A consolotary poem for James Cameron.

Oh, James Cameron.
Look at the world you’re the king of now.
It’s not our world – the good world full of talented and interesting people.
It’s not even a real world, is it?
You’re the king of a world you made up in your head.
And your head’s not even very good at making up worlds anymore, is it?
You’re not even the king of Terminatorworld or The Abyssworld.
You’re the king of ‘Pandora’.

In your robes of blue and your spaghetti tree crown, you sit upon a headache-inducing 3D throne of gimmickery and bluster.
‘I may not be the king of Best Directorworld, Best Pictureworld or Best Screenplayworld’ you sneer – you weren’t even nominated for Best Screenplay – ‘but my world broke all box office records!’
But in the back of your spiritual yet war-loving mind you know that those figures were never adjusted for inflation and Gone With The Wind, ET and probably even Forrest Gump shit all over you. And the tickets for those were way cheaper and they didn’t need to be in 3D.

‘I was just trying to save the world by teaching the world a lesson about destroying itself’ you haughtily sigh as you survey your computer-generated domain.
But they already learned that lesson, at the exact same time you did – when they saw Dances With Wolves and Pocahontas. Which were the same as your film. But better.
Instead, they decided they wanted to learn a lesson from your ex-wife.
She was telling us about war and stuff. But, like, real war – the war that’s going on in the real world, which you are not king of. Where we all live. And she is the Best Director.

Write on.

Two things happened to me yesterday which have kind of collided in my head and crystallized into a point of view.

It’s kind of impressive that these two completely separate events could be significant to me at all as I left the house yesterday only once and that was to get orange juice as I have a bastard cold and feel shitty. The two things were: a two minute conversation on facebook chat and watching a not-great DVD.

I think I’ll start with the DVD. The film was Clerks 2. I had watched it once before, when it first came out in 2006 and had left the cinema with a shake of the head and a hearty sigh. That was the moment I finally gave up on Kevin Smith. To say I ‘gave up’ suggests that I had made some kind of investment into the director/star of this movie and, truth be told, I had. An emotional investment. This is not his fault. I blame him for nothing. I have never met the man, never had any form of communication. Well, that’s not strictly true, but I’ll get on to that later. Where to start.

The 90’s were a brilliant time to come of age. People don’t talk so much about the 90’s. They didn’t have the social revolution of the 60’s, the cultural revolution of the 70’s or the craziness of the 80’s. The 90’s was when we just calmed down a bit and got cynical. I’m fine with cynical. People don’t talk enough about the cinema of the 90’s because it wasn’t very ‘landmark’ but it was an interesting time. Especially for American independent cinema. Miramax was born and finally quirky filmmakers of vision had somewhere to go and aspire to. They were being taken seriously.

The first significant one out of the gate was Tarantino. Reservoir Dogs was like nothing I had seen before – whilst being like everything I had seen before. It was a completely fresh form of film-making which had taken all the great gangster movies, masticated them and spat them against the outside edge of the window of the establishment. Independent cinema had existed for many decades but never had the realism and vim of it significantly impacted upon the mainstream. It was a heist movie but they were talking about Madonna. It didn’t feel scripted yet it was a water-tight story. It blew my mind. Tarantino was – rightly – lauded as a genius. This was the most impressive cinematic debut since Orson Welles.

As with all zeitgeists, other artists will get caught up and bunched in. The last time this had happened to any significant degree was in the seventies when Francis Ford Coppola had lead a rag-tag group of film school graduates – including Scorsese, Spielberg and George Lucas – to change the entire movie industry. Bringing European influences, grit and (unpredictably) the birth of the blockbuster with them.

Within about 18 months, Miramax had its hat-trick of indie visionaries. Tarantino had been joined by Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith – all 3 of them untrained film fans who had made incredible debut movies self-funded on miniscule budgets, picked up by Miramax and given high-profile releases. Rodriguez’s El Mariachi brought big-budget action set-pieces and style to the no-budget arena. Showing it wasn’t the equipment and stars that made the movie, it was the vision and passion of it’s writer-director. He could have shot on video and it would have looked masterful. Kevin Smith’s debut had no action, save for a hockey game on the roof of a convenience store. I missed Clerks in the cinema. It was my first year of film school, a whirlwind of activity. I wanted to see it, but missed it. When it hit VHS, I was working in a video store and gladly swiped the copy off the shelf (never did return it) and watched the film that had the biggest impact on me since seeing Star Wars at five.

Clerks was the best film I had ever seen. It  probably still is but I won’t acknowledge it as such for reasons I will go into later. It was my life on the screen. It was a film where nothing really happened at all. Documenting one day in the life of a convenience store and it’s neighbouring video shop and the two guys who worked them. Nothing happens, just a string of annoying customers, a girlfriend issue and a lot of banter. Tarantino had, to my mind, been the first person to really show banter onscreen but it complimented the action. This film Clerks was 100% banter. And it was funny and dirty and exactly how my friends and I conversed. It was hilarious and immature but also unbelievably insightful, honest and downbeat insofar as it captured a generation of slackers. Pop culture junkies with no obvious or easy futures. These were my friends. This was my sense of humour. So much pathos.

I was addicted. I watched Clerks endlessly. I hunted down late night screenings of it because it was so much better in the cinema (crappy black and white 16mm needs to be seen on as big a screen as possible to really see any detail) It inspired and focused me. I knew then that my calling was to be the British Kevin Smith. It didn’t hurt that I already looked like him to the degree that I would be mistaken for him at film festivals for many years to come. This was not by design. I wasn’t THAT obsessed. I didn’t ever steal from him or copy him but I felt his inspiration gave me license to write films about mouthy young British guys in dead-ends. I don’t know if the influence was even obvious but he was very very much my inspiration.

His second film – Mallrats – came out very quickly after I had seen Clerks. I loved Mallrats too, but differently. All of a sudden Smith had a big studio budget and produced a glossy slick teen comedy. Set in the same world as Clerks, the two drug dealers Jay and Silent Bob, who’d hung out outside the convenience store all day, were back in a supporting role trading their gritty edgy buffoonery for a more Laurel and Hardy form of silliness. It was an odd transition for those characters but it worked. It was so much fun to see them transplanted from one reality to another. To see two Jersey drug dealers as the comic relief in a big movie. A wonderful in-joke for Clerks fans too. In fact, the movie was peppered with in-jokes, references and cross-overs. It felt like what might happen if one of your friends had made a Hollywood movie and been allowed to just fill it with his own personal jokes. It was joyous. It had soul, big laughs and kind of made a point about vacuous teenage crap. I watched it a lot. We all did.

His third film followed quickly too. Apparently somewhat scarred by the big studio experience, he was back making a low budget indie – Chasing Amy. A lot of the publicity centred around Smith apologizing for Mallrats which seemed odd and I took a little umbrage because I really dug that film. But Chasing Amy was better. So much better. Chasing Amy is more watchable than Clerks (it’s in colour, the performances are snappier) and one of my favourite films of all time. The scandal that surrounded it was that Smith had made a film about a guy who turned a lesbian straight. That was ridiculous to me, he wasn’t making any kind of comment on sexuality. Hell, I know a lesbian who is happily married to a guy now, it can and does happen. The detractors had missed the point of the film. They focused on the wrong relationship. It was a film about best friends. About what happens to guys when they reach their mid-twenties and start getting into relationships. What happens to your best mate? How does that all change? Very few films have been intelligently made on this subject and Chasing Amy knocked it out of the park. It’s a really, really good film.

Smith was internet-active and had his own web-store. I ordered a Chasing Amy cinema poster, it arrived signed ‘To Jon, Had her, I swear! Best Wishes Kevin Smith’ the ‘Had her I swear’ line had an arrow that pointed to the face of the lead actress Joey Lauren Adams. I also ordered a strip of film from the workcut of Clerks. I still have it framed in my office. It’s a Jay and Silent Bob scene.

