Rage against the Christmas number 1

It’s quite a big deal to get the Christmas number one slot in the UK pop charts. Over the years, lots of major artists have had a go at writing something specifically for the Christmas market and no office party is complete unless it’s had a blast of some the classic seasonal tracks by the likes of Wizzard, Slade, Elton John or Wham.

For the best part of a decade, the Christmas top spot has been more or less the property of the winning act from the X-Factor. The show is cunningly planned to climax just before Christmas, leaving just enough time to announce the result, press a few million copies of the winner’s debut single and then line up a series of media opportunities designed to push the ‘cash-in’ product over the finishing line. It is almost impossible for any other recording artist to compete with the massive level of exposure experienced by the X-Factor winner in the run-up to Christmas. Not since the Spice Girls’ reign of terror in the mid-nineties has such a stronghold been exerted on the festive chart.

In recent years, some folk have managed tried to prevent the Lord of Darkness (a.k.a. Simon Cowell) from pushing his latest 15-minute superstar to the top of the charts; last year, a charity record by the choir ensemble 'Military Wives' managed to foil his evil plans. In 2009, some really bright people on Facebook ran a successful campaign to get the American rap metal band Rage Against the Machine to number one. Their plan to reclaim the chart for the people worked brilliantly; they managed to stop one Sony BMG act from getting to number one and, instead, put an entirely different Sony BMG act at the top of charts. Now that’s what I call sticking it to the man.

A day or two before the Christmas chart was announced, I heard ‘the Rage’ on Radio Five’s breakfast show promoting their song. The presenters of the show informed us that they had agreed to do a live version of the track, minus the unsavoury language so that folk could make up their own minds about it.

During the interview, they came across as a rather dim and unpleasant bunch of spoiled brats. Their song, if memory serves, was called something like ‘Fuck you mom, I’m not going to tidy my room’. One of them said something about it being a more worthy number one because it was "written in an industrial slum", while X-factor winner Joe McElderry’s track was written by "overpaid professional songwriters". So much for solidarity among the musical fraternity; presumably the Rage thought that the labours of mere industry hacks who write for singers like Joe McElderry should not have the same market value as the labours of rock dudes in their forties who dress like teenagers and write their songs in ‘industrial slums’.

After the interview, the Rage launched into their song with some gusto; in fact, rather too much gusto, because the producer of the breakfast show had to cut them off after a couple of minutes because, in spite of a pre-interview agreement to tone down the language, those crazy guys in the Rage started swearing anyway.

I suppose they were making the point that they were like, TOTALLY FUCKING CRAZY ART TERRORISTS who were, like, out to bring the whole shitty music industry TOTALLY CRASHING DOWN with the AWESOME POWER of their music and swearing.

After hearing this performance, I felt like buying some copies of the Joe McElderry single to give to friends and relatives as presents. The behaviour of the Rage had achieved something that I thought would have been impossible; by dint of their sheer buffoonery, they had forced me into the arms of Simon Cowell and his forces of darkness. But sadly, I suspect my last-minute intervention would not have stopped ‘Fuck you mom, I’m not going to tidy my room’ from becoming the Christmas number one.

This year’s big attempt to derail the X-factor juggernaut is again focused on a charity single, with the Justice Collective tipped to claim the top spot with their cover of 'He ain't heavy (he's my brother)'. With all proceeds going towards supporting families involved in the Hillsborough disaster, the track has an impressive cast list that includes Sir Paul McCartney, Robbie Williams, Gary Barlow, Mel C, Holly Johnson and Gerry Marsden. It's hard to see how it can fail.

And, as far as I know, it hasn’t got any swearing in it.

Song of the Week - 'Gathering Dust'

This track is lifted from the second Eisenhowers album. Musically, it is heavily influenced by great British pop, specifically the Kinks and XTC. The rhythm section – Ross Morgan and Fraser Sneddon- is solid throughout, with Ross also providing some nifty percussion work. Emma Jane’s chirpy backing vocals contrast nicely with the rather caustic tone of the lyric.   

The song dwells on cynicism and self-regard, inspired by an ugly conversation held at a party in the wee small hours of the morning. The central character is a person who has become so cynical and jaded that he has all but ceased to engage with the world. He’s the kind of guy who creeps around Facebook hoping to find that his former friends and acquaintances are now divorced, bankrupt and selling the Big Issue.   

You might well conclude that the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t get involved in late-night conversations with miserable singer-songwriters. Not unless, that is, you have no problem with your drunken remarks being woven into songs that literally quite a few people might hear.  

Gathering Dust

  

 

Someone Keeps Moving My Chair

There are several rock and pop artists who have been hailed by critics as ‘great’ lyricists.  Dylan is often quoted, as are Costello, Morrissey and one or two others. Talented as these writers may be, I’d suggest that none of them can match the genius of John Flansburgh and John Linnell of They Might Be Giants. A deeply intellectual and philosophical strand runs through their work and, in their many splendid releases since their formation in 1982, they have tackled most of the big issues of the day with songs like ‘Why did you grow a beard?’, ‘Bastard wants to hit me’, ‘I am a grocery bag’ and ‘Where do they make balloons?’

Like many great writers, such is the clarity of their vision that they can encapsulate complex notions in ostensibly simple lines. My own favourite couplet is from the magnificent 'Someone keeps moving my chair', where they somehow, within two brief lines, manage to distill the existential crisis of urban alienated post-industrial liberal atheist humankind:

"Do you mind if we balance this glass of milk
where your visiting friend accidentally was killed?"

On first reading, the lyric might appear to suggest that anything is permitted, appealing to our sense of the absurd; but -if not read in a frivolous sense- it can be interpreted either as an outburst of relief or of joy, or perhaps even as a bitter acknowledgment of a metaphysical fact. The fact -or to be more accurate, the ‘fact’- is actually a tenuous certainty of the absence of God, represented in this case by the 'glass of milk'. In that sense, the balancing of this ‘glass of milk’ somehow gives a meaning to our lives that far surpasses mere existential joy in the ability to behave as truly free beings, that is, without fear of consequence or judgement. Echoing Kant, Flansburgh and Linnell argue that moral principles are simply the products of reason. The incorporation, therefore, of the consequences for ‘balancing’ this ‘glass of milk’ into their moral deliberations would be deeply flawed, since it would deny the necessity of practical maxims in governing the working of the will. They ask the question ‘Do you mind if we balance this glass of milk?’ when they already know the answer.  

