music

I always thought I had odd musical tastes. I now realise that I just have a wide-ranging appreciation of various styles, but as I get older that appreciation seems to be widening in directions I could never have dreamt of. My god, I’m even buying 70s jazz-fusion records these days …

For a while I was into mashup / bastard pop/ bootlegs / whatever they’re called this week. Basically mixing elements from various tracks to create new ones. There’s a whole scene out there. It’s lost the cutting edge that it perhaps never had, but still turns up the odd gem. Go Home is a good starting point. Here are a couple of tracks I created myself (these links occasionally work, depending on the whims of Geocities’ servers):

In 1978 I bought Ca Plane Pour Moi, a rather daft but high-energy “punk” single by even dafter Belgian Plastic Bertrand. Soon after, I bought the album, An 1, and enthused about it to anyone who’d listen. No one did. My revenge, after all these years, is to gush at length about it on a lonely little web page. You can look at it here, if you like, and listen to some music. Honestly, it’s worth a look, if only to find out what the lyrics to Ca Plane Pour Moi really meant.

Since 1984 I have been obsessively into Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and the ZTT label in general. Everything you could ever want to know about Frankie, and much more, can be found on the Warriors Return site, including streaming audio and video. They also host a great discussion forum, the Pleasureboard, for Frankie fans, and a parallel forum, the Blue Board, for general ZTT chat. I’m rarely off there.

These days I get most of my new music from the net – not because I’m terrifically high-tech, and certainly not because I have an i-Pod (I don’t), but mainly because it’s free. There are a lot of good mp3 blogs out there – my regular haunts include:

And I keep in touch with popular culture with No Rock ‘n’ Roll Fun. They read the tabloids so you don’t have to – and offer an entertaining commentary on the whole sordid affair while they’re at it.

There’s a lot of music waiting to be discovered out there. Basic Hip Digital Oddio, Oddio Overplay, 3hive, Tonspion, betterPropaganda and Vitaminic are all good places to start.

One thought on “music

  1. Chris

    Nice site. I was living in Paris when Ca plane pour moi came out. I too worked as a translator but must have had a less respectable upbringing than J Finlay! There are a couple of things that are important
    Ca Plane Pour Moi is slang for I’m stoned!
    They had sex on the doormat and presumably the sofa as when orgasm-ing (en passant) she told him he was the ‘king of the sofa’
    (Ne) Touche pas ma planete, is the same as ‘get off my cloud’ it became an eco slogan much later as a play on words and referencing the ‘Touch pas ma pote’ anti racist campaign.
    It is definitely colle as in glue NOT Alcool. ‘…and I will run out of glue’. Plastic always mimes snorting it in the videos!
    Casse l’evier is again slang meaning ‘totally’ (even the kitchen sink) so she totally and utterly dumped him leaving him alone at the bar like a total dick. She didn’t smash the place up!
    Hope this puts things in perspective.

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