The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

A vampy, jet-set hologram scoffing Tex Mex nosh

by 11 Comments

This week I was wondering about when the word “teenager” first came into use. I was rather surprised to discover that as early as 1944, a magazine, Seventeen, was started in the US, with teenage girls as the target readers-

Anyway, while doing so, I stumbled across the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s Time Traveller feature. Just enter a year and you can see which new words entered the printed language in the USA that year

A magnificently entertaining and educational time-waster if you are interested in words.

1949, for example, saw the arrival of LP, Modern Hebrew, overnighter, B movie, vampy, hologram, jet-set, drive-through, clock radio, writer’s block, sixpack and Tex Mex.

If you have a dabble, do share your discoveries with us.

I am sure that other on-line dictionaries have similar features. Anyone got any favourites?

It’s time for a fanclub, wasteland, mutant ninja turtle, dirtbag and kicks thread!

by 41 Comments

In this morning’s Guardian there was an article about Big Mouth and Sex Education two Netflix shows about the trials and tribulations of being a modern teenager. I knew about Big Mouth as our teenage son has binge-watched all the episodes and praised it warmly for its no-holds-barred approach to the facts of life. What did I have at his age? Oz magazine and the Maclean’s Biology Coursebook. Reading about frogspawn and tadpoles was an enormous help to me.

Anyway, here’s a thread to hear about your impressions of life as lived by teenagers in 2020. I sometimes reflect on what similarities, if any, there are between his teen years and mine. Not many! Rock and Roll is certainly completely out of the picture. Guitar music is something for oldies. Grime, trap and hip hop are the thing. There are very few points where our musical tastes overlap. We did go to a Kendrick Lamar concert together and both enjoyed it but that’s about it.

Teenagers are a fickle bunch. Biograf Reflexen, the cinema I do vollie work, was recently offered the chance to be the venue for a new film club for teenagers and I was appointed contact person. » Continue Reading.

Lontoolainen Tate Modern hankki Britanniassa asuvan Konttisen lähiökuvat kokoelmiinsa.

by 14 Comments

This morning, my pal Juha in Turku sent me a link to a short BBC archive film from 1974 about Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, a young photographer from Helsinki who had relocated to the town of Ryker, up there in Geordieland. Gradually she got to know the local people and to take photos of them.

Her pictures of the community are rather wonderful, as is the way she describes the locals. “So gentle and caring.” It was a community which was about to change with the demolition of the terraces and the building of new housing.

A quick Google revealed that she is still living up there and still taking warm, very personal photos. Has anyone heard of her?

And has anyone else been browsing through the Beeb’s archives?

I just found an interview John Carpenter from 1979.

And Miss World putting an ad in a newsagent’s window for a husband

Please share your discoveries with us!

Fleabag at your local fleapit

by 55 Comments

About once a month, Reflexen, the local cinema where I am a volunteer, screens live opera direct from the Met in New York. I’ve not been to one of these screenings yet, but they are very popular. Next up is Porgy and Bess, which is very tempting.

Yesterday evening, I joined Mr and Mrs DuCool at the Bio Rio to see the National Theatre production of Fleabag, Phoebe Waller- Bridge’s one-woman which she very brilliantly transformed into the TV series of the same name.

It is the second time I’ve seen “live” theatre at the cinema, the first being One man, Two Guvnors starring James Corden. I was a bit dubious about whether it would work. Both turned out to be thoroughly enjoyable evenings. Yesterday’s performance was not transmitted live but was a recording. To my surprise, it made no difference.

Thanks to modern cinema technology, people from Kiruna to Katmandu, can now enjoy the latest productions from the stages of London, Paris, New York and Grimsby. What’s not to like?

Has anybody else seen theatre or opera at their local cinema?.

I was telling my local greengrocer geezer about it this morning and he was not convinced that it » Continue Reading.

Sewer Robot’s Treasure Map from Lord Lodestone and Little Gary’s Awesome Adventure!

by 62 Comments

If I post anything more on Lodestone’s magnum opus, the 2019 Album Poll thread, I fear it will break the internet. So instead I have created this bastard offspring fan thread.