But, in order to 'balance' our hypothetical glass with impunity, we must first have accepted John Stuart Mill’s qualitative account of happiness, wherein utility is to be conceived in relation to humanity as a “progressive being", one possessed of, and capable of exercising, truly rational capacities. And yet, in this technological age, these rational capacities incapacitate us through the dilemma of almost limitless choice. If the choice was just about the ‘glass of milk’, it would not be hard to make; but there is, of course, no real choice worth making. The 'glass of milk' does not, in fact, liberate us; it binds us. In the absence of ‘God’, it does not authorize our actions. Yes, the song seems to suggest, we are permitted to balance our 'glass of milk', but what has become of our 'visiting friend'?

'The Map and the Territory' by Michel Houellebecq

This starts off reading like a satire of the contemporary art world, but then turns into something of a mystery thriller. Like some of Houellebecq’s previous work, it is set in the near future but addresses the concerns of the present. France is recovering after a major financial crisis and has become almost totally dependent on tourism and, once again, agriculture. We follow the career of the artist Jed Martin as he pursues his life’s work "to give an objective description of the world."
Single-minded, somewhat naïve, but completely focused on his work, he wins international acclaim through various projects, before his painting starts to bring him incredible wealth. When he decides to paint the famous writer 'Michel Houellebecq', we are treated to a comic and self-deprecating portrait of a reclusive and world-weary man who, we are told, "smells bad, but less bad than a corpse".

As one would expect, there are extended riffs on a variety of topics –France and the French, euthanasia, socialism, art and commerce- but when the fictional 'Houellebecq' exits stage left (I won’t tell you how that happens, but it isn’t pretty), the novel seems to lose some momentum as it starts to follow a police investigation into the ‘Houellebecq’ case and also the final, introspective phase of Jed's career. Having spent much of his artistic life focusing on human labour (his most famous painting is called 'Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology: The Conversation at Palo Alto') Jed becomes a recluse and spends decades making films celebrating the triumph of vegetation over industrial objects. His work suggests that, in spite of all this human endeavour, plants and vegetation will endure to reclaim the world from humankind.

Houellebecq has been described as French literature's JG Ballard and it's probably fair to say that his key themes are existential ennui and the decline of the liberal west. He is at his best when he goes off on one and his forensic cynicism can be quite intoxicating; this, however, is probably his most mainstream work and not at all likely to scare the horses. 'The Map and the Territory' makes you think about the nature and purpose of work; Jed Martin's career is presented as an ideal and noble pursuit, a route to personal identity and fulfillment much more rewarding than travel, consumerism, love or parenthood. Other opinions, as they say, are available.

Song of the Week - 'South of Love'

As we approach the festive season, this might qualify as rather a topical song.  It's a jaunty little acoustic number that pokes fun at the guy who leaves the office party with a swagger in his step, believing his aftershave aroma to be rather more impressive than it actually is.  

We’d probably want to avoid this guy, perhaps because –in the wrong circumstances- we might well be this guy.  Listen out for a modest little Beatles homage at the end. Let’s hope Yoko and her lawyers aren’t listening.

South of Love 

Will democracy hit the wall?

In the wake of Barack Obama’s victory in the US election, there has been a fair amount of knee-jerk analysis of the demographics of the vote and the possible implications for future campaigns. Many commentators have stated that the Republicans simply have to change (that is, move closer to the so-called centre ground) in order to have any chance of ever winning the presidency again. But, for a party that was perceived by many to have been too extreme to be electable, to have gathered 48.3% of the popular vote doesn’t look like a bad return.

In the rush to suggest what the Republicans should, or shouldn't, do to become 'electable', nobody seems to have considered the possibility that the most important thing in politics might be to have principles and to stick to them. We have become accustomed to the notion that serious (i.e. winning) political parties must be ruthless, focus-group driven, vote-gathering machines, designed to hoover up everyone on the so-called middle ground. It isn’t just that nobody wants to fall out over political ideas anymore, it’s almost as if nobody even wants to have much in the way of political differences. The so-called 'third way’ has become the only way. Given the declining turnout at successive elections, I’d be surprised if that many folk genuinely believed that this arrangement was going well for the liberal democracies.

At any given point in history, there will be certain ideas and philosophies that will be deemed unelectable, but that is not to say that such situations will always prevail. We have no idea of what might happen in the next five minutes or the next five years; we have no way accurately to predict the impact of what Harold McMillan famously called "events, dear boy, events."
It is possible that the middle ground might move. It is possible that conditions may one day prevail in which a political party might be able to stand and win on a set of policies and principles that have not been watered down and hopelessly compromised by focus-group fudging and slavish sensitivity to opinion polls. It would be refreshing to encounter a party with the courage to say: “These are the things we stand for. This is what we plan to do if we get elected. If you don’t like it, don’t vote for us.”

Unfortunately, we appear to be lumbered with a professional political class, ever-willing to adjust its ‘principles’ to appeal to as many pressure groups, minority interests, ethnic factions and voting blocks as possible. It seems that no party can gain power without first bribing the electorate to vote for it. Unless we can break this cycle of electoral sweeteners, the prediction made by the 19th century political writer Alexis de Tocqueville is likely to come true:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”

If anyone thinks I am over-egging this particular pudding, I will remind you that there are currently two EU member countries being governed by groups of unelected technocrats. Who would bet against that number increasing at some point in the next eighteen months?

Cock-up or conspiracy?

A few weeks ago, it emerged that the flagship BBC news and current affairs show 'Newsnight' had declined to run a story alleging that one of the Beeb’s leading stars had been a long-term predatory paedophile; the reason given for pulling the transmission was that there was a lack of evidence. Considering the number of Jimmy Saville stories that are now in the public domain, that seems like quite a remarkable claim.
Then, last Friday, having endured a great deal of criticism in the wake of that decision, someone at the BBC thought that it would be a good idea to run a Newsnight programme alleging that another privileged and powerful man had, over several years, sexually abused a number of vulnerable children. Standards for journalistic rigour had evidently slipped a little after the Saville cancellation, because it was decided that this latest edition could run without the bothersome requirement to accumulate anything resembling a body of evidence.

