For embarrassing reasons I don’t wish to discuss, I am hosting a guest who is quite the spoonophile. When he’s not talking about spoons, he’s on about other forms of cutlery and utensils. It’s going to be a long month!

So here’s a playlist of spoon and cutlery related music to keep him occupied. Surprisingly eclectic, don’t ya think?

Do you have any suggestions over what to add? Yes, yes, you SAY you have better things to do but I don’t believe you.

Paul Weller’s words in tribute to Rick Buckler, mentioned the early days in Woking and made me think of the old place. That’s where I grew up, y’know.

I was at a gathering a few months ago here in Auckland NZ and a young chap (by which I mean under 40) asked where I was from in England? I replied “Woking – it’s just outside London”. I always say that. His eyes widened and confirmed with some gusto that he knew exactly where Woking was and started to talk excitedly about Paul Weller and The Jam. He’s a big fan and one day he’d really like to go to Woking. It’s on his bucket list! I counselled him not to get too excited because there’s not a lot to it – but I was inwardly quite pleased that this person from the other side of the world views Woking as such a special place.

One of the many reasons I fell for Depeche Mode was the fact that they grew up in Basildon, a similarly unremarkable commuter town so I could identify with them. The Mode’s very good friends from The Cure hailed from another similar town again – » Continue Reading.

Recent postings about Kid Creole has prompted me to revisit this subject and I wake up today keen to put on record my “take” on Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy.

Firstly, it’s a very funny but cruel lyric. Essentially he doesn’t care much for the child and wants to move on with his life without her – and her mother, for that matter. He is telling the young girl (who believes him to be his father), that this cannot be the case.

So what’s my beef with the lyrics as presented online now and in Smash Hits at the time? Well there are three examples:

He explains that her mother had one or two dalliances in Staint-Tropez. She was in search of love “but all she got was you”.

Lyric sheets say “all she got was used” rather than “you” – which spoils the joke because he is directly telling her “all she got was you” meaning that her birth was disappointing.

The Coconuts represent the voice of the child, reacting to the news. According to the printed lyric, they say “Mama’s baby, Papa’s baby”. This is not right – it must be “Mama’s baby’s Papa’s maybe”. My » Continue Reading.

In the excellent review of (the) Verve’s compilation LP, there was a small sidebar over whether Bittersweet Symphony could be regarded as the best song of that era. Someone suggested Common People, another put forward Live Forever. And then someone else suggested the Manics and Radiohead…but they weren’t Britpop per se. I’d add Massive Attack and Prodigy to that also.

So I thought this was interesting enough to devote a thread to it. The rules are as follows :

The song you suggest doesn’t have to be a single, or even something that you could describe as “Britpop” at all. Just something excellent you remember being around at the time.

You don’t have to post a video – it’s OK if you want to. Its just that I’m more likely to get a hamper if the video clips are kept to a sensible number. If there’s a thread that has more than 50 posts and videos a-gogo, it stops working for me.

So, starting with the obvious ones and working down:

Common People – Pulp Live Forever – Oasis Bittersweet Symphony Parklife – Blur A Design for Life – Manics Firestarter – Prodigy Animal Nitrate – Suede Yes – » Continue Reading.

I asked Chat GPT who is the best contributor to this forum. Here is the response:

Determining the “best contributor” on a forum like The Afterword is subjective and depends on the criteria you value most—whether it’s insightful posts, humor, depth of knowledge, engagement, or helpfulness to the community.

Key Factors to Consider: 1. Engagement:       •   Contributors who actively participate in discussions and keep threads alive are often seen as key members of the community. 2. Expertise:       •   Members who share deep knowledge about music, literature, or other shared interests (a hallmark of The Afterword) tend to be highly valued. 3. Supportiveness:       •   Those who provide emotional support, helpful advice, or thoughtful responses on topics like health or personal challenges are greatly appreciated. 4. Creativity:       •   Contributors who create collaborative projects, like playlists or compilations, or who write detailed reviews, add a lot to the community experience.