For the last few days I have been foraging slowly and playfully through all the comments and discovering all kinds of treats. Not only from artists I know well (The Delines,Divine Comedy, Unthanks, Waterboys, Joe Jackson, Sigird. Tove Lo, Bassekou Kouyate, Sarah Klang, Robert Forster, Underworld, Tinariwen, etc), but also from many I have never heard of.

Lorelle meets the Obsolete, for example, was not a promising band name. Got that wrong! A Mexican techno duo whose atmospheric pop I fell for at once.

By contrast International Teachers of Pop was my favourite band name of the week, And their tunes did not disappoint. If the bottom falls out of TEFL and Swedes lose interest in modal verbs, prepositions, the subjunctive voice and cockney rhyming slang, I may send them my CV.

All sorts of interesting titbits emerged on the thread. For instance, I have realised that every music lover in the UK should at some point visit the Northwich Folk Club. The Cheshire Cat has a very lively » Continue Reading.

Welcome to the new Twenties!

by 3 Comments

Those magnificent musicians from the Postmodern Jukebox have been expressing their delight at the arrival of the New Twenties. And if the new decade inspires them to even more wonderful cover versions, I am not complaining.

I’d be inclined to suggest that Scott Bradlee and his colleagues never left the 1920s. They are the perfect houseband from one of Jay Gatsby’s parties, and have just been waiting for the return of the flappers.

So what, if anything are the new 20s like to have in common with the 1920s?

Personally, I would be very happy to see a new Jazz Age and Weimar Republic.

A decade that started full of promise but later went very pear-shaped….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=408Uvz-nNpA&list=PLJZH8sevmMq4kBcfUJmmkXVJ0jX-bS8Nw&index=3&t=0s

All Our Yesteryules ….

by 10 Comments

Xmas! What an orgy of nostalgia Yule tends to be.

And TV programming just encourages our wallowing in memories of Xmas Past.

Morecambe and Wise, Wallace and Gromit, Steptoe and Son, Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Xmas in Wales, The Great Escape, Thatcher and Scargill, the Black and White Minstrel Show, Xmas number ones on TOTP…

We can even get nostalgic about stuff that does not belong to our own personal past. Like this charming Xmas song by Frank Sidebottom.

Now I am a Swede I too can get nostalgic about Scando stuff like My summer with Monica, HasseoTage, Folkhemmet, Fem Myror and Vikings like Erik Bloodaxe.

We are binge watching cult tv kids show 5 Ants today.

Is anyone else indulging in a warm, soothing wallow in a waterhole down Memory Lane?

Or are you making plans for a bright, shiny, Nigelesque, high-tech future?

https://youtu.be/pdnsUIGZPIY

Gråt inte, Greta! Ät din gröt! Greetings from the glens. Your gritter’s going great guns!

by 8 Comments

Forget being named Time Person of the Year. Sweden’s young eco-warrior has received a far greater honour.

Scottish school kids ave voted to name one of the Roads Department winter vehicles after her. Please welcome …… Gritter Thunberg.

Here’s an interactive map that allows you to follow the exploits of Gritty Gonzalez, The Plougher of Scotland, Grittalica and many more,

Previous winners of the Time Person the Year are a motley crew including Stalin, Hitler, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and Middle Americans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDVqM4iueMg

Dreary or Derry? Killing Time or Killing Eve? Grateful Dead or Dead Grateful? And will Parasite turn out to be Marmite

by 5 Comments

Gary was not enthusiastic about those Londonderry Lasses. Grown women playing teenagers did not work for him. I do enjoy the fact that we rarely reach consensus here.

Those of you who did enjoy Derry Girls may be interested in this podcast interview with its creator.

So what else was marmite in 2019? Based on the 2019 TV and film round up, little consensus could be reached on The Irishman, Once upon a time in Hollywood, Killing Eve, Years and Years….

What about music. books etc?