These grim developments made the resignation of Director General George Entwhistle inevitable; anyone who heard his interview on Saturday morning would have realised that he was already a dead man walking.
But how could so many things have gone wrong in the first place? How could so many reporting guidelines have been ignored? There are very clear rules on what should happen when serious allegations are going to be made against any individual. Given that the Lord McAlpine story was all over the internet at least ten hours before Newsnight went on air on Friday 2nd November, it is truly mind-boggling to discover that a 'right of reply' call wasn't made to the man at the centre of the allegations.

In their haste to run with the story, Newsnight forgot the basic requirement to check the facts. Steve Messham, the man who made the accusations, was not even shown a picture of McAlpine and asked the simple question: “Do you think this is the man who abused you?” Now that he has seen a picture, Mr Messham has stated that McAlpine was definitely not the alleged abuser.

Most commentators have put this mess down to monumental incompetence, but is there just a possibility that there is something more significant at play? The BBC is under fire; it has long-term political opponents who claim that it is ripe for radical reform. It is currently confronted with allegations that it allowed a senior employee -despite persistent rumours and allegations- to not only get away with various sexual offences, but granted him a flagship light entertainment show that allowed guaranteed, continuous access to children.

As the revelations and the resultant media attacks accumulate, anyone inclined to conspiracy theories might suggest that somehow floating the idea that “everyone was at it back then” could be seen as a legitimate part of any defence strategy. Dragging major government figures into the mire might help paint a picture of a pre-PC ‘anything-goes’ culture in which pop stars, politicians and actors could, so long as they were relatively discreet, pursue their somewhat unusual tastes. In the context of such a permissive culture, the BBC's indulgence of Saville and his chums might appear to be just that little bit less heinous.
In mounting this counter-offensive, it would also be in the BBC’s interests to impugn its putative opponents, thereby damaging the credibility of their arguments. Perhaps it is not entirely insignificant that the man at the centre of the unsubstantiated Newsnight allegations, Lord McAlpine, was a senior Tory from the Thatcher era.

So -by default or by design- the debate over the future of the BBC may have taken an unexpected twist. The Director General has gone and it is likely that one or two journalistic heads will also roll, but some might consider that a small price to pay if the institution itself manages to survive the coming storm.
All you have to do is spend a few minutes online and check out any number of discussion boards to realise that, for a significant number of folk, the idea that Margaret Thatcher's cabinet was probably riddled with child molesters is germinating quite nicely. For a beleaguered BBC, faced with implacable opponents threatening root and branch reform of its entire operation, that might turn out to be rather a useful card to play.

But sadly, for whatever else it has achieved, this wretched affair has done nothing to help the cause of any victims of abuse.

What makes you Scottish?

Now that the deal is done, some aspects of the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence remain puzzling. I suspect that Mister Salmond thinks he has won a major concession by including young people under 18 in the vote; he’s a pragmatic operator and will no doubt fancy his chances of persuading younger voters of the benefits of independence. Lowering the voting age is quite an innovation for a party which, not so long ago, raised –from 16 to 18- the age that cigarettes could legally be bought and would like to raise the legal age for buying alcohol from 18 to 21. The Scottish government appears not to see (or chooses to disregard) any contradiction between granting these young folk a say in the most important political issue of the last 300 years, but not allowing them to have a fag while they think about how to cast their vote. And, at the very least, it seems something of an oddity that a kid of 16 or 17 will be able to vote in the referendum but not in a general election. I've yet to hear a convincing explanation as to how that makes sense.

Another troubling aspect of this referendum is that any British, Commonwealth or EU citizen will get to vote, as long as they are resident in Scotland. A Frenchman working in the oil industry and living in Aberdeen, for example, will get the chance to determine Scotland’s future, but a Scotswoman who has moved as far south as Durham will have no say.

I know that if I moved to Manchester tomorrow, I wouldn’t presume to describe myself as a Mancunian and wouldn’t expect to have much of a considered opinion on issues pertaining to political life in Manchester; my roots would remain in Scotland and I’d still consider myself Scottish. According to estimates, there are around 800,000 Scots living in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It would not be unreasonable to guess that a high proportion of these exiles might think like me and would wish to have a stake in the future of their country but, in the 2014 referendum, they will be disenfranchised. What exactly would be difficult about arranging a postal vote for these exiled Scots? Perhaps the main ‘difficulty’ is that Mr Salmond has calculated that people who have moved south for economic reasons might be more inclined to vote in favour of the union.

One of the big arguments being put forward is that the independence issue shouldn't hinge on our ethnicity. The ‘Scotland’ that will vote is merely the diverse community of peoples who happen to be registered to vote here in 2014. I have no particular difficulty with the argument that the cultural or ethnic background of the voters isn’t that important, but surely you can’t have it both ways?
If 'Scottishness' is not about your ethnicity, but is mainly about your post code, what exactly is the point in going to all this fuss to break up a partnership that has worked for more than 300 years? If someone can move a few miles up the road from Carlisle to Langholm and instantly become ‘Scottish’, what’s the big deal about national identity?

What exactly is the point of 'Scottishness' if there is no ethnic component to it? And if there is an ethnic component, why are we denying 800,000 Scots the right to vote?

Song of the Week - 'Reign of the Stupid'

It was once said that if you put a million monkeys on a million typewriters, they would eventually come up with a Shakespearian play.  Someone very smart has pointed out that the internet has rendered this remark demonstrably untrue. I hold to the theory that the person who came up with the monkey /typewriter /Shakespeare / theory was probably a monkey.      

When I wrote this song, I was influenced by watching a TV programme on the ‘National Television Awards’. There were some very well-dressed people being rewarded, celebrated, congratulated and fawned over for their various televisual efforts. As this song says, they were giving themselves prizes and everything.  As a consequence, they probably felt even better about themselves than they did before.  Isn’t showbiz just great?

 

Anyway, I can’t sit here talking all day ... I’m going to zap channels, because I really don’t want to miss ‘Help, I’m almost as fat as my dog!’  On a musical note, the chords on this song are pretty nice and I feel truly honoured to have nicked them from some of my favourite artists. 

The image is by Dan Meyers at the wonderful Unsplash.com.

