Category: [Music]

Well would you look at THAT

I spotted this on Bluesky a couple of months ago but I’ve been oddly slack about posting it here. I don’t know exactly where or when this was taken, though there is, shall we say, a certain sign of the times in it… but obviously we know who that is in the shot, young man by the unlikely name of Elvis Aaron Presley, captured in his godlike youth. Also there’s some black dude at the edge of the frame, and some other guy looking astonished in a door frame. Hard to tell what had him more transfixed here; was it the culture-changing hip-shaking icon he’d probably seen on TV, or was it THAT GODDAMN DARKIE behind him, walking about in public as if he had a right to be there? Hard to tell from the angle, but I feel it might as easily have been the latter as the former…

The queen is deaf

Morrissey cancels Valencia concert after being left in ‘catatonic state’ by city noise

British singer Morrissey has cancelled a concert in Valencia after being left sleep-deprived during the city’s notoriously noisy Las Fallas festival.
A statement on his website said: “Having travelled for two days by road, Morrissey reached the hotel in Valencia late on Wednesday. Any form of sleep or rest throughout the night was impossible due to festival noise/loud techno singing/megaphone announcements.”
The statement went on to say that “this experience has left Morrissey in a catatonic state”, and that he would not be performing.
Morrissey is due to perform in two other Spanish cities, Zaragoza and Seville, on 14 and 16 March respectively.
His team insisted that the Valencia concert hadn’t been cancelled but that “circumstances made it impossible to perform”. The singer produced recordings of the noise to justify the decision. The cheapest tickets for tonight’s scheduled show at Valencia’s Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia cost €103 (£88).
In a later communique, Morrissey wrote that his hotel was an “indescribable hell. It will take me one year to recover. And that is an understatement.”

Well if he’s going to need that much time to get over this attack of the vapours, that doesn’t bode well for those other two Spanish shows, does it? As the article notes, he’s booked 21 shows to promote this new album of his and he’s already cancelled five and postponed a sixth, which I’m sure will be properly called off in due course. Never change, Steven Patrick…

They seem oddly unimpressed

A headline and a half all right… yeah, definitely feels like the Dundee Evening Telegraph aren’t Kasabian fans (they lost me after they kicked out their songwriting guitarist while making the second album, and I never found them that interesting again). Or at least not domestic violence fans, at any rate. The gig’s not until May next year, too, so I don’t know why it’s being advertised now; I could understand someone like Taylor Swift announcing a show this far in advance, but Tom Meighan? Don’t get it…

Second Best

This would be a kind of desolate photo anyway, but it’s even more so when you know that’s Jimmy Nicol, temporary Beatle… that’s him at Melbourne airport after completing his task of filling in for Ringo on the Fabs’ mid-1964 tour when the latter was ill; once he was good to go again, Nicol was good to go back to the UK and obscurity. I found this on Threads via the Flashbak account there, and some of the commenters on that post were kind of swooning about what a great experience that must’ve been and how he’d always be able to say he’d been a Beatle. And I was interested to discover George Harrison actually threatened to pull out of the tour if Ringo couldn’t play; once they’d calmed him down and all agreed that getting someone to take Ringo’s place was better than just cancelling those shows, Jimmy was brought on board as the ringer for Ringo (sorry).

But what good did it do him? Piss all, apparently; he went from being a relative nobody to the fame of being Ringo’s stunt double and being huge for ten days and then pretty much back to relative nobodyness. Nine months after his Beatles stint, he was bankrupt. Apparently when Paul McCartney read this news, he was moved enough to get him a gig with Peter and Gordon on their 1965 tour, and that seems to have been all he otherwise got from the Beatles. By and large it seems he’d rather forget having been a Beatle, and apparently when he was approached to be part of the Anthology he refused. Per Wiki, he’s apparently still alive but hasn’t been seen in public since the early 2010s. And that photo just became so much grimmer after I’d done that bit of reading on him.

A thousand lights look at you

I’ve always been a bit iffy about the Stooges, in that I think they never made a fully successful album (never heard The Weirdness nor Ready to Die, admittedly), though you’d have a great best-of made from the highlights of the first three albums. On re-listening to Fun House this evening, I may have to revise that somewhat. I have it on CD but I listened to it a ripped-from-vinyl form tonight, a rip of the new Rhino High Fidelity repress obtained from my usual hush-hush sources… and while I’m still not perhaps 100% convinced, it worked a lot better for me in this form than it ever has before. There’s a coherence and consistency and direction to it I don’t think I’ve entirely appreciated before. I also played it at somewhat higher volume than I normally do, which possibly made a difference. Maybe that’s what I should’ve done all along.

Whatever, it is awfully pleasant to revisit something you’ve known for years and find you like it more than you did before, though I do still think “TV Eye” should’ve been the opening track. The band wanted “Loose” to be the opener, and I understand that, but the record label preferred “Down on the Street”. And with all due respect, both parties were wrong; Iggy shouting “LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORD!” the way he does would’ve been a hell of a way to kick off proceedings, kind of like if the Beatles had ended Abbey Road with “I Want You”…

I forgot to mention this…

Screenshot from Facebook a couple of weeks ago by my friend Matt who, frankly, had the best response to the news. Another friend commented that she’d heard the song and was initially convinced it was a generative AI parody, so I had to listen to it myself, and GODDAMN genAI parodies should feel insulted by that comparison. It is THAT terrible. But the album is evidently not the one he’s spent years pissing and moaning about how he can’t get a record label to release it; apparently this is another one entirely, and the idea of self-releasing the other one has never occurred to him even though Capitol Records gave back the rights to it.

Still, at least some things in Mozchester remain reassuringly the same:

When indeed!

I was never a huge fan of They Might Be Giants, at least not enough of one to actively follow their career, hence I never heard this until now. Someone posted it on Bluesky today, and just, FUCK. It is so relevant to the current moment and a certain individual that I can’t believe this song is actually fifteen years old and not actually about That Guy. It predates the full horror of That Guy by years, so much so that he wasn’t even a threat to the world at the time. And yet the question contained in that title is one that I’m sure billions of people keep asking about That Guy every day. Prophetic stuff…

RIP Ace

The Grateful Dead are increasingly living up to the latter half of their name, with the passing of Bob Weir. It must be said that he did pretty well out of that group considering he got kicked out of it briefly early on, though since the rest of the band played under a different name for those gigs without him that meant he still played every show the Grateful Dead ever did…