me-ac’s random round-up…
FEVER RAYS
It’s been a strange few days at me-ac central. For one thing we’ve seemingly lost the very core of our being – our appetite – replaced by a suspected case of swine flu (which makes sense when combined with the extraordinary tiredness and sore throat also in situ). But it could be us being overdramatic (regular readers will attest it wouldn’t be the first time) and just an excuse to kick around in bed all day watching dodgy old horror flicks (strictly in the name of research for Halloween week, naturally). Whatever, it’s also that time where we check back on our last five musings with any additional thoughts, corrections and what-have-you…
TALK OF THE TOON
It’s just over a week since we dusted the cobwebs off our retro Newcastle United scarf at Portman Road. And as the deathless cliché goes, that’s a long time in the football. That 4-0 away win doesn’t look so hot in the light of Ipswich’s continuing knack of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, while Newcastle have flatlined; eschewing the chance to haul themselves seven points clear at the top with home draws against QPR and Bristol City. While hardly atypical, like many me-ac suspected NUFC would be toiling miserably in mid-table after our summer fire sale, history suggests we’ll rue this clear failure of nerve later in the season.
But it’s not events on the pitch that concern us here – this is Newcastle United after all – no, it’s last week’s off-field distraction, the Kevin Keegan tribunal. Now like most Newcastle fans me-ac has an enduring affection for Special K, and would begrudge him very little, especially in a head-to-head with our oleaginous owner Mike Ashley – a man whose blundering naivety and prevarication largely secured our demotion. However, neither emerged with much credit from last week’s judgement.
While the dirty laundry raised in the tribunal hints that Keegan’s stance against Dennis Wise’s signing of Ignacio Gonzalez was just the tip of a very grubby iceberg (and please don’t even get us started on Wise), the sheer breadth of Keegan’s claim was startling. In effect he was asking for £25 million – an extra £8.6 million for the remainder of his contract plus £16.5 million for ‘stigma’ damages – for “income, which he would otherwise reasonably have expected to receive up to his 65th birthday”. Say what? It’s an outlandish amount and one Keegan seemed to ‘reasonably’ back off from after his eventual award of £2 million for constructive dismissal. Mind you, it’s not the first time Keegan has spotted a potential money-spinner and grabbed it with both hands. Here’s a four-pack of previous raids…
1. Kevin Keegan’s Soccer Annual
Keegan was one of the first football stars to truly capitalise on his celebrity. And on the back of the popularity of boys’ mags like Match and Shoot emerged this 1978 Christmas hardback. You could read its 64 pages in an hour, if pushed, but who wouldn’t want to learn the mercurial soccer maverick’s thoughts on travel, striking partners, even how to be a prize-winning poet? And that’s not to mention John Toshack’s gung-ho tribute to his erstwhile Liverpool strike partner.
2. Superstars
Keegan’s pluck and courage was certainly the highlight of his profile-boosting showing on the BBC’s sporting series. Competing in a 1976 cycle race in Bracknell, Keegan fell off at high speed – watch it here – suffering severe burns, cuts and abrasions for his toils. Yet despite his injuries he insisted on going again, clocking a second place finish and even winning the show’s final steeplechase.
3. Head Over Heels In Love
The inevitable pop single arrived in the summer of 1979, and by Christ was it a stinker. Keegan could hold a tune, just, but wasn’t helped by his wayward choice of collaborators – Smokie members Chris Norman and Pete Spencer – and it was always going to be an uphill task turning this rejected Rak B-side into chart gold (it stumbled to 31 in the UK, but hit the German top ten).
Alongside boxing legend Henry Cooper, and pre Barry Sheen, the essence of Keegan was an amalgam of citrus, lavender and sandalwood divined from that popular scent ‘with muscle’, Brut 33. The pair showed their guns and took homo-erotica to the masses with their gym-and-shower based ad and its enduring slogan: “Nothing beats the great smell of Brut”. Gertcha!