Examples of Notable Contributors:    •   mikethep: Known for discussions about classical music, health (like prostate cancer awareness), and engagement in word games like Wordle.    •   H.P. Saucecraft: Highly involved in collaborative music projects, with a keen sense of the community’s musical tastes.    •   Black Celebration: Likely focused on music, possibly with an emphasis on Depeche Mode or similar genres, though » Continue Reading.

We watched the Royal Variety Performance last night and, blow me down, it turned out to be quite an entertaining show. Quite literally for all the family. If you don’t particularly care for what’s on at that moment, it doesn’t matter – something else will be on soon enough. Reminded me of the old days.

Any road up, the final part of the night was the black and white portraits set to sensitive music of all those that have died in 2024, ending with One Direction’s Liam Payne. His was the last image shown and his relative youth compared to most of those that came before him added definite poignancy.

Now, in NZ, the end credits are rattled off in about 3 seconds in a small box, so Payne’s image ended the show from our perspective. The very next image we see is a man dramatically falling from a high building to his death. It’s the opening sequence of a trailer for David Mitchell’s Ludwig detective show.

I am 100% sure that this was a very unfortunate error by the NZ TV people – but my God it was funny. My son and I “got it” immediately and exchanged » Continue Reading.

Have a look at the video in the comments. It’s a pretty decent remix of Depeche Mode’s Everything Counts but all of the female models in the video have the face of early 2000’s Dave Gahan.

It’s very clever indeed but I think our ability to recognise true images is a highly advanced skill. You don’t need to know who Mr Gahan is to know that something is “up” here. Even though it may be perfectly done.

The trajectory for most pop acts of the past was to have several years of non-success and then make it big and enjoy some time in the sun being the latest cool new thing. This is when all the half-finished ideas stashed away from the years and years of notes come back to the fore and now you can use those to release your Nevermind, or your Lexicon of Love.

However once that rich seam of material ends, you have to come up with new stuff. And that can be pretty good too – after all, you now have Rick Spangle on your side and your latest video has Martin Scorsese behind the camera.

Now let’s go forward a year or so. We are now in the Jazz Odyssey years, the pop star is wearing a smock and lives with a yak. He distances himself from his successful pop music and embarks on a different journey. Nobody goes with him and debts force him to dust off the old gear and get the old band back together. This is the post-imperial phase and although the light isn’t shining as brightly as before – there are songs that are » Continue Reading.

On the FB site, there’s mention of a Tom Waits-themed eatery called Rein Dogs in, maybe, Sweden. I can see that the image on the ad is of Tom himself, so I imagine all the right permissions have happened.

This is increasingly rare, though. There is a small cafe in Auckland called Major Tom with a zigzag bisecting the two words on the logo. The dishes have Bowie-esque names etc. However, when you go there, there are no Bowie songs playing, no pictures on the walls, no blurb in the menu about why Bowie is such an inspiration or anything like that. It then dawned on me that the cafe has done a nimble bit of IP-nicking by not mentioning the JIODHM by name but trading on his image. There’s a small chain of them now.

There’s also another cafe called Let it Be, which has generic Beatley imagery on the walls. A zebra crossing, Lennon-style glasses, a yellow submarine, CND symbols and peace signs. And yet no pics of The HJHMs or any mention of them by name.

To my mind, these people are cynical bastards and their exploitative establishments should be avoided. Do you have any » Continue Reading.

If your quirky local news item involves pigs, there must be a shot of a pig snuffling it’s nose directly onto the camera lens.

Any item involving groups of children must have them all shouting something at the end in unison, with the presenter in the middle showing good-natured dismay at this spontaneous act of youthful enthusiasm.

Any TV show that claims to be created by children must have a spelling mistake in the title and/or one of the letters the wrong way round.

Anybody that lies on a TV drama must look like they are lying – eyes darting, hesitating, frowning – whereas in real life, lying is done convincingly.

That’s my lot for now until I think of some more. If you have any further ones, I’ll be interested in them.

