YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK

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URETHRA FRANKLIN

Shhh. I'm going to tell you a secret. Don't tell all your friends that I told you because they might hate you. And me. Okay?

Aretha Franklin is a big bag of piss. Her throat is a urethra and her mouth is a piss slit, gushing out loads of effluent and spraying anyone in the ear who gets too close.

That's an even less polite way of saying the thing that can be summed up thus: My God. I hate Aretha Franklin. She really is toss.

I think it was John Peel who mistakenly called her Urethra Franklin on Top of The Pops in the 80s. It might have been Mike Reid or Paul Gambuccini or David "Kid" Jensen. But I think it was John Peel and I think it was probably not really a mistake, if I'm honest. John Peel knew a thing or two about music, so I reckon he thought Aretha was a big bag of piss too. And a urethra empties a big bag of piss, doesn't it? Nah - I reckon he meant it.

What? You want me to qualify all that? Okay then.

There are of course exceptions. Aretha's performance of "Don't Play That Song" is stunning. Crystal clear. She hits every note with the most wonderful clarity. She's generous to the song - it's clear she loves it - and she wants it to shine through. "Think" is pretty darn lovely too. I'm sure there are other exceptions, but most of her work provokes a response in me far worse than fingernails down a blackboard - I haven't been able to bring myself to delve deep enough to find anymore hidden gems. So - now we've got that out of the way, let's get down to some serious hating.

Firstly, despite the fact that Aretha has got a fine set of lungs on her, she doesn't sing. She screams. In every performance I have heard (apart from the aforementioned "Don't Play That Song", the title of which seems increasingly ironic) she caterwauls so badly and so randomly that the songs just disappear. Take, for example, "I Say A Little Prayer." This song was written for her by two of the greatest songwriters of the 20th Century - Burt Bacharach and Hal David. It is the perfect marriage of music (soulful, easy, surprising) and lyrics (at times, pure poetry) - as all the best Bacharach and David songs are. Aretha was lucky to get it. So what does she do. She sings the first half of it pleasantly enough and then...then she just starts to SCREAM! And so you've got this beautiful Burt Bacharach piano groove going on with some mad woman having hysterics over the top of it. Aretha does this all the time. Even on "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves" - you have Annie Lennox - her voice is deep, round and genuinely soulful. She's able to improvise around the melody and yet still manage to communicate a sense of what that melody is to the listener. Aretha just makes a horrible, horrible noise. At times it's genuinely like the gearbox crunching on a bus.

Secondly, she is responsible for the song "Respect". This song deserves only one response and that is this. "Bitch, PLEASE!" You want to know what this song is? It's the aural equivalent of Bodyform sanitary towels. It's a Diet Coke break. It's the Weighwatchers PurePoints programme. It's Terry's Chocolate Orange. It's skimmed milk. It's a compilation album called "Songbird". It's Take A Break magazine. It's Karen Millen. It's an article in Cosmo about how shit men are. It's Bridget fucking Jones' twatting Diary. To put it another way - this song represents that horrible media image of women as man hating, dieting, lazy self centred dickheads who don't want much - they just want to feed their shoe habit, be a size 8, eat loads of chocolate and, oh yeah, they just want a little respect too. Aretha never says why she feels she deserves respect - she just says she's about to give someone all of her money and she wants the profits in return. Way to go, sister.

Thirdly she makes some bloody terrible choices. That duet with George Michael was execrable. Who's Zoomin' Who would be considered the lame piece of shit that it really is had it been sung by Paula Abdul or Gloria Estefan (and that is anything but outside the realms of possibility - just listen to it!)

Anyway - I am sure Aretha is a lovely human being. I bet she'd be damn interesting to talk to. But I sense no pain in her screeching - not like in that of Etta James or Tina Turner. I just hear cash registers ringing. And that's always guaranteed to turn me right off.

Don't play that song again.



Next time: Bob Dylan off!!

TOO MANY TWINKS AND TARTS IN THE WORLD...

This is the story of how Jason Donovan nearly ruined my life...



In 1989 I turned 18. For about a year before that I had been pretending to stay at my mate Ste's house every weekend so we could rehearse with our band, I've Got The Drugs Madam. In reality, I've Got The Drugs Madam was me and a few mates messing about and what I was really doing was catching the train to Liverpool to get absolutely roraring drunk in gay clubs in a clumsy teenage attempt to get laid.

I've known I was gay since I was about five. Don't ask me how I knew because it was a weird mix of non-specific feelings that I had. But I just KNEW. And when I was sixteen I started to admit it to a select bunch of people. It took me quite a while before I could admit it to everyone. But, anyway, this is not a coming out story, so enough of that!

