunder


• Airwolf


• Cheers


• Magnum PI


• Supergran


• The Book Tower (Tom Baker got me watching this – it was brilliant (and very scary))


• MASH


• Hardcastle and McCormick


• Hill Street Blues


• Manimal


• Chip n Dale Rescue Rangers


• Moonlighting


• Crazy Like A Fox


• The Equalizer


• MacGyver


• The Greatest American Hero


• Matt Huston


• Buck Rogers in the 25th Century


• The Scarecrow and Mrs King


• T.J. Hooker


• Tales of the Golden Monkey


• The Fall Guy

I can still sing them all.

There are some proper classics there, and it probably explains the wonky musical taste I ended up with in adulthood. I even remember getting my parents to tape things off the telly while I was off larking about at Cub Scouts. They were obedient parents.

I wonder if I've got any "off air" recordings of anything that's been wiped?

Now, all together...

"I've never spent much time in school

But I taught ladies plenty

It's true I hire my body out for pay, hey hey!"



Tweet me your favourite themes! @HarryMedium

* Top of the Pops was a top 40 singles show from the olden days, kids.

** Sort of a Cheeky Girls for the late 80s

*** I still don’t know what a ninja is

The Cultstream

I’ve recently started a new podcast called CULTISM (available soon, link to follow) with @iantodd82 in which we hook up via the internets and discuss culty TV, music, film and the like. We had our first conversation last night, which was a bit of an overview of CULT – and it quickly became apparent that our ideas of what made something cult differed quite a bit.

This led me to wonder what exactly pushes something into 'the cultstream'. Doctor Who is a great example; it’s always been on a mainstream channel at a mainstream time but – during its 15 or 16 year “rest” it achieved cult status. Was this just because it wasn’t there anymore? Was it down to the (not really) wobbly sets? Was it down to the fantastic ideas it presented, budget be damned? Could Doctor Who, now it’s a worldwide phenomena and the BBCs biggest property, still be called cult viewing?

I’m going to dip my toe into untested waters here and try to be intelligent and informative for a moment: the word cult comes from the Latin cultus and French culte which mean ‘worship, inhabited, cultivated’ and the verb colere which means ‘care, cultivated’ – now as a proud geek that really resonates with me: I do care about and cultivate, some might say worship, these unimportant things that I love.

Wow. That was weird. I didn’t mention bodily functions, or crack a joke that was in bad taste.

In the 1930s the word cult started to be used in conjunction with the study of religious behaviour but it wasn’t until the 1970s that it took on a new life – thanks, Family Manson! From this point it was synonymous with deviant religious groups, brainwashing and the more modern connotations that we now associate with suicide guzzling alien chasers. I’m pretty jealous of anyone that has that much belief in something, such unswerving faith (more on that another time) but they are nutters. Aren’t they?

From this time though cults were seen as highly devoted groups of people; so when you think about it there’s not much difference between the more mental end of the scale and the throngs about to head off to the SFX Weekender (except in Mansons' house you probably got more amenities – have you ever been to a Pontins?).

Since then though cult has expanded into what we now know as the world of Geek. Bands, films, TV etc with a small but passionate following – people who have an emotional attachment to the things they love and a sense of community. That’s the positive we can take from it – and with the advent of the internet, and podcasts, and Twitter and conventions becoming ever more popular people have brilliant and loving communities to embrace everything that they love about the world called Earth. That’s brilliant, isn’t it?

Ian started talking about things like Sherlock and brand new bands that I’d never heard of and I wondered if a cult following had to be earned over time: @gareth_uk spoke to me about the original (nee good) The Prisoner – his Dad worked on it – and that’s another good example of what in my eyes makes something that falls well into the cult category. I don’t know what viewing figures were like when it originally aired but it’s definitely now got a ‘Do Not Tamper’ sticker stuck on its bumper. But could it be called popular, even now? Is a new video that's gone viral on YouTube cult viewing? It's been seen by lots of people but is the effort there? Does that even matter now?

Traditionally, cult has generally meant "too bizarre, controversial, eccentric or anti-establishment to be appreciated by the general public". It's something that did Ed Wood a definite service, as many young hipsters - with their clever irony - have shot his terrible films into the stratosphere of the post-modern. Does cult apply to anything that's 'so bad it's good'? How do we qualify bad and good? And badgood? Who decides? THE WIZARDS?

Well, for bad or good, you can can pretty much get what you want when you want it, how you want it now. That's great. It's bringing people together (whether that's to worship an alien god and drink the "special head juice" or just tweet each other viewing suggestions) and it's brilliant. So big one up the subbaculture!

Or maybe it's just the mainstream that's changed.



Tweet me your thoughts (and any cult stuff for us to experience): @HarryMedium



Harry Medium enjoyed/was scared by/was scared by and enjoyed the following cults:

• Eraserhead
  


• The films of George A. Romero



• Blade Runner (with and without voiceover)



• Transformers The Movie (the cartoon one)



• A Very Peculiar Practice



• They Live



• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre



• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou



• Evil Dead 1,2,3



• Akira



• This Is Spinal Tap



• The Shawshank Redemption



• Twin Peaks



• Quadrophenia



• Firefly



• Streethawk



• Farscape



• Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)



• Pavement



• Swervedriver



• Diesel Park West

Harry Medium doesn't know in which camp to place Doctor Who and Star Wars.

NATURE

My name is Harry Medium. I enjoy music and films and Doctor Who. And food – I loooove to eat. I’d like to think that I’m an enlightened chap, I’d like to think I’m a good person but as I get older I find myself getting grumpier and generally more like Heathcliffe from off of that Wuthering Heights by that Emily Bronte. I think he had several good points to make.

People annoy me. Relentlessly. If I met you, you’d annoy me. I guarantee it.