Smith was now bankable. He had a following, therefore he got to make films. That’s when he went a bit rubbish. As did his colleagues. Tarantino had followed up Reservoir Dogs with Pulp Fiction – a good film, but one which set the template for him just making pop culture mash-ups in which faded stars of cinema past got reinvented into some hip new violent offering. He never made a good film again. They were lazy, doughy, horrifically over-long and indulgent offerings. Robert Rodriguez remade El Mariachi with a big budget then made a Tarantinoesque all-star sequel. He quickly descended into making fairly uninteresting kids films. Smith over-stretched himself with the lamentable Dogma which brought the forces of biblical wrath into the small-town universe he’d created. Jay and Silent Bob, whilst still being funny, were now biblical prophets fighting bad angels. The film didn’t know what it wanted to be. Part epic, part tiny indie comedy. He followed that with the detestable Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in which his two once-brilliant background characters became the full focus of a stupid big budget comedy. He has often identified himself as a purveyor of dick and fart jokes but they had previously been funny asides, here they were the building blocks. I was close to leaving halfway through as the film pointlessly threw flatulent sexy female jewel thieves and George Carlin offering blowjobs into the mix. It was self-aggrandizing cinematic swill. He hadn’t been able to leave behind the security blanket of his first film and now was just hashing out pointless tributes to it.

Then he announced that he was leaving that universe behind. Indeed, the film finished with Alanis Morrisette (reprising her role of God from Dogma) closing the bible on the ‘View Askewniverse’ he had created. I was excited.

His next film Jersey Girl was a flop. But a really, really good film. Although he’d left the comfort of the characters he’d created, it was still set in New Jersey and featured actors he’d worked with before. A simple story about a widowed husband who has to raise his baby alone. Ben Affleck in the lead role turned in a solid performance and it was a nice, small, honest film. It flopped, Smith apologised for it and he announced Clerks 2.

I felt like I wanted to be a Hollywood social worker. Step in and tell him ‘I know you love your children, but if you really do, you should leave them alone and go and get help’. I didn’t want him to revisit and stomp all over his greatest moment of purity. The interviews he gave prior to its release offered me a little hope. He claimed that he had something to say, a reason to revisit these characters.

I sat in the cinema and disagreed. With the exception of the climax scene in a jail cell with brilliant performances from the original protagonists, it was a mess. There was dance sequences, grating celebrity cameos – every customer that appeared had the camp smugness of Sammy Davis Jr or whoever popping out of windows in every episode of Batman where he and Robin would climb up a wall. It said very little about our generation or where we were and offered a frustratingly ambiguous ending in which the two main character opted to buy the convenience store – which could be construed as an act of entepreneurship or an admission of defeat.

By now, Miramax is no more. Tarantino has made a string of crappy pointless movies (the fact that his latest – a nazi funfest called Inglorious Basterds is Oscar nominated – alongside Avatar – shows how bad standards for cinema in general have become) , Rodriguez is making his third Spy Kids sequel, his second and third chapters of Sin City and a film based on the fake trailer he made for the Grindhouse project. Originality does not feature strongly in his plans.

On the Clerks 2 DVD, There is footage of Smith inviting Tarantino and Rodriguez over to watch it. They enthuse boundlessly and it’s horribly clear how all three have lost that spark they had.

The facebook conversation I alluded to at the beginning of this was with a friend of mine – John Wilkinson. He’s been at film school in London for a few years now. This is his final year now. I met John first about six or seven years ago. I think he was only 16 at the time. He enrolled in a couple of my screenwriting courses. By the time he was 18, he’d won the young screenwriter of the year award – presented by Julian Fellowes. I take no credit for his success or talent whatsoever, he was a promising screenwriter when he arrived and, after years of hard work and commitment to his craft, a great one now. I work as a script editor and screenwriting tutor and can tell you exactly what white teenage boys/young men write – without fail it’s superhero films, gangster films and semi-autobiographical comedies about a whacky group of friends. John was above such dross as a teenager. At various times throughout his film school education, he’s shown me scripts he was working on and, without fail, they have been creatively deft, beautifully imaginative and thematically interesting.

He messaged me to tell me he’d won the Best Screenplay award at this year’s Kodak Commercial Awards for film students. I haven’t actually read that script but I know he deserves it. I can’t imagine there’s a better screenwriter at his current level in this country.

Will he succeed? I hope so. I don’t hold out a lot of hope because the industry is a strange beast right now, the mold cast by the Miramax generation has yet to be broken. Those whose names have become brands will always get funding, regardless of their inability to build on their initial raw-edged promise. Why are they unable? Well, I think because they skipped the step John has just devoted three years to. None of them studied. Their first successes were flukes – they had so much to say and such passion that they exploded onto the screen. But once that initial impulse was gone, it was replaced by complacency, arrogance and a lack of understanding of their own work or working. They weren’t equipped or experienced enough to build on their work, only to endlessly clone their first films. Compare them to the generation that preceded them, the film school brats Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg (less so Lucas, perhaps) have built mature, smart, interesting and varied bodies of work – and continue to thirty years later. The Miramax kids maybe deserve the term ‘brat’ more – wallowing as they still do in dick and fart jokes, comedy violence and pop culture references.

Miramax changed the way filmmakers embark on careers now. They’re expected to have an interesting life story and a groundbreaking debut feature film to be marketable. Experience and studying count for very little now. Indeed, Smith and Rodriguez have been very vocal in dismissing the worth of film school or training of any kind. Rodriguez becoming famed for his ‘10 minute film school’ telling you everything you supposedly need to know to go on and make your first feature film.

I dread to think how many talents have been quashed by the encouragement to just jump right in and make a first feature film with no experience.

Kevin Smith could have been the wittiest most insightful filmmaker of our generation had he the confidence to assess his own work and build on it rather than pander to his image and ‘fans’. Same goes for the other two. But they weren’t equipped because they hadn’t been through the experience of a non-public education.

I guess John is ready to step into the industry now but I feel its response to a film school graduate will be less embracing than as to a ‘real life story’. His talent would be a terrible thing to waste.

Fingers crossed, eh?

Best of luck, John. Congratulations for the award. You truly deserve it.

Sit Down Again.

I had another interesting stand up gig last night.

At this point, I’m basically accepting anything I’m offered within Oxford and toying with the idea of giving some open mic slots in London a go. I’m still not sure why I’m doing stand-up. The best answer I can come up with is ‘it’s something to do’. I actually very much enjoy the camaraderie which exists between the small group of local comedians who play these shows which is instantly and warmly extended to any new or visiting comedians too. It’s nice to sit with them and banter and then, one by one, go up to do our separate things with the support of the others despite a palpable feeling of competition to get the best audience reactions of the night.

What I’ve started to notice recently is the audience kind of becomes a single entity with a definable character. As you watch the other acts, and indeed perform yourself, you get to know the audience and by the end of the night, the latter comedians are often confident enough about the audience’s personality to banter, ball bust or berate. This is fast becoming my favourite aspect of the experience. It’s one of the uncontrollable factors which determine whether you’re going to have a good or bad night. It’s essentially the chaos factor. You can have brilliant material, you can be well rehearsed, you can be confident – none of this will necessarily matter. You can be nervous, unrehearsed and empty headed – again, that doesn’t matter. It’s all down to the chemistry of the room – which in itself is subject to ebbs and flows.

First up last night was Izsi Lawrence. Iszi’s one of the more ‘pro’ comics in the area. She’s done some higher profile stuff and performed her own hour-long show before. I kind of know Izsi socially and I think she’s a brilliant person. She’s very sharp and sassy and her warmth comes with a little edge. Last night was the debut for my new short haircut (after many years with very long, thick, curls) and she sat opposite me, ignoring the obvious and when provoked for a response offered ‘I just haven’t decided whether you’re attractive or not’

I detailed the last set of hers I saw in my original post on the subject and last night’s gig felt rather like a continuation of that. I felt that she decided very quickly that the crowd didn’t like her so that became a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her material is good and her delivery is excellent and I get the feeling that with an appreciative audience, she would absolutely fly but she made what I considered to be a mistake by identifying members of the audience who were just staring at her and somewhat alienating them by alluding to their aloofness. I think audience response is and should be the elephant in the room, as soon as it’s mentioned there are implications. The comic rightfully feels angry at the audience for being cold and reserved, the audience rightfully feels they were paid to be entertained so will laugh when they damn well choose. Both are justified. Both exacerbate the problem. Iszi cut her own 10 minutes lot in half on the spot and left by telling the audience ‘I have to go, I have another gig to go to’ – which was the wrong thing to say on a number of levels but really not her fault. When faced with a blinding spotlight and the shapes of an unimpressed audience, you’re not always in control of your words or your emotions. She hadn’t bombed at all, some of her material went down very well – getting a round of applause for her self-assessment as having looked like the product of a lesbian fucking a thundercat – but it set a certain tone of hostility between the stage and the crowd that didn’t shift for the rest of the night.