Everyone knows Kylie Minogue. And everyone knows that homos love her. She has lasted the distance. But when Kylie was first starting out her boyfriend was Jason Donovan, her co-star in Neighbours (the Aussie soap that we used to bunk off school to watch until they started showing it at 5:30pm too). And Jason fancied a bit of pop superstardom too, so he signed up with Stock Aitken and Waterman (Kylie's production team at the time) and launched a bid for world domination. It looked for a while like it might work - his single, Too Many Broken Hearts, was actually number one in the charts on my 18th birthday. That cunt.

See, the thing is, homos at the time were absolutely obssessed with him. They loved his softly square jaw, his floppy blonde hair and his cute little ass. His videos would play in every gay club I went to. Every free gay magazine that I hid under my mattress had him on the cover or elsewhere in its pages. He was everywhere, like proverbial shit in a field.

There was a big problem, though. I absolutely fucking hated him. His music sucked balls. He was creepily clean cut looking and I found him, to be honest, pretty repulsive. I liked men. Men with beer guts and beards and big arms and legs and gruff voices. And this started to worry me because, in Liverpool, it seemed as though there was no-one else alive that liked the same things that I did. Even my best friends loved Jason. I actually began to wonder whether I was really gay at all.

Let me repeat that. I actually began to wonder whether I was really gay at all.

So I pretended to like Jason Donovan. I even stuck a picture of him on my bedroom wall (only a little one, and it was on the other side of the piano where I couldn't see it most of the time, but it was there nonetheless) as a way of proving to myself that I really was a proper, fully fledged homo after all. And this seemed to work. It was harmless, didn't really affect me in any real way and, in a vague fashion, reassured me that I could grow up liking men.

Then something happened. I met someone called Mark who went to theatre school in Liverpool (oh, you faggots!) I found him fascinating. He was into Talking Heads and They Might Be Giants (who no-one except me was into at the time - this was even before Birdhouse In Your Soul). He read Sylvia Plath and Thomas Hardy. He was the same age as me, but he had his own flat (on the same street John Lennon had grown up in) and didn't speak to his parents anymore. He had a double bed and loads of us would be allowed to get completely fucked up on booze and weed and then crash out on it.

And he would secretly wank me off under the covers while we were all there.

And he was desperate to be my boyfriend.

And he looked just like (and I mean JUST like) Jason Donovan. Aw, shoot!

I gamely resisted for quite a long time. Thing is, I liked him a lot. We made each other laugh and we always felt invincible together when we were staggering through Toxteth at 2am. At Jodie's, the club we used to go to, we were known as a very strange double act. Me, the strange little indie kid in paisley shirts and Smiths T-Shirts, and Mark, the prettiest boy in the club who everyone wanted to do. But they couldn't, because he was too busy getting me and him off our heads on pills and trying to do me. But I resisted. And then I resisted some more. And, after a while, I started to feel like my resolve couldn't hold out forever and I would have to be his boyfriend or lose him.

And then fate intervened.

It was the weekend after my 18th birthday. We were there at Jodie's as usual, celebrating. Probably dancing to Jason Donovan when I felt someone rubbing up against me. This was Phil. he was 36, taller than me, with a beard and a beer belly. He told me he wanted to take me home and do bad things to me. He actually said "do bad things to you". I didn't let him, of course. But I did nosh him off in the bogs. And Mark knew I did. And never spoke to me again.

Which sort of broke my heart. But it did prove to me that I was a proper gay after all. And I took all the pictures off my bedroom wall and replaced them with my own paintings. And never looked back.

And now? Now my boyfriend is called Mark. And he looks absolutely nothing like Jason Donovan. So, try as he might, Jason was not able to ruin my life. Though he got repaid in spades for trying. He went on to sue The Face magazine for saying he was gay. The magazine went out of business as a result of it. But he ended up looking like a rampant and lunatic homophobe and everyone hated him after that.

And, in case you were wondering, I DO have a favourite Kylie song. It's Come Into My World. I think it's lovely.

Enjoy the silence.

CAUGHT IN A TRAP

Hello boys and girls. Time for my reviews of the albums of the year. Enjoy the clips!!



THE ELSE - THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS



Who would have thought that They Might Be Giants could team up with The Dust Brothers and come up with something amazing. Well, to be fair, I probably would have thought that all along, but this is still pretty amazing. Their last studio album, The Spine, was a pretty hit and miss affair - it seemed to be cobbled together from bits and pieces and outtakes. This one is a hella more coherent. Many of the songs are built on loops and breaks, giving them a kind of menacing and slightly dirty feeling - very very different to TMBG's cutesy reputation. Highlights include Bee Of The Bird of The Moth (featuring an original Rolf Harris Stylophone, given to the band by BBC Radio 2 DJ Jonathan Ross), the Dust Brothers and crazy brass heavy Withered Hope and this song, the album's opener, I'm Impressed. And I am.




