The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

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RIP Tom Robbins

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Obituary

Haven’t given him any thought for years. But back in the 70s he was the mutt’s nuts, with cult books like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Another Roadside Attraction. ‘…the perfect accompaniment to acid trips, Grateful Dead shows and weekend yoga retreats…’ as the NYT says. Or you could just read them, like I did.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/obituaries/tom-robbins-dead.html

Your food hacks please…

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I’ve just had beans on toast for supper. And…? I hear you cry. Well…

I gently sautéed some shallots until they were caramelised and added them to the beans (English recipe it said on the tin…?), then put hefty dollops of Laoganma chilli crisp on top. The result was exceptional, and is now a signature dish.

Any others to share?

Football – I have questions

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They’re beginning to build up. I still don’t know why a SHOT is now a HIT or a SAVE is now a STOP. Or why someone suddenly decided ‘assist’ should be a substitute for the perfectly adequate ‘made a goal’. One too many syllables perhaps?

I have a new one. Why has somebody decided that Manchester City footballers should wear shorts designed to look as though their braces are hanging round their arse? This is the sort of urgent question Baddiel and Skinner might once have answered. Failing them…

Muted Randy Newman biography klaxon

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There’s a new biography of Randy Newman just out: A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman, by Robert Hilburn. It doesn’t sound as though it’s any good (“toothless hagiography”), but the NYT review is well worth reading. Perhaps the reviewer should have written the biography.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/books/review/randy-newman-biography.html

THE BEETHOVEN’S NINTH OF TEENAGE ANGST – long post alert

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Gene Pitney was a slight oddity in pop history, more at the Roy Orbison end of things for operatic drama. He had plenty of hits, all sung in that melodramatic high tenor that I generally found rather difficult to listen to: 24 Hours from Tulsa, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, It Hurts to Be in Love, Looking Through the Eyes of Love, Something’s Got a Hold of My Heart, a re-recording of which with Marc Almond in 1990 gave him his only no.1 hit ever. He was much more popular in Europe and Australia than the States, where the hits dried up fairly quickly. He had a brush with the Stones in 1964, playing piano at some of the sessions for their first LP and recording the first-ever cover of a Jagger-Richards song, That Girl Belongs to Yesterday. Like a lot of his peers, he had a vague stab at progressive cred in the late 60s, but it didn’t lead anywhere and after spending the 70s being popular in Australia he contented himself with the oldies circuit, finally dying of a heart attack after a gig in Cardiff in 2006. He was also something of a songwriter, turning out » Continue Reading.

ATM – HDMI splitters

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Mrs thep has a tech question I can’t answer – partly because it’s Windows and partly because the internet gets bored before I’ve even finished typing the question and tries to sell me an HDMI splitter.

So: the Mem is setting up two monitors on her home office desk, but the docking station has only one HDMI out. A splitter is the obvious answer, but her supplementary question is: will she end up with the same thing on both monitors, in which case there’s no point, or can you shuffle stuff between them on the laptop screen, as I vaguely remember doing when my MacBook was plugged into a monitor?

Info gratefully received.

Nobody tells it quite like Dylan…

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“With X, you didn’t know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop. After ‘X’ he was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal . . . His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, ‘Man, I don’t believe it’. – Bob Dylan

So who’s he talking about?

Let’s hear it for Rufus Wainwright’s Going to a Town

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Rufus Wainwright’s Going to a Town popped up on DiD this week, courtesy of playwright James Graham, and reminded me what an absolute stone-cold masterpiece it is, intense, musically adventurous and – as you might expect – beautifully sung. The lyrics are a little on the cryptic side, but once you clock that the town in question is Berlin, it all makes sense.

When I was in the a capella choir at the Eden Project we sang this, a touch less beautifully it has to be said, arranged in 4-part harmony by our natural genius couldn’t-read-a-note-of-music leaderene. It was an incredibly powerful experience – when we didn’t fuck it up, it wasn’t easy to sing – and we were always completely wrung out at the end. A couple of American tourists stormed out once, which was nice.

There’s an ok version by George Michael, which is just a little too smoothed-over for my taste. Any other RW favourites?

The World at War/Great War klaxon

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These two epic doco series have turned up on archive.org, complete episodes streaming in good quality and downloadable. Essential viewing of course – I can’t remember how many times I’ve watched them. Last time I was in England I started laboriously ripping the box sets but got bored, so it’s good to have them so easily available.