Park Live

At the point in British pop-culture when it was imperative that one chose between Blur and Oasis, I chose Blur. In Manchester in 1995, this was an interesting and perhaps hazardous choice. However, looking at the post-Britpop careers of the two bands, I'm pretty sure I made the right choice. Thanks to my sister, we got tickets to the first of the Blur gigs in Hyde Park on Thursday last week. Because it was really hot in London that day, and because the support acts were so disappointing (The Foals? Friendly Fires? Where are all Damon's world music mates when you need them?) we decided to turn up pretty late in the day, about seven. This worked pretty well, with the heat starting to die off as we arrived, although we also managed to make our usual error in going to the wrong tube station and having to walk the long way round to the entrance.

I confess to not really having followed the ins and outs of the Blur breakup when it happened, so my sister filled me in on the fact that it was Coxon vs. everyone else. Also discussed was how Damon had gone from being reviled in the mid-90s to pretty popular today, while Alex James is now apparently hated for for owning a dairy and writing about it in The Observer. It just goes to show though: someone should have told Jackson that all he needed to do was spend a decade pretending to be an animated character and writing elaborate stage shows about monkeys, and all would have been forgiven.

Once inside we grabbed a beer and headed into the crowd to get a good spot in what turned out to be a very big crowd indeed. As ever, the crowd itself provided all the needed entertainment before the band comes on. On particularly good form were two guys stood just behind us:

[Roadies wheel a big trolly of equipment onto the stage]

MAN 1: Maybe Damon's going to come on early and do some of his solo stuff?

MAN 2: I think everyone would get tired of Dub Reggae pretty quickly.

Then, a bit later:

MAN 1: (Observing the big map of Britain to the right of the stage) What's that island between Britain and Ireland?

MAN 2: I dunno, but I reckon we should go and check it out.

I hope they do, but I can't help but feel that they'll only be disappointed.

We've been to festivals and gigs in Hyde Park for a few years now, and what surprised us this time was the amount of plastic bottle-throwing, which started prior to the band coming on and continued throughout the evening. It reached epidemic proportions just before Blur took to the stage, and was oddly impressive, like a low-budget fireworks display. Also it was fun to imagine Blur cowering backstage, thinking "Oh God, is our comeback going to vanish under a hail of empty Tuborg bottles?"

Fortunately this failed to happen, and a cheerful and slightly dazed-seeming Albarn and the rest entered from the right. Albarn's somewhat garbled take on things was a main feature of the evening - comparable to seeing The Who a few years ago, but Townsend and Daltry have the excuse that they're now nearly a thousand years old. My favourite piece of incomprehensible banter from Damon? "At one point during this song I'm going to start running towards you, and I want you all to literally run towards me...literally, but not physically." What?

My era of Blur was really "The Great Escape", because I preferred them pretending to be The Kinks rather than pretending to be Pavement. What turned out to be one of my highlights of the evening came pretty early on, with a thumping, up-tempo version of "Girls and Boys": parody of Ibiza dance doing a pretty good job of being the real thing.

Perhaps it was the heat, or the size of the crowd, but the twat-ratio seemed to be higher than previous Hyde Park gigs we'd been to - witness the bottle throwing, but also one guy stood near us who, before nearly every song, shouted "PLAY THE ELVIS ONE!" Bizarrely, it turned out that this meant "Tender is the Night". No, I don't know why, either.

Tender is the night was very popular with the crowd, who continued to sing "Oh my baby/Oh my baby/Oh why/Oh my" for a short time after the song had finished. This did not go down well on stage, and Albarn responded with "If you want to carry on singing, could you leave the park and go down the road a bit?" Gracious as ever, Damo!

All the big hits were played, with people going absolutely fucking mental for "Song 2", causing a guy just to my left, who had a bag full of Graham Coxon flyers he was giving out, to desperately dive around saving the bag from beneath people's feet. "Coffee and TV" was enjoyed in a more sedate way, and it was only when Coxon introduced it that I realised that I'd somehow made it all the way through the 90s without realising that he has a really silly speaking voice. Maybe that's what drove him to drink?