OVERPOWERED - ROISIN MURPHY



This is Roisin Murphy's second solo album and it's a bloody blinder. I think of it as being kind of like anti-opera (much as I love a bit of opera!) because it is, on the face of it, pure style over substance, but there are so many deeper levels to it. The title track, Overpowered (the video for which is below) is a stylish electro tune with lyrics about hormones and chemistry and hidden depths. Second single Let Me Know is a complete and utter 80s piano house romp, but it draws you in. There's even a bit of 90s cheese in there with the song about (possibly) porn called Movie Star. None of it is going to win the Pullitzer Prize, but I know from DJing experience that this shit really gets people dancing. Buy it now. You owe it to yourselves.




CROSS - JUSTICE




My album of late summer. This is largely due to the fact that I saw the band do a live set at La Route Du Rock Festival in St Malo, France. An amazing night if ever there was one. Even the fact that my friend Katty got knocked out and sent to the hospital tent while they were playing didn't stop me dancing. Even the fact that I had lost my other half somewhere and was on my own with a load of French people didn't ruin my enjoyment of it. I'm all heart like that, you see! Standout tracks include the duet with Uffie, The Party, which is pure sleaze, the absolutely brilliant electro funk of DVNO and the pure genius of this track, D.A.N.C.E.



FANTASTIC PLAYROOM - NEW YOUNG PONY CLUB




Another Route Du Rock moment, although I'd been salivating at their stuff for a long time on Myspace. New Young Pony Club came onstage before headliners, C.S.S. Let me just say right now that C.S.S. are one of my very favourite acts for years. I'd been looking forward to seeing them live for months. But as soon as New Young Pony Club had finished their set, Mark and I decided that we didn't want to see anymore. C.S.S. would have just seemed lame in comparison, and I didn't want that to be my experience of seeing them live. Do I regret that now? Yeah, kind of. But I HEARD C.S.S. as we staggered back to the campsite on mushrooms (uh oh) and that was an awesome enough experience in itself. Some people say the two bands are fairly similar. In a way that's true. Judge for yourself with this song, Ice Cream.





THE CASKET LETTERS - MONKEY SWALLOWS THE UNIVERSE




In 2006 Mark and I went to Sheffield on some nasty business. To chillout in the evening we decided to go to Club NME, not really expecting much except some crap bands and cheap beer. What we got were Monkey Swallows The Universe, a band so amazingly beautiful that we had tears in our eyes. We even blagged our way backstage to ask them if they would be interested in coming to play in Jersey. We knew we NEEDED to see them live again. Somehow we never quite managed to get that together (even though the band were keen) and, with the release of this album and their growing profile, I don't think this is likely to happen really. So maybe another trip to Sheffield on some more pleasant business will be in order in the future. Anyway, I think that this lot have, in the future, the potential to become my favourite band of all time. I'll let the very beautiful song Science speak for itself.

LIKE, TOTALLY BONE!

Greetings one and all. Been a marvellous Christmas and all that - drank and ate too much (as usual), had some ups and some downs and even some major dramas. And I've sat around and read a few blogs and realised that the most successful ones weren't trying to be clever - they were just generously written accounts of people's lives. So I decided that I need to have a bit more of that in my blog - so here's my account of some ups, some downs and some major dramas.

I did bloody well for Christmas presents, considering that I'm getting on a bit. My lovely fella bought me a huge bottle of Lolita Lempicka, a Chaka Khan T-Shirt (I did want that!!), a book and a box of kites - 366 kites to be exact - one to build for every day in 2008 (which is a leap year). Considering that we live on a beach, that's a pretty bloody awesome present. I also got various assorted bottles of booze and a really beautiful patchwork quilt, which are things that I have always loved - probably something to do with my obssession with all things Americana. And Emo made us a bottle of chilli oil, which was sweet and lovely and helped with Christmas dinner no end.

Later on Christmas Day we went to a party at our friends Ben and Stavros' flat. Some douchebag with terrible dyed hair (I won't name him because he doesn't deserve the infamy, but I will say that he has not accepted the fact that ginger hair looks loads better than ginger roots in a dyed black bouffe!) made a very homophobic comment to me. Cunt. He's done this before too. Anyway - Mark proceeded to try to beat him up. Probably not that good an idea, but I still love him for it. Since then I've been getting loads of messages of support from people on Facebook and Myspace and the like, telling me that this bloke is a knobhead through and through. So MEH to him.