Next up was Mark Diamond who veered so violently between bombing and winning it was like watching a formula one driver having a heart attack. One of my pet hates is prop comedy and he had a full box of laminated fake product logos. The secret to his ultimate success was a very genuine charm and warmth. It can be the worst thing in a world when a comedian acknowledges how badly their set is going but mark seemed to feed off it, his set becoming increasingly manic and surreal which, in turn, became increasingly entertaining and enthralling. He left to good applause but he had really earned it. He had gone to war with that audience – not in an angry way or even by addressing them directly – but he refused to allow them to make him bomb and his perseverance was admirable and successful.

I was due on stage next but thanks to a scheduling mix-up, compere Alex went on and introduced another guy. At first, I was a little relieved but quickly realised due to an empty stage and that other guy stood behind me saying to Alex ‘No, I’m not going on now!’ that my spot was going to be difficult before I even got to the stage. After having whipped the crowd up into applause, Alex had to go back and ask them to do it again but for me. The applause was obviously lesser this time around and I knew that the opening of my act was quite an alienating one anyway. I really didn’t want to take to the stage at that moment. But I did. I like to take a moment to compose myself and begin the slow burn that I’m now developing as the opening to my act. I think the slow burn is probably a minute to a minute and a half long. It’s a story which contains nothing to laugh at and no clue as to what the punchline might be. 90 seconds of silence is not what most comedians ever hope for and is unbelievably stressful to perform as the feeling builds within you that the punchline won’t fire or will get a polite laugh and you’ll be the guy who tells long unfunny jokes. One of the multitude of reasons I will never do one of those ‘gong shows’. I got to the punchline and got a laugh. I immediately inserted a new bit which I had been very uncertain about whilst writing and it got a great laugh and some applause. I was off. I hadn’t rehearsed well and feel that I stumbled through a lot of my material but made it to all of the key laughs and went down fairly well. Halfway through the set, I made the mistake of directly addressing the audience (my last gig was based on audience interaction and I bombed like Hiroshima and vowed never to interact again), my set was about weddings and I asked them how many weddings on average they had been to each year. Silence. ‘Who here has been to a friends’ wedding?’ – two people raise their hands. I realise that this is a predominantly young student crowd. They have no idea what I’m talking about. They’ve never experienced this. I launch into my ‘wedding invitations are like council tax bills’ bit and it hits me that most of these kids have never paid council tax. They probably don’t really know what it is. I knuckled down and got through it. I end the act by reading out a list – it’s a bit of a crutch but it means I have something to aim for and I know it’s a bit that works and I can end well. Which I did. I got good strong applause and cheers.

Next up was my friend Tom Greeves. Tom is just masterful. I love seeing him perform. In person, he is an incredibly sweet, humble and polite man. Sometimes frustratingly so – I often accuse him of laughing politely at comedians who don’t warrant it. He’ll do anything he can to set you at your ease but when he takes to the stage, he shows no mercy. I love that. He’s been watching the crowd all night and he works through them one by one slamming them into the metaphorical wall. To a trendy young guy sat at a table with two girls ‘Look at you, you’re wearing a woolly hat indoors. aren’t you trendy? Either of these your girlfriend? It won’t last. Statistically. You’re young and you look like you might sleep with businessmen for money’ I’m not doing him justice, but it is a joy to watch. He interrogates a medical student and goes off on a riff about the idea of Brookes University offering a medical course – ‘Imagine that; being in an accident and being seen by a man who got two C’s and a D at A-Level’ ‘NURSE, GIVE ME A SCALPEL’ ‘….why, doctor?’ ‘I DON’T KNOW!’ His physical prowess is excellent and I actually genuinely laughed so loud my sides were hurting. Tom’s a comedian’s comedian in how he assassinates the room. We’re not just laughing because he’s funny, we’re laughing because we resent that audience and love to see them get their comeuppance. We know that he’s striking a blow for all of us – but in a charming and very funny way. The audience love it too. But I think we love it best.

First after the break was a young man who looked very ‘hip’. As he took to the stage, Tom told me that I wouldn’t like him – I was intrigued to know why. He set up a camera to film his own performance, then took to the stage with his hoodie hood up over his head. He opened boldly ‘You’re probably wondering about the hoodie – I never know how to wear it. Wear it up, I look like a thug, wear it down, I look like a DICK!’ He was expecting a big laugh, I think, but he got silence. And he gave silence back. An Andy Kaufmanesque period of silence. I was convinced it was part of the act. He launched into his next bit and trailed off mid-sentence. Looking lost and anxious. More silence. He was dying on an epic scale. He looked like a cocksure young man who thought ‘I could do stand-up easily!’ and had taken to the stage with no experience, no material written, no plan and was just caught like a rabbit in the spotlight. After an achingly long silence, he gave it one last shot. ‘Can someone explain homosexuals to me?’ Nervous disbelieving laughter rang out form those of us in the comedians’ corner. He tried to finish his sentence but gave up and left. He slumped at a table next to his girlfriend and held his head in his hands. We all felt awful for him. Tom said he’d seen him a couple of times and he did have an act. Just a bad night.

Alex had to get back out there and save the night. He did triumphantly by interacting with a horrible crusty old drunk in the crowd who thought he was a joker. Alex was quick-witted and deft in his handling of the chap and got the room laughing again.

Next up was Josh Robbins-Cherry. Josh is very new to stand-up, this being, I believe, his third gig. He’s quite a nervous guy anyway but that translates on stage into incredible manic energy. He started into one of his bits and clearly lost confidence in it. He started to bomb. But then he pulled out of it in a stunning way. He threw it back at the audience. He was angry and hurt and pissed off at having his efforts rewarded with indifference and he told them so. It was stunning. He went to the window and looked out at the river. ‘Maybe I should just kill myself, eh? Throw myself in the river? It can’t be as cold as this crowd. In fact, I can’t even be bothered with you, I’m going to perform to these guys, at which point he turned away from the bulk of the audience and did his next planned bit to the raised area where all the other comedians and promoters were. It was great. His material was solid and he’d given the audience a piece of his mind. We lapped it up – so did they. Tom rightly described it as heroic.

The last act up was Matt Richardson. Matt is the guy in our little community who everyone knows is going to be famous. He’s 18 years old but has the confidence, charm and performance skills of a pro. It was the second time I’ve seen his act so it naturally loses a little lustre when you know where the punchlines are but he stormed it. He is at ease in front of an audience and has a huge amount of energy and cheekiness. I could see him on Mock The Week (and Tom, by the way, was born to be a panelist on Have I Got News For You’) I could see him being a figurehead for the next generation. His act is full of facebook references which flow naturally rather than the ‘grumpy old men’ approach the rest of us have when discussing facebook and other ‘new’ technology. Matt grew up with it, it’s natural to him and his generation and for a younger crowd, Matt is a godsend. We chatted afterwards and even he had struggled with the indifference of that audience.

I think we all did rather well, considering.

The Soundtracks of my Youth: PART FIVE

I have no memory of owning this but I definitely dug the flick when it came out in ‘87. We went on a famliy holiday to America that year and I remember we visited the glass chapel where they get married at the end. That was exciting. The highlight of this record seems to be awful mid-80’s Rod Stewart. I doubt I ever even listened to this one. Thinking about the music to this film conjures up images of horse-faced midget Martin Short doing ‘comedy’ dances.

I remember this one. It was ace. A couple of harry Belafonte tracks an and epic yet twiddly score by Danny Elfman. I know this was my first Danny Elfman score, I was really impressed by it at the cinema. The weird thing is that I remember considering myself quite the soundtrack expert, I could tell you everything that Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein or John Williams had ever done, yet I seem to have absolutely no ‘classic’ soundtracks here, just a bizarre collection of mainly crap. Not that Beetlejuice was crap. God, do you remember when Tim Burton was just an amazing, innovative visionary director? before he just remade established ‘gothy’ things a bit gothier with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter? He’s so boring now. Aaaaanyway.

I actually remember buying this one. At WHSmiths. I remember thinking it was too expensive. I have no memory of how much it was but I was probably right on that original impulse since I can’t imagine I ever really listened to it. I did think it was a great film, though. As a special effects freak, I was blown away by it. But not by the soundtrack.

Great film, good soundtrack, well done, Little Jon.

Now, you see, this is what I was expecting the whole box to be full of – classic film scores by great composers. A lot of soundtracks I kind of assumed would be in here really don’t seem to be but this is a solid example. What a great score E.T. had. What a great film it is – an easy one to take for granted. How often do you ever watch it? It’s such a good film. It’s really brilliant. What they did to it in the special edition was rubbish, but the original is just fabulous. Worth a re-watch if you haven’t for a while.