Slightly off piste, here in Sweden, Michael Handke receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature was extremely divisive.

https://player.fm/series/an-irishman-abroad-2361785/lisa-mcgee-episode-326

Farewell Marie Fredriksson

by 26 Comments

Very sad news today to hear about the passing of the Swedish singer, Marie Fredriksson, only 61 years old.I was an enormous fan. I think she was the first artist singing in Swedish that I ever saw in concert here in Stockholm.

If you know of her, it will probably be as one half of per Gessle’s Dressed for Success Hitmakers, Roxette were a perfectly decent pop band, with some very catchy songs that were Big In Brazil and many other countries.

However,on her far more personal and introspective solo albums, and in general when she sung in Swedish, she was sublime and reached a very special level of intimacy and intensity.

One of the greats.

2019 – Best Films and TV programmes

by 138 Comments

Here’s a chance to tell us about the best movies and TV shows you have watched in the last 12 months. Not a poll, just a chance to share your favourites: the more obscure and esoteric, the better!

You enjoyed a magnificent zombie-comedy-musical from Albania recently? We want to hear about it!

For example, this week I saw Another Day of Life (or Jeszcze dzień życia as you probably know it). A Spanish animated film based on Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski’s, book of the same name: the powerful story of the three months he spent reporting on the war in Angola in 1975. Excellent!

Movies have different releases date globally, so don’t be too pernickety about that. For me, Cuaron’s magnificent Roma was a 2019 film because that was when I got a chance to see it at the cinema. For you, it was perhaps 2018.

We got Netflix recently and it is responsible for some of my favourites of the year.

Films – Roma and Marriage Story (I saw both at the cinema in fact) TV – the wonderful Derry Girls. And Mrs KFD binge watched The Crown which seemed to be rather good.

Old news for you but » Continue Reading.

Excellent Equestrians – Lorenzo the Flying Frenchman and Ms Jessica Springsteen

by 28 Comments

The world is on tenterhooks about the Madrid Climate Conference. The UK is on the verge of a momentous general election that can have dramatic global consequences. That rough beast, Trump, his hour come round at last, has slouched into Watford to be boorish.

We live in dramatic times. December 2019 is a month when The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seem to be lurking in the wings. But I’d like to take a moment or two to talk about showjumping and bareback riding.

Last weekend was the Stockholm International Horse Show and Mrs KFD’s happy place is watching such equestrian events on telly. It’s all exciting stuff but a few minutes goes a long way with me. However I was very impressed when she showed me a clip of “Lorenzo the Flying Frenchman.” He was in Stockholm to entertain not compete and he certainly did. Riding bareback with ten wild mountain stallions who obey his every whim. If I saw his display in a movie, I’d be convinced it was trick photography.

I was also fascinated to hear who had won the award for best rider at the event: Jessica Springsteen. All the Bossheads here probably already know that » Continue Reading.

“The Most Beautiful Sound Next to Silence.” Two Teutonic tonics!

by 27 Comments

No snow has fallen yet here in Stockholm which means that November has been rather dark, glum and gloomy. But mercifully my week has been brightened up enormously by a stupendous film at our film club at Bio Reflexen and a really top notch gig at the Fasching jazz club. And by complete coincidence, both are from Germany. And well worth looking out for.

The film was Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck’s Never look away (Verk ohne autor). He won an Oscar for The Lives of Others and this is in the same class. It is the story of a boy growing up in Dresden during the 1930s and experiencing the horrors of Nazi intolerance at first hand and then becoming a successful artist in West Germany. That synopsis may not sound so original or exciting but I promise you the director is a marvellous story-teller. The film is three hours long with no pee break but I was spellbound. Deeply moving, thought-provoking and at moments very amusing. A masterpiece.

When the audience stands around outside the cinema talking about the movie they’ve just seen, you know that the screening has been a success. This was one of the most popular » Continue Reading.