"Park Life" obviously, was the centrepiece of the set, for which Phil Daniels joined the band on stage for simian-style mockney-dancing. Damon also told us that Hyde Park was the inspiration for the song, because he'd lived just around the corner in the early 90s.

The encore closed with "The Universal", always one of my favourites, although unlike the video there were no Clockwork Orange references forthcoming from the stage. It was a great way to finish - after all, it is now the next century...

WE really enjoyed the whole thing, and given the amount of energy expended by Albarn and the band it might be a good thing that we were there on the first night, because they must have been knackered on the Friday. I'd certainly be interested in new Blur album, if one's in the offing.

Teaching Greek Pottery To The Inbetweeners

Well, this week saw me doing a little outreach work for the department, by giving the Greek pottery session that I do for the undergraduates to classes of Sixth-Form students, in the hope that it'll encourage them to come here and do archaeology. It's a tough balance to strike: you want to be upbeat and friendly, but it's very easy to slip into doing this to nightmarish levels - see Graham Norton's character of the Youth Group Priest in Father Ted for reference.

it seemed to go pretty well. Despite the title of the post, the groups were really good, and I'd have been happy to have had them as an Undergraduate class.

My other work at the moment sees me writing a chapter on Bronze Age warfare in Italy and the Balkans. This has involved mechanically translating five books out of German, then making notes on the translation. Still, I now know an awful lot about the bronze swords of Hungary and Romania. I look forward to listing that as a skill to someone at the Job Centre.

You Can't Help Being Hard Up/Can't Trust The Gods We Trusted

There is, of course, a question as to whether I can afford the time or the money to go and see them. There's also a question as to whether I can afford to *not* have the bass line to "At Home He's a Tourist" echo around my ribcage.

Waiting For The Tanks

Found here, a "new" photograph of a familiar and moving scene. Remarkable.

Disaster Response

In a spectacularly good coincidence last week, Channel 4 had George Romero's The Crazies (1973) on, which I had heard of but hadn't seen before. The premise of the film is that a virus causing homicidal insanity has accidentally become loose in a small town in America. In a sense, what we have is a zombie film without any zombies.

Being made in-between Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), Romero clearly had very little money to spend on this, and it has that look that all low-budget 70s horror films seem to. What sets The Crazies apart from those films is Romero's more sophisticated take on the situation: the problem isn't so much the virus, but more the incompetent and heavy-handed response from the authorities.

I see from IMDB that an inevitable remake should be out next year. The core concept certainly has potential for a bigger budget remake, but I have a suspicion that, like the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, the badly flawed original will remain the more interesting piece.

Why I Hate Saturn

I recently aquired a scanner for the purposes of OCRing foreign-language papers and then running them through an automatic translator, rather than actually being able to read foreign languages like proper academics do. One spin-off from the purchase is that it came with a gadget to let you scan slides.

Now, unlike most people I know, I do actually have some slides - the product of spending your teenage years taking photos of the night sky, rather than doing something healthier, like talking to girls.

So, for the first time on the internet, some of the results. First up, Comet C/1996 B2 Hyakutake:

Then, a bit later, Comet C/1995 O1 Hale-Bopp:





With the constellation Cassiopeia



Taken slightly later, you can see that the tail has changed shape as the comet changes position relative to the sun

Walled In

[River Deep-Mountain High] was the simulacrum of all Spector's grandiosity, his overarching ambition; it was all his passion, his thirst for revenge and his madness. It was a record that swept you up into its particular psychosis and left you stunned and exhausted in its wake. You could be enthralled by it, but you could never love it.

- Mick Brown, Tearing Down The Wall Of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector (2007)

Second-degree murder is, I suspect, a pretty accurate reflection of what happened. I was curious in the media reports of the verdict that Spector was described as having a history of threatening women with guns - this is true, but only in the sense that he had a history of threatening people in general with guns, The Ramones only being the most famous example.

This isn't to say, of course, that Spector's relationship with women wasn't extremely odd. That much was testified in the music, going right the way back to the beginning: tell me that there isn't something a little strange about the last line of "Spanish Harlem".

All in all, yet another case of someone being a great artist and a terrible human being.