Here we go! That’s more like it. Another classic John Williams score. A good record to own. Great stuff!

Aha! That’s the one! Completing the holy trilogy of collaborations between John Williams and Steven Spielberg (uh, quadrilogy, but I don’t have the Jaws one). I think this is my favourite soundtrack of all time. Music being so integral to the story itself and the most important scene being a musical conversation between the humans and the aliens. I’m so glad i found this. And it’s a beautiful gatefold album cover which shows the a big picture of the scientists facing the mothership.

Wow, I forgot all about this soundtrack. And the film. Remember when Robin Williams was funny? It’s so funny looking at the tracklisting of this album because it’s made me realise that this is where I first heard all of these incredible classic songs. Nowhere to Run, I Get Around, Game of Love, I Got You (I Feel Good), Baby Please Don’t Go.. and Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World. How strange that this was what introduced me to them. I remember it briefly sparked off an obsession with sixties music. Introduced me to a lot of good stuff. As did…

What a great, great soundtrack. This one introduced me to Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay, Groovin’ and one of my all-time favourite songs – Smokey Robinson’s Tracks of My Tears.

This just restores a little faith in my younger self. The good records in this box I remember really listening to a lot and laid a good foundation for my discovery of real, good music a year or two later. I’ve been thinking a lot as I’ve been writing these soundtrack blogs about why I might have been buying these things. I think it’s a couple of real motivating factors. Firstly, I think I knew music was important but didn’t really have a way ‘in’ to it at that point. I knew I liked being in record shops but real music was just out of my comfort zone at that time. I just adored cinema. I can’t properly express how much I loved it. Those of you who know me now as the jaded and cynical film snob would never have recognised the wide-eyed pup who counted the days until the release of Jaws The Revenge (WHERE’S MY JAWS THE REVENGE SOUNDTRACK??? I DEFINITELY HAD IT!!!) And the eighties weren’t like today where you could see a film trailer online, watch it as many times as you liked, along with endless clips and publicity pieces, then go and see the film at the cinema in the knowledge that you’d be owning the DVD of it in just a few months. Films were ethereal then. There was no internet. You heard rumours about films in magazines, then you’d be in the cinema and -BLAM – a trailer. And I could hardly breathe when an exciting trailer was on because, unless you paid again, you wouldn’t be seeing that trailer ever again. You had to absorb it as it played out in front of you and remember all of the details. Even then, it could be months until the film was actually released – if it made it into the Oxford cinemas at all. We only had 4 screens. When you finally got to see the film itself, there was at least a six month wait until it hit rental and, even then, no guarantee it would come out to buy at all. It really wasn’t until the mid-nineties that the concept of being able to own basically any film came to fruition. That’s why rep cinema was so popular. There was no way to see a lot of these films.

Being a film geek was different then. Films weren’t available for immediate consumption. There was no imdb, so no way to even really track and cross reference and sometimes even prove the existence of these films (in that first trip to America, my dad took me to see the Garbage Pail Kids Movie. Nobody at my school believed it had even existed let alone that I’d seen it. It was almost a year before it slipped out on VHS in this country by which time everybody forgot that I had even claimed to have seen it). So, if you were a film geek then, you were often denied that one central part of the obsession – the films themselves. So you held on to whatever you could. I furiously collected film novelizations (I wonder where those are now!) which I could refer to when my memory stuck on plot points and, since they were often based on early drafts of the screenplay rather than the finished film, they often contained exotic missing scenes and storylines. I think to me at 11 and 12, owning the soundtrack was a memento of a treasured experience. It was the only part of the film I could relive at my whim. So, you know what? I think it’s kind of sweet. Regardless of how I might feel about these films now, from an adult perspective, these were bought out of the passion and excitement of a young film geek and it’s nice to have a connection back to those feelings. And when, this afternoon, I reseal the box and stick it up in the loft, I’ll be pleased to know it’s up there to rediscover another time.

Oh, there’s one record still left. Let’s have a look….

Balls.

Soundtracks Of my Youth: PART FOUR

Seems a random one to own but Rain Man was one of the first ‘grown up’ films I really felt a connection with so I can imagine wanting to ‘own’ a piece of it. I saw it a bunch of times in the cinema. I would imagine I bought it for the song Beyond The Blue Horizon, which has always been one of my favourites and this was a good few years before I found Mike Nesmith’s definitive version of that song. I still find it kind of baffling how I’d buy soundtracks for one song rather than the artists’ own albums but I guess this was a few years before my music geekery would kick in and I was totally devoted to films. The rest of the album is a baffling mix of Bananarama and Ian Gillan.

Another one that just leaves me with both hands in the air, mouth agape and utterly baffled. I don’t understand why anyone would even think releasing this as an album was a good idea, let alone why I would ever have bought it. This is one of the ones that I look at and think ‘I must be the only person in the world who owns a copy of this thing!’ Who would ever buy this? there aren’t even any songs on it, it’s just score. I can’t stop looking at it as if a clue is going to suddenly leap up and some neural pathway will click into place and I’ll go ‘Ah YES! THAT’S why I own a copy of the Roxanne soundtrack!’ Bah!

And just when I think I can’t be more confused, the box of vinyl cranks it up a gear and blows my mind….

I’m Jewish.

I’m a Jewish person who has never celebrated Christmas.

I’m a Jewish person who has never celebrated Christmas and finds everything associated with it soulless and tacky.

Why do I fucking own this???? It has an Aled Jones song on it! And a Sheena Easton one! And one by Kaja (who it turns out were Kajagoogoo after they decided to become more grown up)! I would NEVER have listened to this. Just NEVER. This is MENTAL. I mean, Steve Martin soundtracks, Dan Aykroyd soundtracks I can just about stretch my mind around and go ‘well, it’s odd, but fine…’ I can even ascribe the Fatal Attraction soundtrack to some strange psychological desire to see grown-up films or SOMETHING.  But SANTA CLAUS THE MOVIE? I’m not even convinced I’ve ever seen the film the whole way through. But even if I had, I wouldn’t have connected with it. I’d remember that, surely. This is weird and horrible.

Another Christmas one but I’m fine with this one. I remember buying it because despite it being a brilliant film (and really the only decent Christmas film until Elf came along 20 years later) I really liked the Annie Lennox & Al Green single which the film closed with. Obviously that seems a bit ropey now but looking at the back cover yielded some pleasant surprises. Two of my current favourite musicians crop up performing intriguing cover versions. Robbie Robertson of The Band performing solo their only seasonal offering ‘Christmas Must Be Tonight’ – which is one of the few seasonal songs I can stomach. Then New York Dolls’ lead singer David Johansen in his Buster Poindexter guise performing Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl. Intriguing.

Fuck it, every 12 year old movie geek of the 80’s should own a Superman soundtrack. I remember being blown away by the artwork. It’s a really good painting! I’m still kind of impressed, actually. That’s really good.

Oh man, I LOVED this film and I LOVED this soundtrack. I just thought it was the funniest film ever ever ever made ever. I had the poster up in my bedroom for ages. I mean – come on – Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as TWIN BROTHERS – that’s ridiculous… that’s HILARIOUS! You know what? I bet I’d still love it. I haven’t seen it in at least 15 years but I could probably still rattle it off line-for-line. Oh god, it was BRILLIANT. I bet it’s just awful now. Ugh, I should watch it again. Anyway, take in on my recommendation, it’s quite the album! From the theme song by Little Richard and Philip Bailey…

…and by, the way, how great is it that the director of that music video clearly said ‘oh, just dance’ to Schwarzenegger & DeVito and THAT is what they came up with? I love it! other choice cuts from this one are ‘Yakety Yak’ by 2 Live Crew (from the excellent scene on the plane where Schwarzenegger is singing along, in his Austrian monotone) and ‘I’d Die For This Dance’ from the film’s romantic high point. This scene…

Oh god, it still makes me laugh. There’s a deeply uncomfortable amount of ass-grabbing in that scene and a very strange and creepy boy/girl pelvic exchange move. Poor old Chloe Webb must have been giving it all the acting she’d got to convincingly play any form of romance with Danny DeVito but it’s still really making me laugh. Probably not a good thing.

Soundtracks Of My Youth: PART THREE

Another slightly odd one. I really adored the film, I remember seeing it three times in the cinema and I was mad about Monty Python. There are no songs on this, though. For some reason, I can recall the main title music of this really well and it’s quite nice in a coastal French acoustic guitar kind of way but I can’t imagine ever having sat down to listen to it.

