Kate Bush Collection
Now, see, your average Scaryduck likes to put up a video every weekend on that common-or-garden website of his and a video – in the singular – is okay for your run-of-the-mill viewer but over here we like to go one better(*) and grace your eyeballs and earballs with three videos. That’s how we roll. With rumours of a Kate Bush release (that sounds dirty, but it isn’t) later this year it seems appropriate for the lazy-minded (me) to supply the beautiful people (you) with a trio of her music videos (these): Experiment IV with Hugh Laurie, Dawn French, and Peter Vaughan Sat In Your Lap with Disco Ku Klux Klan! Them Heavy People John Woo learnt everything he knows from Kate’s fight scene (*) Three is not one better than...
Vintage Industrial Collection
A small selection of vintage pioneers and influences of industrial music. Perfect listening for a Sunday morning after the Saturday evening before which turned out to be the tail-end of athe Saturday afternoon that began with beer on the stroke of midday. What I’m saying is: I’ve got a hangover. Cabaret Voltaire – Sensoria Ministry – Over The Shoulder Roxy Music –...
Eurovision
Well, it’s the Eurovision Song Contest final tonight so I’ll be drinking and mocking and adoring the spectacle and coming over all nostalgic for when the show was really great back in the 1970s. And with that thought – and with this one: I really should update this site more often – why not present a selection of "classic" (or, more accurately, "random") videos of Eurovision’s yesteryear? I can’t think of a reason why not; after all, it’s a lazy way to refresh the site’s home page and video embedding will slow down the render time to a crawl when YouTube has one of its inevitable funny five minutes annoying any passing or potentially regular (who knows?) visitors so that’s the double whammy of excellence in my view. It might even kickstart my brain into thinking of new things to write so I can push this post off the front of the site sooner rather than later. You never know. Stranger things have happened. Never say never. Too many cooks spoil the bird in the hand. And so on. 1970s Eurovision Song Contest Videos… ACTIVATE! Helen & Joseph (full names Helen Micallef and Joseph Cutajar) performing ‘L’imhabba’, the Maltese entry at the 1972 Eurovision Song Contest. I would kill for that shirt. Jacques Raymond and Lily Castel performing ‘Goeiemorgen,Morgen’ (Good Morning, Morning), the Belgian entry at the 1971 Eurovision Song Contest. A bit of a Diana Rigg look going on there from Lily. Nice. Anne Karine Strom performing ‘Mata Hari’, the Norwegian entry at the 1976 Eurovision Song Contest. If, like me, you’re always forgetting just when it was that one-piece gold trouser suits and glasses with lenses the size of grapefruits was in fashion then here’s a helpful reminder that it was 1976. Chocolate Menta Mastik performing ‘Emor Shalom’ (Say Hello), the Israeli entry at the 1976 Eurovision Song Contest. Let’s bypass the awesomeness that is the awesome name of Chocolate Menta Mastik and concentrate on the three women performing this song instead: stunning choreography (I was stunned) and faces that are somehow more disturbing than those multi-mouthed, quad-eyed singers from Battlestar Galactica equals major win. Nicole and Hugo performing ‘Baby, Baby’, the Belgian entry at the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest. Classic. Who doesn’t look good in purple? Nobody, that’s who. Fun fact: Phil Spector was so influenced by this song that he stole a white afro wig from one of the backing singers. The Les Humphries Singers performing ‘Sing Sang Song’, the German entry at the 1976 Eurovision Song Contest. Nonsense lyrics, no coordination in the clothing, not even a semblance of dance choreography or even the...