Reign of the stupid

'Philip Larkin - A Writer's Life' by Andrew Motion

This comprehensive account of the life and work of Philip Larkin is remarkable in its detail and scope, particularly when you consider that the poet insisted, on his deathbed, that his diaries be destroyed. At times, it reads like a novel as we follow the development of the bookish, precocious middle-class child who became a jazz-obsessed undergraduate before ‘settling’ for a career as a librarian. Showing some flair for the work, he made his mark in his first job by reviving a dowdy Shropshire branch before moving to Leicester, Belfast and eventually, Hull University. Library triumphs aside, the writing is what we are interested in and Motion reveals a great deal about the poet’s various struggles with his art. Concerns about the worth of his endeavours loom large, as does the influence of his autocratic father and demanding mother; it is no wonder that one of his most famous lines was: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”.

Some modern critics have foolishly chosen to judge Larkin by today’s politically correct standards and, invariably, he is decreed to be ‘unsound’ on just about any topic you could mention. There is, however, a sense in which his life and work can be seen as illustrative of the disillusionment of the post-war years; many of the best minds of his time will have shared his opinions on, say, social engineering, modernism and the decline of empire. Motion is broadly sympathetic and, rather than condemn the poet for some of his ‘old-fashioned’ views, tacitly recognises that he was a product of his times. Complicated and contradictory as Larkin often was, one suspects that some of the so-called ‘damning’ correspondence detailed in this book was written in something close to the spirit of caricature, designed to amuse and tailored to what he thought the other person wanted to hear; his letters to Kingsley Amis and Barbara Pym are examples of that.

Having long feared –presciently, as it turned out- that he would not live beyond the age of sixty-three, his final years were marked by alcoholism, bitterness and regret. Towards the end, he confided to Monica Jones (one of his long-term girlfriends) that he was “spiralling down towards extinction”. In truth, that was the kind of remark that he could easily have made at any point during his previous forty years. Reading Larkin’s poetry, one knows -for all the mordant humour- that boredom, failure, disappointment and death are never very far away. It is quite sad that in spite of accumulating an impressive body of work, he could often view his artistic life as a rather tepid failure.

Chosen to edit the Oxford book of Twentieth Century English Verse, Larkin made enemies in literary and academic circles when the final selection appeared to reflect his own view that modernist poets were often elitist, wilfully obscure and somewhat over-rated by the cognoscenti. But what some interpreted as a cantankerous and conservative eccentricity on this topic actually reflected a principled belief in the value of verse that was accessible to all. There is something very English about that kind of unfussy and unpretentious approach to art; indeed, it is probably one the reasons that Larkin’s work endures.

Until reading this biography, I was unaware that his love life was quite so complicated. He obviously had strong desires for love and sex, but also a need for solitude. Having made the decision to put his writing before other considerations, he scrupulously chose to avoid making a firm commitment to any one of several women with whom he might have led a very different kind of life. His work turned out to be remarkable, but one can't help but wonder whether the women in his life would have considered it all to have been worth it.

There is no such thing as musical 'guilty pleasures' #2

Further to my recent observations on the concept of ‘guilty pleasures’ in music, something has reminded me of another episode of foolishness that probably stopped me getting as much enjoyment from music as I should have.             

 

Nik Kershaw’s recent UK tour, in addition to promoting his new album ‘Ei8ht’, featured a complete run-through of his platinum-selling ‘Human Racing’ album from 1984. I was particularly happy to attend a couple of these shows because I had more or less missed out on the ‘Human Racing’ album first time around, not because I was unaware of its existence, but because I was daft enough to have felt guilty about liking a certain kind of pop music.    

I recall that when he first appeared on Top of the Pops, my girlfriend described him as looking like a cross between Gary Numan and someone from Buck’s Fizz; I don’t think it was meant as a compliment. He had obviously had some kind of fashion makeover and looked like what I would have pejoratively described as a ‘manufactured’ pop star (as if other more ‘authentic’ pop stars just appeared out of the ether, fully formed and bursting with talent and integrity). On the final night of 1984, the BBC showed a live transmission of one of his gigs. In spite of the fact that I quite fancied watching it, I kept only half an eye on proceedings and eventually consented to the TV being tuned to something else. I knew deep down that I found his music quirky and tuneful, but I couldn’t give myself wholeheartedly to it, because, well … it just wasn’t ‘cool’ to admit to liking someone who featured in Smash Hits and who was screamed at by teenage girls. I mean, come on.  That kind of stuff, surely, was just not culturally significant? It didn’t have, to use Woody Allen’s phrase, ‘total heaviosity’. 

          

Some would argue that 1984 was a great year for British pop music. Wham, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Culture Club all topped the charts, but they made little impact on me.  Haughtily and ostentatiously snubbing the charts, I would have been too busy with other stuff. When, for instance, I bought my 12 inch copy of ‘What difference does it make?’ by The Smiths, I was convinced that I was witnessing the rise of the coolest and most culturally significant band on the planet. There is no doubt that they made a cultural impact, but –to my ears- much of their work now seems bereft of melody, with many of the songs failing to cash the cheques written by Morrissey’s witty titles.   

I was a big fan of the introspective singer-songwriter David Sylvian. His ‘Brilliant Trees’ album was one of my favourites of 1984, but nowadays I struggle with his constipated vocal stylings and humourless existential angst (and any songwriter that references Picasso and Sartre in his work is surely trying a wee bit too hard). I also admired the dreamy post-punk soundscapes of Cocteau Twins, but find now that I tire rather quickly of their ethereal, meandering, effects-driven epics. Although Liz Fraser’s melodies are sometimes pretty, the lyrical gibberish I once thought charming (or even mysterious) now seems merely annoying.      

Another act that I would definitely have name-checked in any conversation in which I would have felt the need to appear cool (namely: any conversation that would have taken place between ‘waking up’ and ‘going to sleep’) was Echo and the Bunnymen. But whenever I hear their stuff now, I find it difficult to like; much of it appears plodding and pedestrian, drearily anchored by what sounds like a very limited range of keys and tempos.  Most of the time, Ian McCulloch is not so much singing as posturing, sounding like a lippy social sciences student who wished he had studied at the Sorbonne. His lyrics somehow manage to sound vacuous, gauche, pretentious and glib at the same time. The Bunnymen’s 1984 album ‘Ocean Rain’ was launched with a PR campaign that proclaimed it to be the greatest album ever made. It wasn’t. It had a few decent tunes, but the tasteful orchestration helped disguise the fact that most of the songs were little more than average.   