I have been reading some very complimentary reviews of 0% Guinness and I am wondering if anyone here has tried it? I believe topping it up from the “real” Guinness tap once settled is the favoured way, making it indistinguishable from the original version.

I have had mixed results from 0% beers – most notably waking up with a hangover – but it recently I have been drinking 0% hazy IPAs. I don’t particularly like the hazy ones at the best of times, so I can’t tell the diff.

Most of us here remember times when life was more simple and being a child meant wearing goalposts instead of jumpers and playing out on our bikes until the town’s factory hooter went and then our mams would shout us in for us tea, which was liver and onions with a bowl of prunes for afftahs.

You get my drift. Anyway, I am desperately trying to dress this post up as something different to the Peter Kay-type routines about the old days. In fact, I suspect the Peter Kay routine itself is probably 25 years old now (eeeh…them were the days, eh).

I was mainly brought up in Woking so God knows why I get all northern when I talk about 50+ years ago. I blame the Pythons.

So let’s discuss things that we haven’t heard about already. I want to talk about transfers. Transfers were bought from a newsagent or petrol station and typically involved a cardboard landscape – a non-descript desert-type environment. Let’s say there’s a dinosaur theme – you’d have a sheet of TRexes, Stegasauruses and Triceratopses and many more besides – and you would rub the images with a coin and t-daa! There it is! Roar! » Continue Reading.

I read an old Smash Hits singles review page today, from 1984. It was curated by one Roy Hay, one of the people that isn’t Boy George in Culture Club. However, it is notable that he shares in the writing credits for all of their biggest songs and Wikipedia tells me the band have sold 50 million records – so he’s done all right.

In this singles review, he ridicules Depeche Modes’s People Are People for having terrible lyrics about war (“People are People so why should it be…you and I should get along so awfully?”). He’s absolutely right on this, by the way. But then, a year or so later – he co-pens “The War Song” with the chorus “War is stupid and people are stupid…”.

That’s not the Sliding Doors moment, though. In that review he mentions that when Vince Clarke left, he seriously considered joining Depeche Mode because he knew them because he was a regular at the venues like Crocs and the Pink Toothbrush, where Depeche Mode performed, pre-fame.

Depeche Mode advertised for Vince’s replacement in the music press and found Alan Wilder. The ad said applicants must be no older than 21. Alan was » Continue Reading.

I was listening to Richard Osman talk about this on his podcast recently. I don’t recall the actual stats but a surprisingly small amount of “bands” currently exist – with the last one having a number one single aaages ago.

The pop charts are solo performers and/or DJs collaborating with people. You won’t see Bruno Mars forming his own Tin Machine any time soon.

A confident, stage-schooled solo performer is a lot easier to handle and promote. Also, the reality shows that gave us One Direction and HearSay are gone.

The trouble is that some of the most talented and successful artists have started in bands – shy, awkward, nervous in themselves but a group of mates creating a noise behind them gave them the necessary confidence to get onstage. Top-of-head examples, George Michael, Thom Yorke, David Byrne, Gwen Stefani. Without their respective bands/friends it is highly unlikely we’d have seen them at all.

Solo performers seem to be more troubled than singers in a band. Sweeping generalisation I know. I get the feeling that Bono for example really, really needs the band to save him from himself. God knows what he’d have ended up doing if he’d gone » Continue Reading.

Do you know what? I’m getting older and maturerer and this means that my original title of this post “Happy Endings” was dumped in favour of a more prosaic choice of words.

The other day I took a break from my never-ending quest for fresh and exciting new music from around and the world and decided to revert briefly to some of my favourite songs, namely:

Going Underground, The Jam Isolation, Joy Division She Loves You, The Beatles Woke Up This Morning, Alabama 3 Never Let Me Down Again, Depeche Mode

What do they have in common? They don’t fade out, they don’t lose their way, they are not too long and they are not too short. They are not too quick, not too slow – telling the time for Trumpton. A major factor here is how the song ends. Each one could, in theory, fade out and would have been just fine if they did. Yet the ending in each one is perfect.

