50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong - 4 comments

Richard at Baggage Reclaim reminds me that today is legendary Fall frontman, Mark E. Smith's 50th birthday.

The word "genius" is overused - and would in fact be completely inappropriate in Mark's case, but his cantankerous personality, bizarre politics, contempt for authority and establishment, and thirty-year legacy of weird and wonderful music remains an inspiration. I shall be listening to this in tribute.

I tried to find a recent photo in which he didn't look about 60, but that hasn't been possible for a good many years (plus I'm newly sensitive about image copyrighting), so here's Google's image gallery instead.

Euston rocks - no comments

Step Two in my gentle reintroduction to blogging...

This is great - A Blacklist The Left Could Use: Meet the Christopher Hitchens of postpunk:

Does your fan base turn away when they discover Blacklist is an exponent of the so-called "decent Left"? Your lyrics are allusive enough, but you have no compunction about wearing your pro-regime-change politics on your sleeve, at least offstage.

I couldn’t say whether or not our fan base knows about our politics, though in a way they already appreciate them by virtue of liking the music. We play the way we do because we’re sick of complacency. It’s no wonder that much of what passes for independent music today is drab and lifeless - the people who make it are often soft-headed postmodern liberals. We want the intensity that came with believing there was such thing as truth and shouting about it.

That shouldn’t be the exclusive enterprise of conservatives, but it has been of late. What must it have been like to hear razor-sharp, swirling guitars in a dank club in Leeds circa 1982? Likewise, what must it have been like to live in a time when the notion of fighting against dictatorship, genocide, theocracy, and totalitarianism was embraced by the Left? On these two seemingly different questions, the politics of Blacklist is the same, and we preoccupy ourselves with offering an answer. [...]

Here they are:



Thanks D.