MP3 Song Cover Art Thing
MP3 Song Cover Art Thing (MP3 SCAT… no, that’s horrible… I’ll call it MP3 Friend instead)… MP3 Friend version 0.1 (the 0.1 means I haven’t spent much time working on it) is a little Windows application I knocked up over the weekend in order to turn these: into these: Firstly, if you don’t know what they are then let me explain that the first image is the image you see in Windows Media Player when the song you’re playing doesn’t have any embedded cover art whereas the second is an example of some album cover art for an MP3. Secondly, my application does not add the cover art for Bert Kaempfert’s A Swingin’ Safari to every song without art because that way lies madness. Here was my issue: I had a lot of MP3s and a great many of them didn’t have any cover art. It was unpleasing to my eyes. So… I had a look online for a utility that would get the cover art automatically for MP3s. I was quickly disappointed. And that’s why I whipped up my own. The application makes use of the excellent UltraID3Lib.dll to scan and update the MP3s and uses the rather lovely Last.fm API in order to try to work out what cover art to grab. Here’s what my little MP3 Friend does… adds cover art to your MP3s based on the files’ artist and album or track title tags allows you to delete cover art from one or more MP3s at a time allows you to edit the artist, track, or album text for one or more MP3s at a time works on Windows 7 and Vista (because I checked) and it probably works on XP with .Net 3.5 installed too (but who knows?) And here’s what my little MP3 Friend does not do… guarantee any accuracy of results returned (the first, best match is applied, and it’s pretty good most of the time but it’s not always right because it’s nearly wholly reliant on Last.fm supplying correctly-weighted search results) work 100% of the time (expect the odd exception raised with badly formed MP3 tags; I might address them in version 0.2 if you’re lucky) or utilise worker threads to slickify (it’s a word) things look attractive (damnit Jim I’m a developer not an artist) work very fast (there’s a reason for this: I deliberately throttle the requests to Last.fm so as not to abuse their service) Here’s how to use MP3 Friend: 1. Install it from here – setup.exe – and ignore any warnings about it being unsigned (I didn’t sign it) or it being perhaps untrustworthy (I have...
Song Subjects: Where Are They Now?
Musicians and songwriters are a lazy bunch of nogoodniks; when they’re not writing or singing about love then they’re almost inevitably writing or singing about a person. Where are the songs about giraffes flying blimps? Where are the songs about streetlamp demons unable to find late-night pharmacies on a Sunday? Call themselves artists? Rubbish! There’s no bloody art in doing the same piece over and over again. Do you think the people at the Louvre would replace their perfectly overrated Mona Lisa every time some nobody with a PR team from Warner turned up and said "This spunky, fresh, exciting teenager has just produced a spunky, fresh, exciting copy of the Mona Lisa but brought it up-to-date with a spunky, fresh, exciting, street look that only people of no taste would mistake for talentless crayoning"? No, they wouldn’t. That’s possibly because they’re French and obstinate but the point stands. I’m going off on a tangent. Let’s get back to what I was going to talk about: people in music. Songs have been written and performed about people for decades. Occasionally, those people-centric ditties are fabricated entities in their entirety. Works of fiction. Musical pieces with dribbles of imagination. Most often, however, the songs are about genuine people that the writers have known in real life. You may be wondering: "I wonder, in my current state of wonderment, just what wonderful thing has happened to the wonderful people mentioned in those wonderful (sometimes) songs." If you’re not wondering that after all the effort I’ve gone to to put that thought into your head then you should probably stop reading now. Sister Sledge – He's The Greatest DancerUploaded by PeteRock Sister Sledge – He’s The Greatest Dancer From The Song: This funky disco song – sampling heavily from Will Smith’s Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It – never tells us The Greatest Dancer’s actual name but we do learn from it that the dancer liked dancing in San Francisco, had a great body, attractive face, wore designer clothes from the likes of Gucci and Fiorucci, and never left the disco alone. After The Song: Obviously, the greatest dancer was a flaming homosexual. After the song’s release he continued to dance and wow everyone until his abilities started to wane, the result of a hard-to-clear bout of pneumonia. He became known at this time as The Greatest Early Sufferer Of Gay-Related Immune Deficiency and, later, The Greatest HIV-Sufferer. Nowadays, he’s better known as The Greatest Corpse. ***bee_gees__more_than_a_woman***Uploaded by maverick0808 Bee Gees – More Than A Woman From The Song: Controversy has always courted the songs of the brothers Gibb, writers of this track featured...
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