In a somewhat snide manner, someone recently remarked to me that I’d like Sydney (as in the city in Australia) because it was superficial.
Ha ha, funny. Yes, I’m being sarcastic. I’ve been to Sydney, didn’t much care for it. I abhor humidity and aside from that it doesn’t have that much going for it. It’s kind of a crap version of London. (Sun 10/12/06 - ironically the person who suggested I should go to Sydney moved back to Melbourne. Is there a connection with that incident and the thought below?)
Neither of which are as hypocritical as Melbourne, but you’re all aware of my thoughts on that.
Ah…life in Britain, it’s very bleak unless you happen to be well-off. Fondly, I remember two albums of a band named Blur entirely devoted to taking the piss out of the upper classes and the waste that is existence - Parklife and The Great Escape. Parklife is the earlier out of the two, and might be remembered for its Eurotrash anthem ‘Girls and Boys’.
Then there’s ‘Tracy Jacks’, a tale of a nine-to-fiver who cracks up and goes mental under the pressure of modern life. And who could forget ‘Bank Holiday’ when all the shops are closed and the plebs get hell-trashed to (again) escape the drudgery of modern living. The instrumentation is all very catchy and melodic - I swear it’d be a punk album if there were more screeching and simpler musical composition, or tonelessness.
As for The Great Escape? Well, I wouldn’t know what on earth a quango was if I didn’t first hear the word in a Blur song (’Mr Robinson’s Quango’) - you’d think I’d have no use for it but one day whilst playing Scrabble someone had opened up the dictionary to a random page and asked me what any old word meant. It happened the word chosen was ‘quango’. I think we were all scared that someone in our circle actually knew the definition (being a typical child, I ran to my father - because everyone knows fathers know everything).
So what the hell happened to Blur? ‘Song #2′ killed what my continuing love of them. Do you remember a time when every second bloody extreme sports advert featured that bleeding ’song’, if you can even call it that?! Bring back vintage Blur, when they were all punky and had bass lines that made you want to take off all your clothes. Oh, hang on, that’s just me, isn’t it.