From the nice little double stitch of Going Underground’s 3 second bass guitar line to the false ending in Isolation, to the denouement of Woke up the Morning, where a moody maelstrom of misery » Continue Reading.

I joined Twitter in 2010 and today I have deleted it. The final straw has been recent rioting and how the platform was used so easily to distribute lies and provoke violence. Pay Elon Musk for a blue tick to have your shite promoted aggressively. Every post that has a world view different to Musk’s has prominent responses that are generally lazy insults. Musk is helping to fund Trump’s campaign. News feeds have a suspiciously large amounts of nastiness and/or irrelevant confrontational tosh along with sprinklings of graphic pornography that never featured before.

About two months ago I reported a cartoon depicting a young woman being gang-raped by a group of evil-looking dark-skinned men, one brandishing a copy of the Qur’an. A man to their right is shouting “that’s my daughter!” to a policeman who cautions him that he mustn’t complain because that would be racist. In the foreground Nigel Farage is saying ‘what’s going on here?’ And two men in suits marked “Labour” and “Conservative” are in the background of this delightful tableau, graphically buggering members of the British public.

A few days later, I received a reply that this did not meet the threshold for promoting hatred.

I » Continue Reading.

Found this wonderful and touching clip of a recent Kraftwerk show. See comments.

Vice President nominee JD Vance has just said in a speech that people without children have not invested in the future and therefore should have less of an influence in participating in a democracy. This is not an interpretation, it’s completely what he thinks should happen.

Meanwhile, Trump urges a group of Christians to vote “I LOVE Christians!” he shouted. That’s not the worrying thing. He then says that he’s asking them to get out there and vote “one last time” – he said will fix things so that they won’t have to vote ever again.

Even if neither of these measures can possibly be taken – isn’t it just a little concerning that they even think these things, let alone say them out loud?

The PM’s closest aide, Craig Williams, put a bet on at the bookies on the likely election date three days before the announcement.

It doesn’t matter if this is was a fiver or fifty thousand pounds. It’s another self-inflicted wound and makes me think that the Conservative Party, as an entity, is killing itself.

If he is close to Sunak, he will know that insider trading is a serious offence. I know people will try the “harmless bit of fun” defence but it won’t wash. These people are idiots.

There’s something wrong with my clothes dryer. I need to pull it out and see what’s occurrin’ round the back.

Trouble is that it’s very snugly in its hole and under normal circumstances I’d pull it out. However, we cleverly slotted a stray square bit of flat MDF wood on the top of it. This means there is liderally no wriggle room now. It’s stuck fast. I can only get a grip of one edge of the MDF and even if I do, it only moves a little bit.

If I can get the MDF out, I think it’ll be all smiles. But…what should I do? Do I drill holes into the edge of the MDF and hammer nails in it, so I have something more to hold on to?

Or … do I staple gun some cable ties to it and then pull it out? I like this idea because it means I get to use the staple gun. But it sounds dangerous.

I can’t help thinking that the more practical-minded members of the Massive might have a simpler solution. So do you?

I have just seen some footage of Blur at the Coachella festival in the States. They are performing Boys and Girls and we can see that Damon is looking stroppy and fed up. No one is singing along or dancing. He points the microphone to the crowd at the chorus – silence. He says from the stage “we are never coming here again, so you might as well enjoy it!”. He stares and shakes his head rather than sing, while the band chugs along. It’s a difficult watch.

It brought to my mind an experience in Woking back in the mid-80s. It was a “Search for a Star!” local talent show at the Council hall. It was actually more entertaining than it sounds. It takes guts to perform live and no-one gave the performers a hard time. Until this one act came on. The single most ridiculous performer I think I have ever seen. He was a small, rat-like young man of about 20 with a porcelain-white, hairless torso framed by an unbuttoned ruffled pink shirt. His shiny red satin trousers sported a golden belt buckle that was the size of a child’s head. He came on to “It’s not » Continue Reading.