Now we’re talking! What an album. Queen did the soundtracks to two films (no, Biggles does not count); Flash Gordon and Highlander and both films – and indeed soundtracks – stay very close to my heart. Particularly enjoyable is the art on the inner sleeve…

…which makes it look like every member of Queen is actually in a completely different band with only Freddie being an actual member of Queen. Brian May looks like a pub-rocker of several years previous, Roger Taylor looks like he’s in Duran Duran (or one of their dads) and John Deacon appears to belong in Black Lace, pumping out the bassline for Agadoo.

Once more, I have no IDEA why I would have bought this. I remember not even actually liking the film! Interestingly (or not, I wouldn’t fight about it) the bulk of the soundtrack is by Harold Faltermeyer who is the man behind ‘Axel F’ the ‘DUNH DUNH DUH-DUH-DUH-DUHDUH’  Beverley Hills Cop theme, he also wrote the theme for Top Gun. A synth-pop legend. But ‘Bit by Bit (Theme From Fletch)’ doesn’t immediately spring to mind, does it? Here it is being performed at the time…

The chorus seems to be ‘Have you heard the news, making all the headlines, Fletch is working overtime’. The audience seem to be politely indifferent, don’t they? Rubbish.

Brilliant record! I listened to this endlessly. I never even really liked the main Ray Parker Jr theme, it was the other tracks I adored. ‘Savin’ The Day’ by Alessi and ‘Cleanin’ Up The Town’ by The Bus Boys being the apostrophe’d highlights.

This, however, is far less forgivable. Just 5 short years later and the Ghostbusters apparently went ‘hood’. The theme ‘On Our Own’ by Bobby Brown is lamentable, see..

What’s Donald Trump doing in there, eh? That’s MAD! Ray Parker’s theme is awkwardly described as ‘performed and rap by RUN D.M.C.’ and there’s a track by an ensemble calling themselves ‘Doug. E. Fresh & The Get Fresh Crew’ – which sounds suspiciously like an abandoned Colgate promotion idea.

Not much to say. I loved Indiana Jones. Amusingly, Spielberg has written a little essay on the back about it and sounds like an absolute tit! Here he is describing the track ‘Grail Knight Theme’: ‘written in the English, pastoral, idiom, in major modes with very positive intervals to the scherzo, underlining the father and son exploits in a brilliant, driving 6/8-time orchestral idiom.’ Yeah, whatever, Steve.

I have no idea why I would buy the Jaws 2 soundtrack and not the original but I did. On the back of my copied, stamped in gold is a print stating ‘PROPERTY OF EMIR – DEMONSTRATION ONLY – NOT FOR SALE’. I find myself far more interested in who Emir was, how exactly he demonstrated the Jaws 2 soundtrack (‘it looks like a flat piece of black plastic, but one simply starts the turntable and drops the needle and finds oneself transported to the terrifying coasts of Amity Island!’) and who the hell ignored his wishes and sold it to that chubby little 12 year old, eh? We might never know.

Jesus, I forgot this film even existed! I can’t believe for the life of my I would have bothered seeing it in the cinema. I only remember seeing any of it at all on TV about 10 years ago and turning it off after a couple of minutes. How strange. Maybe I just liked Dan Aykroyd’s soundtrack contributions. Although, disappointingly, there is no music video atrocity to accompany this, here is his contribution to this record…

I think, once again, Dan Aykroyd is a convenient place to take a break from this.

Soundtracks Of My youth: PART TWO

OK, I’m rested from the incredulity of the last installment. Let’s see what other treats/dark secrets the Jon of 1986-1988 has been hiding for the past couple of decades.

Yeah, I actually remember buying this and questioning if it weren’t a bit ‘girly’ at the time. I really liked Grease when I was 10. I haven’t seen it in years and when the special edition was recently released on DVD in the US in matching leather T-Bird and polyester Pink Lady jackets, I found myself gleefully clicking the Amazon ‘add to basket’ button before being whisked back 23 years to the very same ‘hang on, isn’t this a bit girly?’ dilemma. I decided to not buy them. What does that say about me? (rhetorical question, thank you very much) Was I less restrained and liberated to follow my whims boldly, unfettered by the reactions of others as a 10 year old? Or was I just a pathetic little girly girl? Am I bullying myself at this point? oh fucking hell, now I’m looking to see if those DVDs are still available on Amazon. They are. Why am I dredging up all this crap? Some things are best left in the soundtrack box of youth.

This isn’t as bad as it seems. I think I just didn’t have the mental dexterity to realise that what I really wanted was to just buy a Randy Newman album. I still think the title song is a really good one. Listen…

Actually that’s far rubbisher than I remember. With really annoying instrumentation. Oh well. I wonder how the film itself holds up. Hmmm.

Oh god…

Actually, I won’t apologise. This is a really good film. I just, instead of having a flash to the brilliance of the film itself, had a flash to this…

Call it kike-rage but it kind of pisses me off that a film about the Jewish diaspora has it’s lead song sung by two conspicuously un-semitic talents. Come on! Imagine that song performed by Neil Diamond and Bette Midler! That would be AMAZING! Anyway, although I’m not about to crank the volume and take this one for a spin, I’m glad I bought it! It’s the purchase decision of a young boy embracing his heritage through the medium of animated mice. Mice! Vermin! Ugh, they really didn’t think this film through, did they?

Wahey! I’ll stick up for this one too. It’s a great album. Back in the days before I was unburdened by the knowledge that it is more socially acceptable to proclaim your love for the BNP than for Phil Collins, I had much toe-tapping pleasure to this one. Plenty of 60’s classics on it, an enjoyably naff Four Tops number and finishing on a deliciously rubbish moment of Collins jacket ‘n’ jeans intimacy…

He’s loving that fag, isn’t he?

I just remembered that this very LP kicked off a huge argument when I got it. I’d asked for it for my 12th birthday and when I unwrapped it, immediately noticed the cellophane had been pre-cut and discovered that my mum and sister had both taken cassette recordings of it, which they had been enjoying for weeks. This still seems hugely unacceptable to me. I’m actually getting angry about it again. Deep breaths. OK. Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever actually even seen the film. I wonder if it’s any good. Hmm. Might have to track a copy down.

YES! Oh god, I LOVED this film. I loved it so so so much. I saw it three times at the cinema. I had never seen anything funnier. Amongst the other crap in my cupboard I also found the Dragnet ‘poster magazine’. I loved poster magazines. A magazine about a film that unfolded into a giant poster OF that film? Genius! GENIUS!!! Anyway. I just found the trailer for it…

Am I wrong or did it have a shot of Tom Hanks offering the international ‘wanker’ gesture? AND it had another wank joke in it ‘all that repression – must be what keeps your hair up’ – that’s a wanking joke, right? I think I must have missed a lot of the real gags in this flick. Maybe I should watch it again. There are just 5 songs on this LP. One of which is apparently performed by Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks. Oh my god. Oh my GOD.

OH. MY. GOD.

They made a music video. Prepare yourself for… TOM HANKS RAPPING…. and… there’s… DANCING. and just… watch…

I think we should all take a moment and then reconvene.

The soundtracks of my youth

Two years ago, I bought my first house – it’s delightful, you’d be jealous. Along with all the brilliant aspects of home ownership (the security of being on the property ladder, the ability to truly make it your own and the chance to laugh smugly when people ask how much the rent is) I discovered one mighty drawback. The unexpected but inevitable parental phone call that said it was time to reduce any evidence of my ever having lived in the family homestead to a couple of faded sepia photographs, a wobbly banister railing and a splodge of metallic purple spray paint on the garage floor.

The house had been reclaimed from the younger generation some years back, my sister’s bedroom has long since been stripped of A-Ha posters and converted into the dressing room and storage area for my mother’s ever increasing collection of forest-print pant-suits.

My childhood bedroom has become my father’s ‘office’. Considering my father doesn’t work from home and… doesn’t need an office where he does work, this translates as the room where his Compaq Presario 286 computer (that’s 3.5 inch floppy disks, my friends) sits and he goes to file away and organise his Royal mail first day covers once a month. Up until now, he has been happy to co-exist with the books I’ve never felt the need to re-read and to leave the fitted wardrobe completely untouched but, apparently, the space is now needed. Not by him, I should add, but by my mother, whose pant-suit collection (forest print) has now exceeded the capacity of both the double wardrobes in her own bedroom and my sisters. I have my suspicions that she might be stockpiling these green, leafy creations to clothe an army of doughy post-menopausal warrior ladies who intend to actually disguise themselves as a forest in which they can lay traps and snare their now-adult children to give them a chance to lecture, without fear of interruption, about haircuts, careers and appropriate footwear.