So, off the top of my head, those are four acts I would have enjoyed in 1984, but am quite indifferent to now, along with one act that I pretended not to like in 1984, but am pretty keen on now. 

Hamstrung by silly student snobberies, I let Nik Kershaw’s chart-busting glory days pass me and only deigned to catch his act once his commercial star had started to wane. During the nineties, he took a long sabbatical from performing before returning with the sublime ‘15 minutes’ album in 1998. Mature, reflective, tuneful and adult in its lyrical concerns, it was all that good middle-of-the-road pop should be. His albums now sell in modest amounts, but the recent tour gave his fans the chance to relive the halcyon days of 1984 and, of course, presented a fool like me with a belated opportunity to see those big hit songs performed live.  

The enjoyment I got from these concerts has led me to reflect once more upon how we experience, perceive and enjoy music. How do we judge musical quality? What makes folk imagine that some music is ‘cool’, while other music isn’t? What gives a piece of music longevity? Does age bring greater clarity about what we like, or does it merely make us more conservative in our tastes? Why do some songs remain in our hearts while others lose their lustre?  

I have the feeling I might return to this topic.

In the meantime, here is Nik Kershaw bringing in the New Year at the Hammersmith Odeon on 31^st December 1984, complete with balloons, eighties-style dancing and screaming girls.   

Song of the week - 25 o'clock

This week’s song is ’25 o’clock’, taken from the first Eisenhowers album. 

It represents something of a brief assault on the senses, crammed as it is with retro synths, a disco bassline, crashing powerchords and harmonies straight out of the Beatles songbook. The original demo started off sounding a bit like Squeeze impersonating the Rutles, but once we started to kick the song around in rehearsals, wiser council prevailed. We eventually settled on this slightly retro (but hopefully not cheesy) arrangement, with Ronan Breslin contributing the synth (complete with mad solo), while Paul Gray and Billy Devine cook up a storm in the rhythm section.      

The lyric is about two people trying to inhabit a private space away from all notions of personal responsibility. The line “You learn from experience that you don’t learn much from experience” is key to illustrating the folly of dwelling in the kind of fantasy world conjured up by the self-deluding losers in this song. Incidentally, there is no thematic link between this piece and the rather fine Dukes of Stratosphear song of the same name.

The image is provided by Adrian Swancar at Unsplash.com.

25 o'clock

  

On falling out of love with Doctor Who

A friend asked me the other day if I had caught the final episode of the latest series of Doctor Who. I confessed that not only had I failed to catch it, but that I had stopped watching the show some time ago. The acknowledgment of that fact still makes me feel a little bit sad.

When Russell T Davies revived the franchise in 2004, he reclaimed Saturday night TV for the family. Doctor Who, with Christopher Ecclestone and then David Tennant in the starring role, was the only programme that our whole family could sit and watch. It seemed to have something for everyone. But much as I loved this reinvention of the show, I wondered if there would come a point at which I would eventually tire of it. When I was a lad (and it was all fields around here), it had a definite shelf life. Once you had worked your way through a couple of Doctors, it was usually time to move on. I lost interest towards the end of Tom Baker’s reign and, by the time the TARDIS was occupied by Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford, Doctor Who meant about as much to me as Andy Pandy or Emmerdale Farm.

I don’t, however, think that my current lack of enthusiasm has anything to do with Matt Smith. From what I’ve seen, he is a fine actor and a very good Doctor; he’s quirky, weird and funny, but with just the right hint of menace. My indifference may be something to do with the fact that my youngest child has also lost interest in the show, but I think the writing was actually on the wall during the last days of David Tennant's tenure. That series drifted lamely towards a prolonged and cheesy farewell that was utterly devoid of dramatic tension. While Russell T Davies may have stayed just a little bit too long, his successor at the helm, Stephen Moffat, is probably too much of a Doctor Who geek to have been left in charge of steering the ship. Under his direction, the show has become almost ridiculously self-referential and pointlessly complicated. At times, one gets the impression that elements of unresolved plot within the various timelines are accumulating like so many piles of uncollected rubbish. The narrative arc, for instance, around the character of River Song, is just too convoluted to care about. And if I ever hear the phrase "Hello, sweetie" again, I may well commit an act of violence.

I think, however, that my current lack of enthusiasm is mainly about what I believe to be a fatal flaw in the writing. This might best described as an absence of jeopardy, brought about through the current Doctor's unfortunate acquisition of messianic qualities and seemingly limitless power. For example: I can’t be the only person to have grown bored, and then irritated, by the infinite capabilities of the sonic screwdriver. In the old days, it was a handy little tool for getting the Doc out of tricky situations. Where once it might have unlocked a door or maybe sparked a broken circuit into life, it is now a fall-back device that can do just about anything, making Harry Potter’s magic wand look about as effective as a stick of celery. It does, however, come in handy for writers struggling to resolve awkward plot situations.

In order willingly to suspend disbelief, we have to believe that there is at least a chance that the Doctor might fail. When he can do literally anything, we have no stake in the drama, because there isn’t any. You can't have drama when the central character has a bottomless pocket full of GET OUT OF JAIL FREE cards.

Without wishing to sound like too much of a traditionalist, omnipotence was never a characteristic of previous Doctors and I’m afraid that the notion of ‘rebooting’ the universe to resolve a plot was the writing equivalent of the infamous Dallas series #9 ‘it was all a dream’ debacle. These developments have painted the show into a corner, from where it can surely only benefit from some kind of downgrade.

It pains me to say it, but what Doctor Who probably needs now is several years off before trying another imaginative reinvention.

When 'the story' isn't the story

The murderous attack on the American consulate in Benghazi has been followed by further assaults on other western embassies. It is claimed that the ‘reason’ for these so-called riots is that locals have taken offence at the content of a low-budget film produced in the US. The film, 'Innocence of Muslims' (by all accounts, a pretty amateurish production), portrays the Prophet Mohammed as a womanizer, a ruthless killer and a child molester.

Depressingly, much of the reporting of these terrible events has chosen to focus on who made the film and why they made it, as if any of that matters. Some commentators even decided to focus on how certain Western political figures interpreted the attacks.
One particularly striking headline in yahoo news ('Romney politicises embassy killings') provided a near-perfect illustration of the ‘let’s-just-put-our-blind-eye-to-the-telescope’ approach some people have taken to this story.

