Going For A Song: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space’

Spiritualized – Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

It’s twenty years this year since Spiritualized released their album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. An anniversary I was reminded of by Guy Garvey’s Finest Hour, and a recent Quietus feature, but confusingly marked by the band last year, a decision which Jason Pierce explains in The Quietus interview.

I loved this album when it was first released, listening to it constantly. From Kate Radley introducing the album on this the opening song (a suggestion of a state in which to maybe consider listening to what comes next) to the twenty-minute ‘Cop Shoot Cop’ that finishes it, this is an album that is ambitious, experimental, simple (the last two not incompatible with each other), and one which has become, in the twenty years since its release, one of my favourite albums of all time.

 

 

Stranger than Fiction

In the Financial Times (I know, I know) yesterday there was an article headlined Drama is struggling to match the reality of Donald Trump. It’s behind a paywall unfortunately, but it discusses, albeit briefly, how “satire, theatre and TV shows are challenged with the restless US news agenda”.

Continue reading “Stranger than Fiction”

Money, Money, Money / Must Be Funny

I was left with this feeling that we are all still borrowing money we don’t have to spend on stuff we don’t need – we are still dancing on the deck of the Titanic

As voice-command purchasing is enabled as default on the Echo devices, some viewers’ Alexa units interpreteded Patton’s words as a command, resulting in a series of additional dollhouse dispatches

These two quotes are taken from the new issue of Delayed Gratification, a magazine which again I’d recommend. The first is from Laura Greenfield, a photo journalist, “who has spent 25 years documenting dept, the growth of consumerism and the rise, fall and rise again of the super-rich”; the second from a regular feature in DG, The butterfly effect, which in this issue shows how a derailed banking career in C19 Vienna led to the mass online ordering of dollhouses in January 2017.

Feature followed article and I felt the two quotes, by accident or design, highlighted and complimented each other nicely.

Going For A Song: ‘7 heure du matin’

 

Jacqueline Taib – 7 heure du matin

July is the month of the Tour de France. It’s being shown on ITV4. They closed the highlights of Stage 13 with this song, which was perhaps a nod to the winner of that stage, Warren Barguil, and to the winner of stage 12, Barguil’s fellow Frenchman, Romain Bardet.

When I first heard it I assumed it was a cover of The Who’s ‘My Generation’, but I was mistaken in that assumption.