Anyway, it was time to clear their house and loft of all of my possessions. I started with my cupboard which I don’t recall ever having even opened since the age of 18. From the day I left home, I had no need or interest of anything in there. Even in uni holidays, I lived out of a rucksack, the cupboard was just full of crap. So, 15 years untouched and even before that, it was just somewhere to put stuff I didn’t want actually around me. I was kind of excited to explore. I found the detritus a once-indie-kid 33 year old might expect to  – long sleeve t-shirts (The Levellers, The Cure, Ride), short sleeve T-shirts (The Wonder Stuff, James, Jesus Jones), piles and piles of old NMEs and Melody Makers, fanzines, film magazines (lots of these), tons of old posters grabbed off venue walls or begged from video shops and cinemas. Nothing I particularly minded throwing away. The two things I found which made me go ‘Ha!’ were collections that I had forgotten about. To a degree (and not a painfully nerdy one, I might add), I have always collected things. I had typed examples but deleted them in the desperate attempt to preserve a modicum of dignity. The collections I found in my cupboard were my badge collection – an obsession between the ages 3 and 8 – and my film soundtrack vinyl collection, a long forgotten obsession I fed between the ages of about 9 and 12.

Now, I have been obsessed with films my whole life – hence being a filmmaker and having owned 2 video shops – but as a kid, I was really, really obsessed. I don’t think there was a film I didn’t LOVE. I really can’t remember having any semblance of a critical perception, if it was a film, I LOVED it. An arbitrary love. I watched everything. Every film they showed on TV was taped and archived away, by the age of 11, I was allowed into town alone and spent every weekend (and most weeknights, once I was a teen) between then and leaving for uni at the cinema seeing ANYTHING. I was very materialistic and wanted film ’stuff’. By the age of 13, I had become far more selective in my tastes and by 14, I had discovered The Cure and The Clash and was well on the road to becoming the bastion of cultural quality you know and love today.

The soundtrack collection has been untouched for 22 years, I just found the box and flipped through the first few. I have no memory of ever having owned two of them. I have decided to share this voyage of discovery and nostalgia with you now. Jin me, as we flip through the contents of the Sainsburys Muscadet de Sevre et Maine box labelled ’soundtracks’….

I’ll stand by this one. I do remember this is the first film soundtrack (or OST to those of us in the know – Original SoundTrack. I know) I bought and I bought it because I loved the film (still do) and loved the music in it (ehhhh, not so much now) It heavily features the work of syrupy 70’s songsmith Stephen Bishop. I just found a video of him performing It Might Be You (Theme From Tootsie) here: it’s quite good actually, isn’t it? Shaddup. I remember getting it home and finding out the record was warped, so I took it back to the shop and they offered a refund as they didn’t have any more copies. I decided to keep the warped one.

I don’t remember this!!! I adore the first Arthur movie, barely even remember ever having seen this one but it must have left enough of an impression on me that I actually spent my parents hard earned money on the soundtrack. A brief perusal of the tracklist reveal the theme song Love Is My Decision (Theme from ARTHUR 2 ON THE ROCKS) is by now less of a talent than the lamentable Chris De Burgh. Let’s see what youtube can offer us… ah, yes…

…it seems at least one person in the world has made a very real connection to this song, eh? Horrible. It also features some Bacharach and The Loco-motion by Kylie, which I’m sure wouldn’t have been a motivating force for me. Why did I buy this????

OK, this is ace. No regrets there. I can’t imagined I would ever have actually sat down and listened to this but it has their version of ‘My Little Buttercup’ which I will certainly be capturing to my hard disk for future mix-cd awesomeness. Again, have no memory of ever having bought or owned this, though.

This one I do remember! I remember hassling the guy at Movie Boulevard in Leeds (where I mail ordered the harder-to-find soundtracks in my collection from) to track this down for me. I loved the song on the end titles. Which, when put next to the theme from Tootsie (no, we won’t count Arthur 2) reveals a worrying infatuation with syrupy 80’s love songs. This one was from Joe Cocker who, in fairness, is fucking ace – even at his 80s balladeering worst…

Looks like whoever made that video loves Bigfoot and the Hendersons (yes, BIGFOOT and the Hendersons, as I will always know it) even more than me. According to one of the comments on that video, the New York Gay Men’s Chorus does a ‘wonderful’ version of this song. I hope to hear that some day. It’s still a fucking great flick.

No apologies here, either. This contains probably the best ‘Theme From’ a film EVER…

WHAT???? WHY???? Why would I ever have bought this??? I don’t even remember liking the Police Academy films THAT much. Maybe I was lured by the Drew Struzan artwork. I hope so. I couldn’t have ever actually LISTENED to this, could I? Apart from Brian Wilson (must have been one of his ‘bad’ years), this record features the talents of two alliterative and extraneously ‘r’d acts -  Darryl Duncan and Garry Glenn. As tempted as I am to power up the turntable to sample ‘I Like My Body’ performed by Chico DeBarge (who, wikipedia informs me, was stabbed outside a Philadelphia nightclub in 2003 by a South Philly Italian mafioso named John “Johnny Gongs” Casasanto) and ‘Dancin’ Up a Storm’ by Stacy Lattisaw… I won’t.

Again, I remember seeing and not hating the film (hey, I was 10!) but why the hell would I have bought the soundtrack? it is apparently a Thomas Dolby project which proves that success breeds insanity. Side one is all songs featuring the vocal talents of star Lea Thompson with backing vocals from, um, George Clinton, harmonica by, really, Stevie Wonder and guitar by The Eagles’ Joe Walsh. What a monumental waste of time. The band, presumably assembled for this project specifically, are known as Dolby’s Cube. I wonder how many of them list that on their CVs.

I don’t think I’ve ever even seen this film! This has to be one of my sister’s albums. Shut up.

I do remember buying this! I bought it because it was the new Spielberg film (being a Jaws/ET/Close Encounters junkie) little did I know that the film was impenetrable for a 10 year old. There were no aliens or sharks in it. I listened to the record once. I didn’t like it.

Still awesome. And there’s a band called Mummy Calls.

Another WHAT??? Why would I have bought this? The film left no impression on me at all (I liked Romancing The Stone). The title track is Billy Ocean’s When The Going Gets Tough but on closer scrutiny of the tracklist, one finds the fantastically titled ‘Party (No Sheep Is Safe Tonight)’ performed by The Willesden Dodgers. I’d like to think that’s why I bought it. It’s certainly why I’ll be keeping it.

Apparently this is collectable now as it features John Deacon’s only ever non-Queen recording. Hmmm. make me an offer.

I remember this bad boy! And I listened to it a lot! Kokomo by the beach Boys, Tutti Frutti by Little Richard, Don’t Worry Be Happy, some Ry Cooder, John Cougar Mellencamp and a Starship song. Wicked stuff. Again, I’m not sure that I’ve ever actually seen the film. I dimly recall buying this to impress a girl.

WHY DO I OWN THE FATAL ATTRACTION SOUNDTRACK???? I couldn’t even have seen the fucking film! It was an 18 and i WAS 11! I don’t think I woudl even have given a shit about it seeing as how there were no aliens or sharks or comedy. Why the hell do I have it? There aren’t even any songs on it that would have interested me. It’s the SCORE of FATAL ATTRACTION. WHY DO I HAVE THIS???? I’m picturing a tubby little eleven year old strolling into HMV, deciding he wants to own the score of a film that not only has he never seen but would have no interest in… and paying his pocket money for it. I just. can’t. process. this. What were you THINKING, Little Jon???

I remember buying this. I really loved the movie and liked how they labelled all of the merch ‘SPACEBALLS THE…’ I had Spaceballs The Poster and Spaceballs The Badge and bought this just because I thought it was cool. The theme is performed by The Detroit Spinners and it features a really nasty duet on side one by Kim Carnes (wikipedia: once wrote a concept album with her husband for Kenny Rogers!)  and Jeffrey Osborne (wikipedia: career now consists of singing the national anthem at baseball games) called ‘My Heart Has A Mind Of Its Own’ which is a very pithy title, eh?