The truth is that ‘the story’ here isn’t about why or how a bunch of amateurs made their little film. Nor is it about how a politician who isn’t even in power reacted to the events. The story is that innocent people got murdered by an ugly mob intoxicated on a heady mix of belligerent ignorance, a childish sense of grievance and sheer political opportunism. All of this, we should not flinch from pointing out at every available opportunity, is depressingly underpinned by a myopic, literal, atavistic interpretation of a text written around 1400 years ago.

To pretend that the motives of the folk who made the film is somehow the story or that Mitt Romney’s reaction to events is somehow the story, is to collude in giving the murderers an easy ride. Instead of apportioning blame in the right places and making some rational judgements on an irrational, pre-medieval set of superstitions and values, some have chosen to retreat from responsibility and focus instead on what they perceive to be the political bad manners of the film makers and the Republican party candidate.

Let’s get this clear: Mitt Romney didn’t politicise this event; the act of attacking the American consulate was not only hugely symbolic, but explicitly political. To deny that is to patronise and belittle those who carried it out. Radical Islam has a global political vision, about which it is deadly serious. None of us really know exactly how much of a threat it carries, but it has enough of a track record to suggest that we should at least accord it the respect of taking its political acts and political intentions seriously.

Another egregious element of that headline was the clearly pejorative use of the word ‘politicise’. To use politicise as a dirty word demeans political discourse. Politics doesn’t have to be about consensus and constraint. It can be awkward, dirty and rife with conflict. By denying politics -that is, adult, frank, no-holds-barred political discourse- we willingly diminish our cultural options. Little wonder then, that today’s political landscape is as sterile as Teletubbyland, wherein each photogenic protagonist is merely a colour-coded deliverer of the latest vapid sound bite.

It is this very de-politicisation of politics that has helped smother our cultural discourse. Framed within the stiff, formal and stifling boundaries of political correctness and cultural relativism, we are reduced to interpreting events like the Benghazi attack by focusing on anything other than the naked truth.

Sadly, the US government, by asking YouTube to ‘consider’ its policy on sensitive material, now seems to believe that freedom of speech is not such a noble cause, after all. By bringing the film-maker in for questioning, the administration also appears to have adopted the same view on 'Innocence of Muslims' as the folk who burned down the consulate.
These actions alone will have confirmed to the rioters that they are on the right track. It’s hard to see how they could conclude anything other than the fact that they can, with impunity, carry out similar attacks on American and other western embassies.

But some folk still want to put that blind eye to the telescope. Some folk still want to believe that the story isn’t really 'the story'.

Song of the week - Mr and Mrs Frankenstein

A song about a crazy celebrity couple, with a generous side helping of hypocrisy and hubris. The idea was to scratch the glossy surface of celebrity and find, not just vapidity, but a real heart of darkness … but in a funny way.  Imagine a TV show, something like ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here’, in which a famous singer and his surgically-enhanced showbiz wife have to film a pop video in a shanty town somewhere on the edge of a major South American city.  

The song lingers among the sights, the sounds and the smells, but the biggest stink by far comes from the attitude of the global superstar, believing –as he does- that he’s “off to meet the savages with a pocketful of beads.”

This track was recorded for an American podcast a couple of years ago and I think it’s actually better than the version that appeared on the first Eisenhowers album.  The album version is perhaps a bit fussier than it has to be, while this cut gets pretty directly to the point of the song. The image is provided by DDP at the fabulous Unsplash.com.

Mr and Mrs Frankenstein

This is not a review

I can’t be alone in having had the experience of reading a review of a film or a book or an album and thinking: “Did that idiot see the same film /read the same book /listen to the same album as me? Did they actually watch the film /read the book /listen to the album?”
Judging by the quality of some reviews, I’d guess that ‘phoning it in’ after a cursory perusal of the work is not that unusual an occurrence. Some might say that would constitute a rather dishonourable practice, but I wonder if that is necessarily the case? Might it be possible not only to write, but to justify a review of a piece of work that you have not experienced in its entirety?

I recently abandoned reading a novel, around fifty pages in. The book in question was ‘The Quiet Girl’ by Peter Hoeg and had been on my ‘to do’ list for a while. I really liked one of his novels from the early nineties -'Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow'- and was looking forward to seeing if the rest of his work was up to that standard.
Giving up on a book is not something that I do lightly, but, struggling with what seemed like an almost Joycean density to the text, I first considered chucking ‘The Quiet Girl’ about twenty pages in. I was suffering from information overload, but the good stuff I had in the bank from ‘Miss Smilla’ gave me the resolve to soldier on in the belief that things would surely settle down.

Unfortunately, about fifteen pages later, my initial misgivings had mutated and grown, like mould on yogurt. Numbed by the relentless accumulation of detail in the text and irked by the cryptic dialogue, my rising tide of irritation was compounded by the extraordinarily detailed descriptions of the lead character’s incredible auditory powers (in which every sound had hidden sharps and flats or underlying minor and major chords). And, to be honest, there is only so much detail one absorb about street names in Copenhagen or the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. So, for the second time, I gave serious thought to abandoning the book, but -for reasons too tedious to analyse- decided to give it one last push.

Then, alas, somewhere around page fifty, wading through the bog of another annoying, self-consciously illusive episode involving a ‘mysterious’ young girl, I had to admit defeat; ‘The Quiet Girl’, for me, had taken its last surrealistic leap into cryptic irrelevance.

Now here’s the thing: I believe that I could now write a perfectly valid review of that book. I think my review would include the phrase: 'self-regarding’ and would posit the opinion that the book wasn’t written to enthral and entertain the reader. I would suggest that it was a book written to score intellectual and stylistic brownie points for a writer who must have felt that he had something to prove. I would suggest that, while the author may have intended to expand the techniques of his profession, he had succeeded only in wandering up a cul-de-sac of pretension and obscurity.

I’d like to think that my review would acknowledge that I had given up on the book. By way of mitigation, I would suggest that, had I sat down to a meal in a restaurant and the first few mouthfuls had tasted like old shoelaces marinated in vinegar, it would not have been entirely unreasonable for me to assume that it was likely that the rest of that meal would also taste like old shoelaces marinated in vinegar. Unless I was determined to somehow acquire a taste for old shoelaces marinated in vinegar, I could not only excuse myself from the obligation to eat the rest of the meal, but could legitimately warn my friends to avoid the ‘old shoelaces marinated in vinegar’ option on the menu.