Boxing Day we had our cocktail party. Complete and utter carnage. Several people fell down the stairs, random strangers got off with each other and someone decided it was a good idea to put Absinthe in the punch. I was watching people, completely sober, go up and take one small glass of punch and go from sober to steaming in ten seconds. In the end I decided that it really was a case of if you can't beat them join them! Don't remember much about the latter part of the party, but I do know that I was talking to my friend Lucy in a completely incoherent Ulster accent about CLOWN SHOES for about an hour. Then I collapsed. Everyone else left about 5:30am in the end. The next morning the house looked as if an episode of Skins had been filmed in it (see the video below for an explanation of that, non UK peops!) It was all good. All worth it. But I am really looking forward to a completely sober few months in 2008.

The really big Boxing Day dramas happened hundreds of miles away, in my home village of Bispham Green, though. And those dramas are haunting me still. There are two people I used to know called John and Jeanne. I was friendly with them and in the case of one of them I was very friendly. I won't say any more about them, except to say that it all turned nasty and we ended up falling out big time. I was very hurt by it all at the time and felt as though I would never be able to turn my life around, but I did - I moved on, found a man I adore and live in a place far away that is beautiful and suits me down to the ground. I have had no contact with them at all for nearly four years. But it seems as though they are unable to move one. Jeanne's sister decided to attack my sister in law, Sarah, on Boxing Day. It all turned really nasty and my brother, Ian, hit John. And knocked his front teeth out. I was really shocked by this, but then it turns out that John and Jeanne and co have been threatening and abusing my family for months. And I can see absolutely no reason why. Maybe there are reasons and Ian and Sarah just haven't told me about them to protect me.

But Ian was arrested today. The police have told him that it sounds as though he was provoked and that he would probably get a caution. But they can't guarantee that. So it's all kind of up in the air and I feel a bit numb that something that I though was ancient history is still haunting my life in various ways. We'll just have to keep our fingers crossed that the situation doesn't get any worse.

So - yeah - that was my little account of the last few days. Quite therapeutic actually. Expect some more rambling, random thoughts soon.

And now, Skins.

MAKE MINE A SKINNY DECAFF LATTE

I've not written anything for a while, which kind of annoys me because I started out with really good intentions. But, meh. I've just been watching a Channel 4 show about women's sex blogs, and that has inspired me to get the keyboard out again, which is kind of ironic, but here we go...

So there was this woman, who wrote, under the pseudonym Abbey Lee, a blog called Girl With A One Track Mind. This blog, by all accounts, documented her sexual frustrations, fantasies and misadventures throughout 2004. Eventually she was exposed by a tabloid newspaper as being a nice middle class Jewish girl who worked in the film industry. Tabloid newspapers think, of course, that nice middle class Jewish girls thinking about sex is front page news.

Anyway - on this programme, an array of former bluestockings now running clit-lit magazines and lipstick lesbians, twatted on about how Girl With A One Track Mind was revolutionary because it showed the whole world that women do think about sex. It challenged the prevailing view in society that women are not sexual beings and it said to me "Hey, you guys! We've got news for you! Women like fucking too! Get over it, losers!" This is, of course, the very worst kind of Channel 4 style lazy journalism, made by people with Cultural / Women's / Media Studies degrees. And it's a load of complete and utter total and absolute bollocks.

Firstly, there is no groundswell of opinion amongst the male population that women don't like fucking. Just the opposite, in fact. I think most straight men I know have an over inflated sense of how much women think about sex. They like to think that most women are up for it all the time. I think this probably isn't true, but men convince themselves that it is and it's what stops them losing all hope.

Secondly, where I grew up, there was never any demonstrable way in which women's sexuality is supressed in the way that these University Sex Kittens would like to think it is. Women in working men's clubs in Wigan are more than happy to say "Nice arse, love!" and grab a fella's butt - and no man they do that too is likely to be shocked. They're not likely to get raped because of it either - though if they both fancy each other, it could end in a nice fuck!

The only reason that these Katie Puckrick lookalikes think that this doesn't happen is because they really want to be Betty Page but they're stuck with being...well...erm...Katie Puckrick. Which is likely to be a cock block for any man, I would have thought.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the kind of women who are remotely impressed by this academic nonsense about women's sexuality fall into two camps. Either they are academic types themselves, who see an opportunity to tubthump about yet another oppression of women - or they are nice middle class women, who hide the fact that their biological clock is ticking away by pretending that they are fiercely sexual and predatory and not at all interested in marriage and children, when, in actual fact, what they really care about is making sure that they can have skinny milk in their lattes. And decaff too. Or even soya. No - not soya. Make that rice milk - because Gillian McKeith says that rice milk is better.

