Via Jules from Indie Wonderland
I don’t think he liked it
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
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I must be the only music fan on the planet who wishes Mr Agreeable had stayed in the pages of the Melody Maker in 1982 or whatever Godforsaken year it was. I thought he was *awful* at the time, and I’ve got even more intolerant with age.
F*** off you unfunny c***!
Poppy, you’re fast becoming the Afterword’s best poster. I found Mr Agreeable vaguely funny when I was about 14. His re-emergence is nothing short of embarrassing.
Agree with you chaps. A well judged rant can be funny, an ill judged one embarrassing. This one is the latter. Deeply fucking wince inducing.
“I’ll put you down as a “maybe”, yes?”
I used to like those M.M. columns. Mr Agreeaable was alright but weren’t there a couple of others? Silly Adam from U2 and bungling Nod from The Neff. Or something.
There was one about Mick Talbot. Very cruel…. quite funny though.
He’s having a go at Muse. How terrifying! Who’s his next target, James Blunt?
Every period must have its official Uncool Act Laureate: Gerry and the Pacemakers, Hermits Hermits, The Moody Blues, Status Quo, Queen, 10 c.c., Paul Young, Phil Collins, Kenny G, Dire Straits, Jamiroquai , Ocean Colour Scene, The Darkness, Coldplay, now Muse…. Some – like Vuh Quo and the Dires – get rehabilitated by the critics down the line, but most never do. Once cast, the die of naffness is indelible. (Wrong type of dye – Ed.).
I saw Muse at a festival fifteen years ago (the last festival I went to, in fact). They were no worse than some (hi, Alanis!) and a damn sight better than many (hi, The Cure!). Incidentally, the headliners at that festival were The Chemical Brothers, who also headlined the Sonar Festival last week, I see. Yes, that’s how exciting and dynamic the last two decades have been for rock and pop and roll.
Uncool acts I have known (or ignored) has potential for an interesting thread. And I’d be prepared to argue against the inclusion of Gerry and the Pacemakers. Whilst I accept they were never at the forefront of hip, compared to Freddie and the Dreamers they were positively sick. Leaving the Fredster aside I once saw the Dreamers described thus: one is bald, one is boss eyed and the other one has a face like a potato.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Freddie_en_The_Dreamers_(1964).jpg
evidence. extra ugly bloke not identified’
From the little I’ve seen of Muse they really are the kind of band I absolutely can’t stand. I’m quite happy to ignore them but if was compelled to review them for work, maybe I’d feel similarly to the writer.
It’s pretty witless & repetitive stuff though, so even if you love to hate the band, why would bother finishing reading such a review?
The most noticeable thing was the proliferation of the asterisk. If the site/ publication enjoys affording a platform for their ‘bad boy’ reviewer, why don’t they have the cojones to print what he wrote verbatim?
That’s “co*o**s” to you, Sir
The original column in MM was bound by IPC’s mid-80s ban on proper swear words. This was applied to NME in, I think, 1987. Suddenly there were these little stars all over the place.
It was the stars that made it funny.
I liked him at the time, but his re-emergence has been a bit like when I discovered that the old Hanna Barbera Godzilla cartoons were old YouTube. Great excitement at first, which rapidly palled when I realised they weren’t very good.
Never mind that, have you watched the Banana Splits recently? Jesus, what a load of crap.
Who is Mr Agreeable?
I used to think it was Steven Wells, but I think we can discount that at this stage.
I think it’s safe to say, however, that Swells hates Muse from beyond the grave.
Hey! They should put that on their ads.
True.
Let’s face facts though. There’s nothing anybody could write about the new Muse album that could possibly be funnier than the the cover.
It clearly comes from a Scorpions “rejects” pile.
I’m flabbergasted this thread has made it this far before someone mentioned the obvious elephant in the room.
One day books will be written on how that cover came to be. And I will read them. Oh, yes.
At the time, I thought the writers of MM considered themselves far more amusing than they actually were. This is why I preferred Smash Hits, Q and the NME.
A once editor of the NME told me a funny story about the time Paul Weller paid a visit to Kings Reach Tower where their office was stationed. He received a message buzzed up from the reception that Paul was waiting in the lobby to meet the journo who had said in that week’s album review : “If I ever see Weller I’m going to kick him up the arse.”
Weller breezily requested the scribe should come downstairs and be given the opportunity to ‘kick him up the arse’. The writer was apparently shitting himself and hid in a stationary cupboard and asked his boss to placate Paul by saying , “Tell him I’m actually a massive fan and I’m really, really, really sorry.”
After a brief tete a tete, Weller informed the NME editor the apology was accepted *and with that disappeared off into Waterloo , laughing heartily.
*It seemed all NME interviews finished in this manner,
“And with that, he/she winked/ picked up their cigarettes and disappeared into the Soho night/ heaving crowd…etc “
I don’t hate ‘Knights Of Cydonia.” Go figure.
That new album cover though? I saw it on a tube advert and almost pissed mysefl laughing.
I dunno. I, like, looked at that album an’, you know, somebody’s done that, they painted it an’ that, like a work of art, an’ I was looking at this cover for like, I dunno, ages, an’ suddenly it was like I saw what the Artist was, like, thinkin’ in his head, what he was tryin’ to say, an I realise this is, you know, SYMBOLIC. You ‘ave to think about it! You can’t just look at it with your eyes, the colours an’ that, you got to use your brain ‘cos it’s like a puzzle or something, an’ anyway what I think is, what the Artist was seein’, is, what he’s SAYIN’ is, we are all CONTROLLED. Right?! See that control lever where the head is, and the hand? That’s like sayin’ someone is controllin’ your head! It takes a while for this to like, come out of the picture but if you sit an’ like, stare at it for an hour and, like, about a quarter of an hour, you get it. But it’s more than that!! If you look at what the controlled guy is doin’, he’s got like a computer or somethin what he’s CONTROLLING like with this LEVER, an’ on the TV there’s this film of people marchin’, like they’re in the Army or somethin’, but they ain’t, right, they’re like office workers or somethin’, an’ he’s got this lever what makes them march! So the whole thing, right, the whole concept, is … is … LEVERS. We’re all just fucking LEVERS.
Blows my mind.
Since when did you turn into Dick Van Dyke?
Since when does a natural-born cockernee sound like he hails from the West Midlands?
I’m willing to assume you were *aiming* at Cockernee.
No, it’s not that, Barry Shitpeas.
The retro cover actually depicts a person who has been playing Space Invaders for such long periods on his Atari Video Computer System that they are now having Magrittesque nightmares. What this tells us is that the we spend far too much of our leisure time staring into screens achieving only ephemeral results like a nation of ‘knobheads’.
The title is unrelated. Muse Drones means ‘Muse drones on and on about something or other’
Oh … right. Yeah.
I hate covers that remind me of the future I’m living in. This one, however, is like a Numan reject from 1979. I could be living in the past. Where’s the fucking present?
I thought Mr Agreeable was the persona of David Stubbs, but could well be wrong. I used to like the MM column about Mr C of the Shamen.