современная жизнь

by 84 Comments

Escalators, roller skates, hotline bling, skinheads, microwave ovens, polaroid cameras, FM Radio, whiggers, bikinis, gramophone records, flappers,….Here’s a thread for songs about the sundry inventions, trends, fads and fashions of modern life.

Last week I was in Flemingsberg south of Stockholm, It is the location of an enormous hospital and Södertörn University. The architecture is very brutalist. Concrete blocks everywhere. Very DDR. Anyway, to reach these one has to use an enormous escalator. To my delight, they have now added blue lights which give it a pleasantly jazzy feel. All that I lacked was some mellow background music.

And would you believe it? Respected Swedish jazzman Per “Texas” Johansson has named his latest album after that escalator: “De långa rulltrapporna I Flemingberg.” Rather good it is too.

The story behind it is that Per hung his sax up for a while and retrained as an anaesthetic nurse, I suspect he knows Flemingsberg rather well.

How many songs about escalators can you think of? Please post them and any other songs about Techno Trousers or other invaluable additions to our modern lifestyle.

One thing is for certain: the Flemingsberg Escalator is certainly not Over the Hill.

» Continue Reading.

となりのトトロ

by 104 Comments

How many times have you left a cinema with a song or piece of music indelibly ingrained in your memory?

That certainly was the case when I saw John Carpenter’s Assault on Precint 13. That menacing, synthy theme tune he wrote is a killer. And I think it is also true for many people who see Miyazaki’s 1988 anime masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro. We had a school cinema screening yesterday morning at Bio Reflexen. 180 lively, bubbly six and seven year olds. And more than a few of them came out singing the insanely catchy theme tune.

Re-watching the movie yesterday made me realise how much the music contributed. I had to google to find out that the composer was Joe Hisaishi, who has had a long career writing music for Studio Ghibli. Now I want to know more about him.

Grease? The Sound of Music? Battleship Potemkin? Hair? The Producers? Amadeus? Cabaret? Which film soundtracks left made the greatest impression?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ4c8TQpDRg

Absolutely Ooky! A tribute to Vic Mizzy, Ian Stott and all the other household names whose names we don’t actually know.

by 38 Comments

I was at the flicks this afternoon and there was a wonderful moment at the end of the Addams Family reboot. The original theme tune played and the whole audience (youngish kids and their parents) started finger snapping along. The most famous finger snap in popular music?

Another moment of musical magic occurred on Sunday afternoon. Biograf Reflexen, where I am a volunteer, was hosting a sneak preview of SVT’s Vår Tid är Nu (an enormously popular Swedish drama series). It is set in the 1960s and the audience were encouraged to dress up in period gear. To add to the he atmosphere we had booked local combo, the Flåset Brass Octet, to play outside the cinema. Really into the spirit of things, they turned up in uniforms that Sergeant Pepper’s band would have been proud of. And their repertoire was ace: Yellow Submarine, Putting on the Ritz and many more vintage faves.

What was especially pleasing was how much the children in the square were digging the band. Particularly memorable were two tiny tots dressed in bright yellow raingear who were really getting into the groove and moshing around joyfully.

To my delight, Flåset played the Wallace and Gromit » Continue Reading.

The people who get your record played on the radio in exchange for cocaine and sex. Or perhaps in this case haggis and a wee dram?

by 31 Comments

Sometimes the most wonderful things crop up on YouTube as the result of me watching something else.

Recently, I was treated to a clip of an intimate 1983 gig by Randy Newman at the Odeon in NYC. To help him out on Rider in the Rain, he is joined by Ry Cooder and Linda Ronstadt. Three great musicians clearly having a lot of fun together. That put a big smile on my face too.

And there are many more unexpected things out there. Tom Jones singing with C.S.N & Y. Rhianna live with Calvin Harris at the Brit Awards. Beth Orton and Terry Callier singing Dolphins on Later. Not to mention Rammstein feat Ken Dodd and the Diddymen plus Jools Holland on boogie woogie piano.

Scorchio! The list just goes on and on.