So perplexed was I by this spectacular difference in quality between one of Mr Hoeg’s novels and another that I decided to carry out some research. I quickly came across this revealing phrase from the Danish literary critic Poul Behrendt: "The cold reception of the 'The Quiet Girl' was due to its complexity and scope, which the critics didn't understand".

I get it now. The fault was almost certainly mine. Perhaps, in order to write a proper review of the book, I will have to train my palette to appreciate old shoelaces marinated in vinegar.

Song of the week: Asleep at the wheel

This is an acoustic re-working of a song that, in an ideal world, would have been made famous by Gum.  It was recorded for their 2003 ‘Low-flying Kites’ album, then later given a lush makeover for single release.  

The original demo was a little bit 'down and dirty' before the band transformed it into something in the folky-electronica vein. This version is probably closer in style to my original demo of the song and the slightly bitter tone of the vocal seems to suit the subject material.  

Stripped right back to basics, this acoustic version manages to retain the kind of condemnatory vibe befitting what is -in effect- a piece of character assassination. As usual, the names have been left out in order to protect the guilty.

Asleep at the wheel 

Let's have a fair fight

Now that the gloves are coming off in the run up to the US presidential election, I’m hoping that the media coverage improves on the execrable example of 2008 and that there is at least a modicum of impartiality and the possibility of something approaching reasoned discussion and debate. Last time around, the mainstream media was very firmly behind Obama, generally perceived to be the fresh, attractive and culturally significant candidate in what many folk viewed as a landmark election. It was certainly a landmark election for the BBC, in the sense that the corporation pretty much abandoned even the pretence of impartiality in favour of pushing the received narrative, namely that Obama was the chosen one.

I am not unsympathetic to the notion that there were all kinds of cultural reasons why the election of an African-American president was unequivocally a good thing, but there was very little discussion about the actual politics, beyond repeated use of those campaign bromides about ‘hope’ and ‘change’.
It seemed that so much emotional and intellectual capital was invested in the Obama project that barely a dissenting voice was tolerated. Caught up in what, at times, seemed like an almost messianic zeal, some reporters hinted that only a ‘racist’ Republican vote could have kept Obama out, seemingly unaware that the decisive element of any racist vote, by definition, would have to have come from the Democrat side. It is very rare indeed for the hard core Republican vote to fall below 40% (George W. Bush had polled 50.6% in the 2004 vote). Before Obama, the last Democrat to get 50% of the popular vote was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Since then, no fewer than four Republican candidates had polled more than half of the popular vote, none of them running against a black candidate. To have imputed race as a motive was a disgraceful slur on the American electorate.

On a personal level, I found myself surprised -more than once- by some of the throwaway remarks that folk were prepared to make. They seemed not to understand that, if it is wrong to make a negative judgement on someone because of the colour of his skin, then it must also be wrong to make a positive judgement based on the colour of his skin. Some of those remarks may have come -as the saying goes- ‘from a good place’ but we shouldn’t forget that those positives and negatives are merely aspects of an equation in which the key component is that willingness to pass judgement based on skin colour.

Beyond the race issue, some of the day-to-day coverage also left a lot to be desired. I recall one particular example, a vivid illustration of the lack of perspective and balance that was all-too-common.

Dom Joli was hosting a Sunday morning news and current affairs show on Radio Five Live and was interviewing a number of guests on the subject of the election. At one point in the discussion, the American goalkeeper Marcus Hahnemann –at that time resident in the UK- was asked if he would be sending in a postal vote. He replied in the affirmative, stating that his family, from several generations back, was firmly Republican.

Joli said: "Oh ... that's a bit weird". An awkward pause followed, before Mr. Hahnemann, to his credit, handled the slight with good manners and no little grace, allowing the conversation to move on.

A couple of things were remarkable about this incident. First, Joli was clearly confident that he had license to be rude to a guest and to write off about 46% of the American electorate as ‘weird’; in other words, he was comfortable with being explicitly partisan on a news and current affairs show. The second remarkable thing comes from the realisation that Joli's bewilderment about Hahnemann's support for the Republicans was actually genuine. He was truly shocked that the goalie could have those political views.

The word 'bias' is inadequate in a case like this, because the notion of bias infers an understanding that you are favouring one position as opposed to another. If you are biased, you choose to discriminate because you are aware that you have a favoured position. What should we call it when someone is literally unable to understand or appreciate that other folk might have another, entirely legitimate, take on things?

It would be nice to think that the race issue can be parked and that the records of the individual candidates will be the focus of the discussion. It would be nice to think that our state broadcaster will seek to uphold standards of probity, honesty and impartiality.

It would be nice, but I’m not going to hold my breath. 

Song of the week: Miles until morning

In answer to, literally, a request, I occasionally post my own songs on this blog. That's fair enough, because I reckon it's about time that some other folk got to suffer for my art. Whenever I feature a different track from my extensive back catalogue of non-hits, I will include a little bit of background information. Many of these songs could have been successful, but only if they had been written, produced and recorded by someone more talented. 

Today's song is ‘Miles until Morning’, taken from the second Eisenhowers album ‘Film your own Atrocities’. 

A couple of years ago, I was playing with a band that was doing some work with the charming singer Sam Brown and I had the notion that this song might have suited her down to the ground. Abject cowardice (and a fearsome minder in a suit) stopped me handing my demo to Ms Brown after a gig one night in Perth. That’s Perth, Scotland and not Perth, Australia. Who knows what might have happened had I managed to seize that particular moment?  

Sam didn’t cover the song, but she did once borrow the piano on which it was written and recorded. Perhaps, one day, rock historians will deem that fact to have been significant. But probably not. Backing vocals on this version are provided by Kelsey Hunter, a splendid young Scottish singer about whom you may well be hearing a lot more. 

The image was provided by Milada Vigarova from the excellent Unsplash.com.

Miles until Morning

Nik Kershaw - 'Ei8ht'

Nik Kershaw was -as the saying goes- big in the 80s, particularly in 1984 and 1985, when a string of hit singles and platinum-selling albums had him sharing the stage with the rock and pop A-list at Live Aid. As his sales took a dip towards the end of that decade, he embarked upon an extended period out of the spotlight to concentrate on writing for other artists (and famously penned ‘The One and Only’ for Chesney Hawkes). He returned to the fray in 1998 with the splendid '15 minutes', the first album in his post pop-stardom phase. He’s been on that path ever since, quietly producing thoughtful, tuneful, adult pop music without ever threatening to trouble the charts.