I had forgotten this film even existed!!! I have owned two video shops for the best part of a decade and still haven’t happened across any mention of this film in 20 years. Wow. I do remember really liking the film. I want to see it again now. I bet it’s awful. Actually, I bet it’s ace – Peter O’ Toole playing a drunkard, Steve Guttenberg in his only British flick, directed by Neil Jordan. Cool. Thanks 12 year old Jon! Apparently all the music is performed by the Graunke Symphony Orchestra. Where’s Graunke? I’ve never heard of Graunke.

OK, that’s enough for now. More soon.

The thin line between love and hate

So, here we are again. February 13th. The day every single person in the country takes a deep breath and steels themselves for the annual celebration in which vacuous idiots who have found like-empty-minded twats to waste their lives with act all fucking smug and self-satisfied.

I don’t want to be the lonely guy spouting off about how Valentines day is just commercial crap. But I feel the burden of responsibility does fall on me to correctly articulate that sentiment and elevate it beyond a simple bitter refrain.

Even on Valentines days when I have been in a relationship, I have been fortunate – or wise – enough to not have been seeing girls who would ever dream of paying Valentines Day any heed. It is genuinely for idiots. Idiots and corporations.

Love is such an unbelievably complicated, personal and bespoke thing that the very notion of an international day in which it must be expressed is completely antithetical to genuine intimacy. So it is with utter disdain that I regarded the legion of idiots clutching bunches of flowers and boxes of chocolates as they piled out of Sainsburys today. Not least because their romantic gestures were mainly snapped up from the ‘Better Than Half Price!’ Valentines display.

Allow me to list the corporate seasonal offers which have bombarded my conscious in the past few days;

WETHERSPOONS: Two steaks and a bottle of wine £14.99

MARKS AND SPENCERS: ‘Gourmet dine-in for two’ (choice of ready meal starters, mains, accompaniments and dessert plus a single stem rose or box of chocolates) £20

TESCO: £9 Three-course ready meal selection with chocolates

DAILY MAIL: Offers seven free DVDs of ‘romantic’ films of varying awfulness. Vouchers redeemable at Tesco or WHSmith.

To me, these are entirely useful indicators of whether you are in a worthless relationship. If your beloved makes a grand gesture of their love only once a year and it comes in one of the following forms: Taking you to a fucking WETHERSPOONS, microwaving ready meals for you or suggesting you watch a film that they have selected based on the fact it came free with the Daily fucking Mail… then you’re in a worthless relationship. I understand that this is an elitist and arrogant assessment but it’s true. You know it’s true.

The wonderful thing about gestures of love is that they are recession-proof. It is not valid to say ’some people can’t afford to take a girl out to the Ritz and fill their house with red roses’. I know. The gauche expensive displays are as empty and turgid as the Tesco value alternative. A gesture of love should be personal. Tailored. Not bought, created. A letter, not a card. A meal cooked from scratch. A gift that means something. A thought. The thought that counts. So true. There can be no thought in taking the one you ‘love’ to a Wetherspoons for a meal deal on Valentines Day. In some cultures, the mere suggestion of taking someone to a Wetherspoons on any day would be considered highly offensive.

The second consumerism is embraced into expression, the sentiment becomes bunk. Christmas has redefined itself in this way, but that’s OK. Devout Christians might argue that it has lost all meaning and I’d agree but there is a great inherent value in a society enforcing a few days off to be spent with family and friends, trying to be happy. The roots of Valentines Day are fairly ropey (St Valentine himself having nothing to do with romance, the festival largely being a rather nice, quite modern, social construct in which lovers wrote letters to one another) but there can be no doubt that the current incarnation, a day in which men are expected to buy their lovers a box of chocolates, flowers and some form of material offering of value (real or Tesco, apparently) before taking them out for dinner and women are expected to reciprocate by gladly offering up their partner’s favoured orifice of choice, is fuelled by consumerism and a media-saturated burden of expectation.

Maybe I shouldn’t be complaining about one of the few things in society that encourages warmth. i just think it degrades the true notion of love. Like everything else in this convenience obsessed culture we currently inhabit. It gives a path for people to put aside genuine thought and interaction. The supermarket display touting cheap Milk Try and Hallmark greetings cards gives a person an easy alternative to having to think about their partner’s needs and desires and a society-approved gesture to pretend they have. It’s just a shame. But fuck ‘em. They’re idiots. I’m sure actual thought is anathema to the people these are all geared towards and the recipients’ standards have been suitably lowered to the degree that a cut-price box of All Gold represents genuine affection.

True, actual love bucks consumerism. It looks at it in disgust.

When I was 5 years old, we made Mothers Day cards in school. They had 3D daffodils on the front, made by wrapping yellow card around our fingers to form a bell and then stapling it to a green cardboard stalk. It was finished off with a squirt of cheap perfume and we were left to write our personal messages to our mother on the inside. I had never heard of Mothers Day before this exercise and was roundly mocked by my classmates for this. When I took it home and proudly offered it to my mum, she looked at me with a weariness as if I had given her some worms I’d found outside. “We don’t do mothers day or fathers day” she told me “if you feel like you want to show us that you love or appreciate us, you do it at that moment, not when society dictates you should.”

Damn right. Similarly, birthdays and Chanukkah were never times of commercial excess. We got small, thoughtful token gifts. The big stuff we got when we needed it, deserved it, or Mum and Dad found something they thought we’d like or would be good for us. It’s that kind of random present giving that actually means something. Means that someone was genuinely thinking of you or got excited about making a gesture.

The best person I’ve ever loved sent me letters and cards randomly. When she thought of me. She sent me postcards of paintings which reflected situations we found ourselves in and she’d explain to me why.  She gave me family objects because she wanted me to have some stewardship of her past and a link to others who had meant a lot to her. She wrote me poems and thoughts and she cooked and gave the best gift of all which is the inspiration to explore and express one’s own sentiments and feelings in one’s own unique way back.

I guess if you’ve never experienced that, a Wetherspoons steak and a Daily Mail DVD of Sliding Doors might suffice. And maybe such easily-filled needs gives those people a certain right to be smug.

Sit Down.

I’ve been trying my hand at stand-up comedy recently. I’m not entirely sure why – since I generally hate being the focus of attention (or is that just something self-concious attention hogs convince themselves of?) I think the main reason is because I saw friends doing it and thought ‘I could never do that!’ and I really hate being confronted by my boundaries. Since there is little chance of literal death like most of the other things I ‘could never do’, I decided to give it a go and it actually been going well.

I’ve done a few gigs now each one is a unique experience and has given me a real insight into the craft of it. The masters of the craft seem to have an effortless ease and it becomes quickly obvious that such comfort is something you have to work very hard to achieve. I also think if people are paying to see you specifically perform, then there is already a room full of goodwill which is the exact opposite of performing as an unknown to a room of strangers.

That is the initial boundary, I’ve found. The first 30 seconds where that bunch of strangers will judge you. I think it’s probably the most important part of the act as the time that follows usually sees you either surfing on the goodwill you’ve generated in that first half minute or desperately trying to compensate for the lack of it.  The real pros seem to get in fast with a confident gag which defines them. This can impress and settle an audience. The worst comedians come on and do some kind of sub-Michael Barrymore display of physical comedy – a desperate plea for the audience to like them. The average comedians use a maniuplation technique (which does seem to work) of shouting ‘How are you doing???’ and encouraging cheers ‘Let’s hear it from the students!!’ ‘Who’s drinking???’  I don’t disrespect this technique – it works and encourages an audience to participate and feel embraced by the comic. I don’t like it though. I’ve been experimenting with slow starts. The last few gigs, I’ve purposefully not put anything to laugh about in at least the first 30 seconds – (a couple of weeks ago, I managed to go a minute and a half without offering them a chance to laugh). I do this for three reasons – firstly, it amuses me – I like being obstinate. Secondly it holds the audience’s attention, they like to try to work out what I’m building up to and therefore engage with me rather than sit and judge me. Thirdly, I don’t need their love, I’d rather have their respect.  I’ve seen so many fledgling standups who discard every scrap of dignity in a desperate attempt to be liked by a bunch of strangers. I can’t relate to that. I have enough self confidence and arrogance to know that the vast majority of the audience are just a bunch of uninteresting dicks and I will not prostrate myself to them. I tried some self-deprecating material in my first ever set and it went down really well but to have people applauding my insecurities is not an experience I would ever choose to repeat.