I think that the sad truth is that women have gone from being oppressed by a patriarchal state apparatus, to being viciously and relentlessly oppressed by each other. You only have to glance through the pages of Cosmopolitan to know that this is the case. The basic ethos of this dreadful rag (and many others like it) can be summed up thus: men are all bastards, they are only fit to be mocked and manipulated by their female superiors - but here's how to get one anyway. Or thus: It's okay to be fat - look how cool Dawn French is. She's funny and successful and amazing. But her clothing range is shit. All clothes bigger than a size twelve are shit. So give up chocolate and wheat and dairy and fat and sugar and alcohol - drink a soya decaff latte. But it's cool when a man buys you chocolate. Even better if it's a chocolate cake. With cream. At the staff do - where you can get really drunk on champagne and shag the office hunk. Who won't fancy you in the New Year when you are a fat munter who can't fit into her fabulous Karen Millen dress anymore. So you'll have to go back to the soya decaff lattes again. You see how ridiculously circular this all is?

Of course, there are some feminists who say that the real people behind this new oppression of women are fatcat capitalists who want to sell things. They're right, of course. But women are not stupid - and there are plenty of reasonable voices saying to them "Come on, girls! Don't buy into this bollocks anymore!" Look at French women - they eat cheese and bread - they drink wine - they can even get red wine and steak on prescription when they're feeling a little depressed. But they have a healthy approach to food and sex and life. So they do nothing to excess. Consequently they're as sexy as fuck for the most part.

So here is my sex blog advice to my female friends - if you think that sex blogs or soft core porn written by women who wear way too much red lipstick are sexy, then you aren't; if you insist on skinny or soya milk in your coffee, then you're frigid; if you read Cosmo and take seriously absolutely anything you read in it then you will be getting divorced before your kids finish University. Eat cream. Give blow jobs. Gorge on chocolate. Find your G spot. Have a fucking massive sarnie, for fuck's sake!!!

MUSIC ISN'T MY LIFE

Music is my life. It's something that you see on countless social networking site profiles everywhere. People say it and I'm not sure what it means. So I've been thinking alot about it lately and I've come to the conclusion that music isn't my life at all.

But let's get one thing clear from the outset. I love music. It enriches my existence more than I can possibly say. An example - yesterday I had my ipod on shuffle and Nothing But Flowers by Talking Heads came on - a song I would never have specifically picked to listen to. And then I heard the lyrics:

Years ago I was an angry young man I'd pretend that I was a billboard. Standing tall by the side of the road I fell in love with the beautiful highway.

It literally made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. There couldn't be a more thoughtful, caring, poetic, generous admonishment to tubthumping youngsters anywhere. And all this set to Johnny Marr's glorious guitar, ringing like a bell, coupled with the best rhythm section in rock history. Make no mistake - every single day there are moments when music fills me with complete and utter joy and love.

But music isn't my life. In fact - there are moments when I just want it to go away. I hate it on a Sunday morning, for example. I just want quiet. I'd rather listen to the sound of the waves when I'm walking on the beach. I like to go drinking in places where there is no music, just the gentle hum of conversation and the chinking of glasses occasionally. And is there anything more irritating than being forced to listen to music that you despise? Well, yes, of course there is, but sometimes it doesn't feel like it. At the moment my bugbear is that (I think) Killers song with the line it's indie rock 'n' roll to me. There are few things in the cultural world more lame than that song. And that's another reason why music isn't my life - though I hate that song and hate it when colleagues at work put it on, it doesn't inspire huge feelings of ire in me. I don't really mind - I know that it will be over in four minutes at the most and then I can forget about it.

You hear people who act as though it really is the apocalypse when they are forced to listen to a song they don't like - or even a song they don't know. These are usually people who like to use music as a weapon - to prove to people how much cooler than everybody else they are. Sorry - but music can't do that. Liking Devo doesn't make you cool - Devo are cool, but you aren't. There are millions of Devo fans all over the world (including me) and they can't all be the coolest person ever. Fact of life I'm afraid. Conversely, thinking that the end of the third act of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro is one of the most sublime musical inventions ever (as I do) does not make me naff. I reckon the only people who would think it does would be people who haven't heard it and who don't want to hear it. That just makes me more musically literate than you, I'm afraid.

So. No. Music isn't my life. I'd hate to have to live without it, but it's not that high up on the list of things I would rather die than give up. I fell in love with the beautiful highway, I'm afraid.