Anyway, all this got me thinking of putting together a dream evening of music for my own pleasure. And for yours too of course! We are in Dreamland so artists being dead is no obstacle. The Taybridge Bar would do very nicely as a venue. And as I have been listening to a lot of Shetland and Scottish stuff recently, there will be a » Continue Reading.

I’m sorry Bryan! You are not the only ferry in the harbour!

by 41 Comments

Using my monthly Stockholm public transport season ticket, I can take a ferry from Gamla Stan, the Old Town of Stockholm, over to the Gröna Lund Funfair. The journey only takes about 15 minutes, but there is something rather magical about it, especially if I am making the journey in the early evening to see a gig.

And every summer they have some marvellous gigs. Madness, Patti Smith, Lady Gaga, Veronica Maggio, Jimi Hendrix, Ry Cooder, Bob Marley and the Wailers… to name just a few past triumphs.

Leaving the stately buildings of the Old Town and sailing towards those flashing funfair lights with a boat full of people who are all psyched up for a great evening is a thrill.

Of course, I could take a far larger boat, sail eastwards all night and wake up in Helsinki. With the Stockholm archipelago to enjoy during the first part of the journey and its Finnish counterpart on the other side of the Baltic.

In this thread I would like to hear about ferry rides. Mundane, extraordinary, exotic, hilarious, terrifying…..

Journeys that you do every day. Trips that you did once that have left a great impression on you. Or » Continue Reading.

Slow boat to the Blasket Islands with Inge Thomson, Jimmy Perez, Bonnie Princes Billie and Charlie, Bob Marley and Harem Scarem

by 142 Comments

After all the trials and tribulation, treachery and torment of the past week in Westminster, I fancy a peaceful weekend away from it all. And what better place for that than an island?

I’ve a few bees in my bonnet about islands at the moment.

Firstly, islands off the West Coast of Ireland. Our book circle have just read Roddy Doyle’s Smile, The protagonist, now in his 50s, looks back to his school days and among other things recalls having to read the autobiography of Peig Sawyers at school. This book, written in Gaelic, was compulsory reading for all Irish school kids in the years after independence. Not a cheerful read. Misery, pain and suffering on the Blasket Islands.

It was all so OTT that it inspired that wonderfully amusing writer, Third Policeman Hitmaker, Flann O’Brien, to write a parody of it; The Poor Mouth. It “ relates the story of one Bonaparte O’Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of its residents.” His satire got him into a lot of hot water.

No doubt about it. There is something very unique about those » Continue Reading.

Shaft goes to the Shetlands…and other ones that got away

by 5 Comments

This week I’ve become rather fascinated by the music of Hot Buttered Soulman Isaac Hayes and multi-instrumentalist, Inge Thomson from Fair Isle in the Shetlands. These two musical directions seemed incompatible until I read an article this morning about posters for films that never got made.

I had a moment of inspiration. What if, after Shaft goes to Africa, the film company had had the bottle to make Shaft goes to the Shetlands?

Harlem’s most famous private dick dons a kilt and goes undercover in the Highlands and Islands in search of contraband whisky. Get in Brookmyre or Rankin to write the script. How can it go wrong?

Who’s the cat that won’t cop oot, when there’s pipers all aboot? Shaft!

I’ve posted a clip of the Shetlands Fiddlers Society. Their cover version of the Theme from Shaft would be magnificent.

So what are the films, real or imaginary, that you feel ought to have been made?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLUSFAI0vpQ

Nothing so cute as bald as a coot

by 105 Comments

John Walters recently described the magnificent cover of Hot Buttered Soul as “the best photo of a perfect, shiny, baldy bonce there has ever been”.

Was there ever a better cue for a thread celebrating the baldies of popular culture?

From Uncle Fester to Skunk Anansie, from Kojak to Errol Brown: who is your follically challened favourite?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIN36NweL6I

Love me Tønder

by 43 Comments

Retropath2 and I were discussing Danish music festivals over on the Cambridge thread. We seem to be in agreement that the Tønder Festival, which takes place in the last weekend of August at the town of Tønder in the south-west part of Denmark would be well worth a visit.