Something that annoys me more than people is cruelty to animals, usually by people not by other animals. I would avoid an argument wherever possible in everyday life, I’m not keen on confrontation. But when I have had a go at someone it’s always been because of animals. Once upon a time I barged through a crowd of students (I'm generalising here - they may not have been students but they were definitely "youths") who were throwing stones at swans and apologised for “interrupting your fun”. I think they got the message but I was wearing Buddy Holly-esque specs at the time, and it may have taken some of the impact of my scolding away. I also seem to remember that I’d got a bit of a beery tummy, and I’d had to undo the button on my jeans. I probably looked weird. Maybe my point was lost. I hope not.

I consider that humans, in general, should be more enlightened – it’s simple, isn’t it? I have the choice, as someone of medium intelligence, whether to hurt or kill something. I choose not to. The only thing that would change this is if the situation I was in was kill or be killed. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll get mauled by a tiger on Monks Road. So I choose not to hurt things, easy. Come to think of it, if that situation did arise I’m pretty sure that I would be tiger lunch before I could do anything about it. Maybe I could hope to fill him up with an arm or a leg and then drag myself away to the relative safety of the Co-Op. Although the prices in there! That might finish me off.

But bear with me; I am actually leading to a point. I have started to find that I’m fighting nature. I heard a weird buzzing coming from one of my windows the other day. I went to have a look and a spider had made his little webby home inside the window and an unlucky fly had wandered into it. The spider was pleased – he’d got a decent meal out of it – but I had to stand nearby listening in distress until the buzzing stopped and I knew the fly had been put out of its misery. I still think about that fly.

The amount of damage I have probably done by trying to save animals from potential dangers; the legs that have fallen off Daddy Longlegs as I try to waft them out of the window, the snail that has fallen to it’s doom as I try and move it to a nice safe plant, the moths wings ruined as I try to save them from the heat of the uplighter bulb. I even try to help wasps – and I hate wasps. What is the point of them? Does anyone even know?

The thing is I now feel guilty about not being able to help. That’s stupid I know, nature is very natural, some might say that nature is the most natural thing in the world. So why do I feel like that?

I have always treated my cats like another member of the family, and I know that we people of the west have done that for some time, on the whole. In this period of the post-nuclear family we do (or I do, at the very least) put human qualities onto our animals. I do it all the time and it’s not just because I am a fan of Watership Down and The Plague Dogs (two films GUARANTEED to have me blubbing harder than a whale on a bonfire).

Our hamster recently died (miss you, Melvyn) and it was an important lesson to my five year old as we went somewhere nice and buried him. Under a tree, next to a river. We had to find somewhere that he’d like to live. Then we went and got an ice cream.

I think that - for me at least – animals are the true innocents of this planet that we call The Earth. They only act out of instinct, whether that instinct be to eat something or run away from something that wants to eat them. They don’t have political agendas. They don’t want to impress you on Facebook or convince you to change your gas supplier. And depending on who you believe they have been given the short end of the stick by us humans, what with us destroying their habitats and pulling them out of the sea to eat and stuff. The ironic thing is there’s always more sea coming at us, but apparently less stuff in it.

Maybe it boils down to the fact that animals are more enlightened than we are. They definitely wouldn’t be interested in reading this. More fool them. Actually, no – that proves it: due to their lack of moaning they are definitely more enlightened than me. Flip.

Er.....hang on....

This thing still exists????

It's five and a half years later. I have greyer hair and beard.

Nothing else has changed.


In the interests of nostalgia, I am leaving the lists of songs...I mean posts below for your delight and delictation (don't read them).

Wowzers trousers!

It's already nearly X-mouse again!
Here's some things that have happened and some bullet points:

• I have written lots of new little instrumentals but nothing that could be called a song.
• I have been playing Lego Star Wars 2 a lot.
• I have found a guilty pleasure in Lake Placid.
• I have been enjoying having central heating for the first time in an (ice) age.
• I got dressed up as a zombie for halloween (predictable, I know and next year I will try harder).
• I watched Resident Evil Apocolypse again and found that it was shite. But I still enjoyed it.
• I went to see The Prestige and it was very good indeed.
• Garth Marenghi's Darkplace has finally been released on DVD and it's still ace.
• I have had a little boy. As in a son, nothing odd.

So there you have it. Until the next time I can be arsed...

Don't be lunch.

Whoah there, Pickle.

How's it going?
I played at GVPG and it was hard work. A long set and early playing time contributed, although there was an audience and they were relatively noisy considering it was about 730pm and they were all waiting for cover of darkeness to get "festivalled up". The set included:

• Superman is Dead!
• Portable Sun
• Cloudbusting
• How Turns The Tide
• Hit The Sky
• Cool Your Boots
• Just One Word
• Coast To Coast
• We Know How But We Don't Know Why
• Day of the Triffids
• The Bridge
• Waiting For Answers

Old songs went well, I especially enjoyed Hit The Sky. We Know How... and Day of the Triffids were...um, shall we say augmented by a drunk, smelly man on drums. He asked if he could play drums. I asked him if he could play drums. He said yes.

He was wrong. He was wrong and he didn't want to stop.

The next night I played at a birthday party in front of about 60 people. There was a hog roast and a lot of wine which maybe explains why I can't really remember what I played. I do remember playing Jolene by Dolly Parton for about 25 minutes. I do not know all the words to Jolene by Dolly Parton so you can imagine the singalong fun.

I do know all the words to Jolene by Cake however.

Last night I was back at The Brewer and went on second to try to get some people warmed up. I played Day of the Triffids and Happy Man by Sparklehorse (a cracking song - they are touring next month and I don't think I'll get to go. Boo.)

Watch the heat, make sure you drink plenty of water.