His latest release, ‘Ei8ht’, features another diverse selection of excellent material. Crafted middle-of-the-road pop music might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but Kershaw’s melodic gift is such that these songs work their way into your head very quickly and then stay there.
The current single ‘The sky’s the limit’ would be a huge hit if Take That recorded it, while ‘You’re the Best’ has a chorus so absurdly catchy that you’d think he must have stolen it from an old playground chant.

His music is more acoustic and folky these days and some of the material could be bracketed alongside Crowded House, albeit with more focus on the melodic jugular vein. ‘Stuff’, an observation on the perils of rabid consumerism, has echoes of Ray Davies, while ‘Runaway’ contains one of those killer lines (“if you leave me, can I come too?”) that seems so obvious that you wonder why nobody has used it before. He has a nice line in self-deprecating humour and ‘Shoot Me’ is his jaunty take on the notion of old pop stars on the comeback trail.

Although he is very much a pop artist, Kershaw displays a willingness and an ability to explore big themes. A song about death might not sound that promising, but ‘The Bell’ is a beautiful acoustic piece in which he runs through the images he’ll have in his head when the Grim Reaper comes calling. Among these snapshots are images from his childhood, from a family holiday and a moment lying next to his wife. Most touching of all, he recalls an everyday domestic scene with these beautiful and poignant lines:

"There are high hopes in a high chair, sitting in there is a king-to-be;
and he’s smiling his little heart out as he holds out his little arms out to me".

That appeals to the parent (and the sentimental sucker) in me, but in a medium that is all too often mired in cliché, calculation and irony, it is refreshing to encounter unadorned honesty.

The melodies sparkle and soar throughout this album and the arrangements are always slick, but the odd pudding does get over-egged: the catchy refrain of ‘Enjoy the Ride’ perhaps overstays its welcome, while one or two moments feel like they’ve been polished for rather longer than is necessary. But those are minor concerns; the truth is that if we lived in a world in which it was possible for a singer in his fifties to have hits, several of these tracks would have ‘single’ written all over them.

‘Ei8ht’ is further proof that it is possible for a pop star to evolve and age with dignity, grace and humour. Nik Kershaw is an artist who is past the point of worrying about where his music fits in; he’s just writing lovely songs and enjoying life. This album might not push the boundaries of the modern pop song to the limit, but it showcases a very catchy set of tunes from an accomplished singer-songwriter.

My enemy’s enemy is my friend

Granted asylum by Ecuador, Julian Assange remains a house guest -albeit one with very limited options- at their embassy in London. As the arguments continue about the rights and wrongs of his case, one is tempted to paraphrase that Norwegian football commentator: “John Pilger, George Galloway, Tony Benn, Michael Moore, Oliver Stone … your boy took a hell of a beating.”
Only, to these prominent leftists, their boy hasn’t, shouldn’t and -if they get their way- won’t take a beating. Rather than accept the obvious truth that serious allegations have been made and that there is a case to answer, they are hiding behind insinuations of dark conspiracies to ‘get’ Julian Assange. The folk who are out to get him include the American, British and Swedish governments, various secret services and god knows who else.

Let’s make one thing clear: I don’t know if Julian Assange is a rapist and neither do you. But neither do George Galloway, John Pilger and Naomi Klein, all of whom have weighed in with their own brands of idiocy and hypocrisy. Among the most unfortunate of a number of unfortunate contributions to the debate was this remark from Tony Benn, who said: “The charges are that it was a non-consensual relationship. Well, that’s very different from rape.” I can’t be alone in being intrigued by Tony’s ability to draw what he clearly thinks is a distinct line between the second thing (which, presumably, he thinks is quite serious) and the first thing (which, presumably, he thinks is not).

One of the most nauseating aspects of this tawdry show of solidarity is that we know that had the allegations against Assange been levelled at a premiership footballer or a Tory MP or (best of all) a rich banker, Galloway et al would have wanted the alleged miscreant hung, drawn and quartered. The sad truth is that their visceral hatred of the United States has blinded them to the faults of a fellow traveller, to the extent that their judgement is seriously impaired; they think that Assange’s strike rate against the Great Satan puts him somehow above the law.
What makes it worse is that their belief in the Wikileaks cause allows them to be comfortable with the notion of belittling the rape allegations, which in turn belittles the crime of rape itself and –effectively- smears the two women who have made the allegations. The result is a defence that has been, at times, about as sophisticated as saying: Who cares about a couple of chicks out to make a ‘kiss-and-tell’ buck? They are probably on the CIA payroll, anyway.

There are those who would argue that Julian Assange is a special case and it is certainly true that his political activities tell us a lot about him. Wikileaks wields significant power without having to worry about anything as tedious as democratic accountability. It has also broken various national laws on espionage; had these laws been broken by you or I, we would have been put in jail for a very long time. Assange has made a big name for himself as the self-appointed arbiter of when to disclose classified information in ‘the public interest’. In disclosing this information, he has taken no consideration of the possibility of dangerous repercussions, no consideration of any possible sensitivity with respect to national and international security issues.

The request for his extradition has been passed by three independent UK courts. Assange may be an unusually significant person, but if you believe that every person, significant or insignificant, is equally answerable to the rule of law, there is no convincing argument against him being compelled to go to Sweden to defend himself. There is, of course, some irony in the fact that the extradition request comes from a country that is generally held up as an exemplar by so-called political ‘progressives’.

I know, from his actions, that Julian Assange is a hypocrite who believes that the rule of law should not apply to him in the same way that it applies to ordinary people. But I don’t know whether or not he is a rapist. The only people who know that are Assange himself and the two women making the allegations.

This matter is for the Swedish authorities and, if necessary, a Swedish court to decide.

1969

Neil Armstrong has died. The dignity and courage shown by him and his fellow astronauts represented something of the very best that we can be. His name is likely to be remembered long after that of any other person from the 20^th century. 

This track from The Eisenhowers uses the tale of an attempted seduction to look at why the optimism generated by the space race of the sixties appears to have been lost. The video was put together by Ed MacArthur of Stealth Studios.