If money and time were no object, which festivals would you like to attend? Or which of local of your local festivals do you think we should come along to? The smaller and more esoteric, the better!

Roll up! Give some free publicity to hard working festival folk!

Reggae, jazz, synth, brass band, dansband, electronica, folk, bluegrass, newgrass: all genres welcome

A hurdy-gurdy festival in Hardanger? Count me in!

And just to prove the festival actually exists, perhaps you could treat us to a YT clip…..

I am very gullible, and if someone tells me there is an annual crumhorn festival in Cordoba, I will spend hours trying to find out more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49BbLNg5wEc

From the prim Penguins of Pinner to the sizzling, scorchio sirens of San Francisco…Time to judge books by their covers!

by 70 Comments

I burnt my fingers this morning. Sniffity introduced me to the paperback artwork of Robert McGinnis and I got minor burns from trying to pick one of those books up. Jinkies! A whole series of very fatale femmes, all rather under-dressed. McGinnis is a gifted fellow and there is great variety and skilful pencilwork to be enjoyed.

If the lyrics of Big Shot are anything to go by, Viv Stanshall had read a few. “Hotsie. What a dame. A big, bountiful babe in the region of 48-23-38. One hell of a region. She had the hottest lips since Hiroshima: I had to stand back for fear of being burned.”

What a contrast to the chaste, prim, rather anonymous Penguin paperbacks that I grew up with in Pinner All kinds of shenanigans might have been going on within, but those discreet covers were giving nothing away.

The paperback has been with us for rather a short period. Penguin was founded in 1935 and its first books were sold in Woolworths for sixpence each.

Over on the Poirot thread, Boneshaker mentioned the remarkable covers that Tom Adams did for Agatha Christie’s novel. Menacing, mysterious and memorable. So, tine to ask you: » Continue Reading.

The perennial appeal of a prim, Belgian pedant: Hats off to Hercule!

by 64 Comments

Recently I watched an episode of The ABC Murders, starring John Malkovich as a rather twitchy, guilt-ridden, autumnal Poirot. It is directed by Brazilian. Alex Gabassi, and often has a rather brutal, phantasmagorical quality. It is more David Lynch than the genteel Christieville world of cucumber sandwiches at the vicarage that we are used to.

Intrigued, I paid a visit to IMDB and was struck by how many well/known actors have played Poirot. Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov, David Suchet, Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh. The recent Orient Express movie feels like a vanity project so that our Ken would get a chance to play the great sleuth. Initially it was beyond my ken, why Hercule should be so popular, but on reflection, I began to appreciate the charm of this rather stiff and pedantic Belgian brainbox. And of course a detective with flaws is always appealing.

Agatha Christie was definitely rather fond of her creation who was inspired by the Belgians she met working as a nurse during the Great War. Poirot appeared in 33 novels, one play and over 50 short stories.

By contrast, her other great character, Miss Jane Marple from the village of St Mary Mead » Continue Reading.

Singalong hits for modern fruggers, lovers and rugger buggers?

by 54 Comments

There has always been something rather exhilarating about a group of people spontaneously bursting into song together. At a concert, in a chain gang, at a football match, in the check-out queue at Waitrose, at an anti-Brexit demo or a sea shanty on a Tall Ship while hoisting the sails etc etc

But what are the modern songs that are most likely to get people bursting into song?

At this year’s Roskilde Festival there were two rather surprising examples. When Johnny Marr began to play There is a light that never goes out, the enormous audience in the Arena Tent sang along. It is a unique frisson to hear ten thousand people singing along to the chorus.

On the even larger Orange Stage, Robyn had 60,000 or so young Scandos joining in for that anthem for dumpees across the globe: Dancing on my own. Great, Danes! What a stupendous pop song it is. If Robyn is still touring when she is 80, the audience will doubtless expect to hear her sing about being dumped.

Over to you. What uplifting singalong experiences have you had or have you heard about?

I’ll confess I have some prejudices here about who is » Continue Reading.