Last night’s gig was at Brookes University and it was a unique and unexpectedly eventful night…

There were eight comedians on the bill – each doing a 10 minute set. Most of us naturally convened in a lounge area to the side of the stage. I love watching comedians before the show. Some are utterly relaxed and full of banter, others are nervously writing their entire sets on their hands. I fall between the two, I write usually 5 keywords on my hand of ‘bits’ that I want to use but so far have only ever once had to glance at it. I banter a bit, but find my concentration is on nailing the opening of my set in my head so seem to drift away mid-conversation.  I also spend a lot of time looking at the audience and building up a subtle hatred for them. It goes once they start laughing, but I like to take to the stage with an amount of disdain for them.

Alex Clissold-Jones, a very good and relaxed young comedian was compering the evening and worked the crowd nicely. I’m not sure if he plans any of his gags whilst compering but he sparks off the audience very well. I was first on. I was fine with that. It meant I had nothing to follow or live up to and could to a degree set the bar for the evening. I have mixed feelings about my set. I’d planned an opening to challenge  the audience a little bit. Based on my discomfort at how a compere whips the audience up into a frenzy of cheers for a performer they’ve never heard of who is then expected to deliver material worthy of such a reception. So, I let the applause die down and stared at the audience looking perturbed and thoughtful for half a minute. Then I asked Alex to return to the stage and confronted him with the source of my unease. I told him he’d created a comedy defecit, putting me in debt before I’d even said a word – essentially putting my act into recession. He rolled with it very well, asking the audience to ‘look uninterested and scrape the feet on the floor’ for me. It was OK. It felt too much like a skit to me and that was a bit awkward.

The rest of my set was based around the stigma of being a Brookes student – which got some good laughs, especially from the other comedians who enjoy seeing a comedian attacking an audience en masse – and a bit I’ve been developing about environmentalism and how the UK seems to focus it’s entire efforts in this area into making the acceptance of a carrier bag in a supermarket a huge social faux-pas. It went well. I think the material suffered by being well written but not a subject I feel passionately about. Comedy without passion becomes limp observational humour. It went well, though. I got good laughs, a couple of jokes got some applause and I got a good vibe from the audience as I left.

Following me was a comedian called Phil. A nice and funny chap whose manner and rapport with the audience covered over a slightly ropey set – the material was actually very funny but he seemed unrehearsed and hesitant, leading to a few pauses, but he went down really well with the crowd and the other comedians. I bet on a good night, he could bring the house down easily.

He came and sat down to handshakes and nods of approval from the rest of us and the next comedian, Lee,  got up to do his set. This guy was a young ‘un – probably just 19 or 20. He’d been quite affable with us, told us he was studying comedy in Southampton – doing a BA in it. None of us had ever heard of such a course and the concept alone seemed a bit sketchy, but fair play to him. He was ‘trendy’ in an awkwardly self-concious way – ovesized woolly had hiding swoopy spiky hair. Jeans positioned halfway down his arse with a huge expanse of white pant on display. Still, it’s of his generation. He took to the stage with the line ‘Don’t worry, I’m normal – not like the rest of those crows over there’ – motioning towards us – we all looked at each other with mild surprise.  ‘Frankly, I’ve got more talent in my left nut’ he continued – that was the punchline – he carried on into his set. The audience didn’t laugh and we were frozen in astonished amusement. My friend Tom Greeves who was to perform later in the evening was the first to speak ‘is he actually going to come back and sit with us after that?’. Lee’s act continued with a smattering of polite or drunk laughter from a few people in the audience but here was a general baseline of confusion – made all the more palpable by the joke ‘Do you like my scarf? I stole it off a black man – nice for the shoe to be on the other foot for a change!’ Again, our jaws dropped in blissful astonishment. ‘He didn’t….?’ He finished his set and, indeed, came and sat with us as if nothing had happened.

The next act was a musical one and was too loud for any of us to address Lee about his lack of basic decency for his fellow performers. He packed his back and left. Phil and I had the same thought and jumped up in tandem to follow him out. Tom tagged along because he sensed drama. I don’t think either of us had planned to intimidate him, that was an unfortunate result of us both approaching  him at the same time. At first he thought we were congratulating him on his set and offered a proud handshake with a ‘thanks guys’, but then the penny dropped. We weren’t at all nasty or threatening. Just pointed out that it was a dick move to slag off the other acts and that wouldn’t actually win the audience’s favour. He looked panic-stricken and fled with a heartfelt ‘Hey, I’m just a student, guys!’

There was an interval and Tom Greeves was next up. Tom is masterful, he’d done no planning for the set at all and took to the stage with ease, opening with a bit about having anally-raped Lee during the interval. I believe the line was ‘I found the last comedian to be ungenerous to his fellow performers but a surprisingly considerate lover’. The audience lapped it up. Tom spurred with them playfully ‘of course, I didn’t get accepted by Brookes – had to make do with the crappy old medieval university down the road’ and won them over easily.  It was clearly the best set of the night.

The next guy was very sweet but a complete car crash. The rest of the comedians found ourselves crying with laughter but not at the intended punchlines. The cackhandedness was almost masterful. He explored the room, asking of an alcove ‘is this where comedians come to fart? I just did!’ Wildly inappropriate and unfunny but that in itself was hysterical. I felt bad that the biggest laughs were coming from the other performers but we couldn’t hold it in he pointed over to us ‘laughing at their own jokes over there!’ he quipped, not for the last time. The heckle of the evening came when he proclaimed ‘I think I’ve been put on some kind of list’ and a voice from the darkness shouted out ‘the sex offenders register?’. I felt bad for the comedian, who was a nice chap but utterly hapless. Although I didn’t hear the feed line, the biggest unintentional laugh of the evening came from the sentence ‘but that’s not the worst thing I’ve seen children do to each other on my tv’. Poor guy.

He was followed by a student comedian who despite seeming awkward had quite good material – it was sharp and well written, if badly delivered. His predecessor sat with us, watching with a look of disgust saying ‘Ed Byrne!’ after each line. I found this odd and amusing and, feeling a giggle fit emerging, tried to ignore it. Eventually Tom asked him ‘excuse me are you accusing him of plagarism or is this some form of Tourettes?’  ‘His entire act is stolen from Ed Byrne – line for line’. An iphone was produced and, indeed, word for word, this guy was doing nothing but a variety of Ed Byrne’s old material. I was utterly intrigued by his motivation. I assumed that this was his first time and he wanted to get a feel for performing, build up some confidence maybe, but the compere regretfully told me that he’d seen the guy perform three times previously – all the same material. Alex hadn’t clocked that it was nicked and felt stupid at the memory that he’d advised the kid to enter into some comedy competitions because although his performance wasn’t great, he could really write. Ugh.

This kid hadn’t been sat with us, so we weren’t going to have to make small talk with him or anything. We just waited for his set to end. Which it did – in spectacular fashion. As he was building up to a punchline, a member of the audience pre-empted it and shouted it out word-for-word. The kid had been rumbled. He was flustered ‘No heckling, I’m the one with the microphone thank you’. The guy in the audience calmly and clearly replied ‘I wasn’t heckling, I was finishing the joke which you stole from Ed Byrne, as you have your ENTIRE set.’  Wow. A moment of electricity and silence. ‘The thing about hecklers…’ starts the kid ‘No, I’m not heckling,’ continues the guy in the audience ‘you’ve plagarised your whole act now the best thing would be if you just go and sit down’. WOW. Another pregnant pause before the promoter steps in and says ‘you’re over-running anyway, let’s just put an end to it’. The kid, red faced and shaking sloped off back to his seat.

The final act was Izsi Lawrence, a fantastic comedian I’ve seen before but coming at the end of a long night after such drama, the crowd just weren’t with her. Her material and delivery were fantastic but the room just felt tired. She tried to energise them but they were resistant to it. It wasn’t their fault, it certainly wasn’t hers, it’s just sometimes the mood of a room is not conducive. It’s a very organic thing. I felt that she ended the evening with class. Had Tom followed that kid, I fear there would have been carnage.

It’s totally a strange thing, stand up – there are so many controlling factors, the material, the delivery, the audience, the venue, the surrounding events, the order of the comedians, the unexpected, the time of the night and sobriety of the participants. It is completely uncontrollable and I think that’s what makes it so exciting and ultimately satisfying or painful. I rather pity the Michael Mcintyres and Lee Evans (not financially, obviously) because to know, night after night, that the audience response is guaranteed unless you fuck up on a hugely monumental and ethical level, must be rather dull.