THE FULL PACKAGE
Amid me-ac’s bout of dewy-eyed nostalgia for The Very Things colossal non-hit The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes, was a small shot of the sleeve of The Cravats’ last single, Rub Me Out. A startling black and white image, with stencilled titles in the established Crass house style, rendered as a fold-out sleeve on poor quality yet resilient paper stock, it’s wholly distinctive and emblematic of a time when the packaging meant nearly as much as the music. John Peel and a few sympathetic stores aside, there were few very opportunities to crane your Britney Spears around the more outré sounds of the time. And me-ac, like many others, would often take the purchase plunge stone deaf – either on the basis of some half-remembered review in the inkies or, more often than not, purely on the artwork’s graphic appeal.
Visual identity was something Crass embraced from the start, and there’s little doubt that their impact would have been muted, if not negligible, were it not for the anger and impact of Gee Vaucher’s distinctive artwork (fully documented in Crass Art And Other Pre Post Modernist Monsters). The mad font foreplay on the inside sleeve of that Crass-released Cravats single (above) is another provocative reminder of the bang you got for your buck in those halcyon days and me-ac, for one, finds it more than a bit rich that Apple/iTunes are currently celebrating sleeve artwork when they’ve done so much to practically ensure its obsolescence.
GIFT RAP
The Turner Prize exhibition opens today at the Tate, as previewed here last week, and me-ac will be wobbling on down for a proper look as soon as we’ve got through our recommended dose of Tamiflu. It can be a bit of a dry and underwhelming encounter when busked solo, so we recommend tagging along on one of the Late At Tate tours with a glass of plonk. Back in 2005 me-ac thoroughly enjoyed a quixotic tour of the exhibits preside over by bequiffed film critic Mark Kermode. Anyone familiar with the Marcus Tandy lookalike’s work will know he’s never short of an opinion or 12, and so it proved on this vastly entertaining sortie – taking less than 20 minutes for a reference to his beloved The Exorcist to creep into proceedings. Way to go.
RED OR DEAD
After finally catching up with Andrea Arnold’s feature debut Red Road on DVD, me-ac was not only wowed (for the second time in a month) but also struck by how structurally similar it was to this year’s Fish Tank. That’s no bad thing by any measure – cogent plotting seems to have gone the way of the dodo in many recent blockbusters – but perhaps surprising given the film’s genesis. Filmed as the first of a trio of films for the Dogme inspired Advance Party, it was conceived under the following rules, as dictated by Lone Sherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen:
“The scripts can take their starting point in one or more characters or they may be subjected to an external drama. The characters can also participate in a form that is governed primarily by neither characters nor plot.
“The films take place in Scotland but apart from that the writers are free to place them anywhere according to geography, social setting or ethnic background. Their back-stories can be expanded, family relations can be created between them, they can be given habits good or bad, and secondary characters can be added if it is proper for the individual film.
“The interpersonal relationships of the characters differ from film to film and they may be weighted differently as major or minor characters. The development of the characters in each story or genre does not affect the other scripts.
“All of the characters must appear in all of the films. The various parts will be cast with the same actors in the same parts in all of the films.”
Rules is rules and all that, and we’ll be intrigued to see how the second in the trilogy turns out. Currently in post-production, Morag McKinnon’s Rounding Up Donkeys is due in early 2010, though the status of the third and final part (originally conceived by Mikkel Noergaard) is still the subject of speculation and a prolonged gestation. me-ac would also like to apologise unreservedly to anyone offended by us invoking a union of Mick Hucknell and PJ Harvey – as we did with the main characters Jackie and Clyde in Red Road – which, even taken on purely platonic terms, would be akin to a Late Junction session cooked up in the seventh quadrant of hell.
CHILD IN TIME
Precocious, fast-burning child film stars have always been a casualty of the American Dream. But few, bar Bette Davis’s spectacularly batty turn in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, have really featured in its fictions, so me-ac takes off its hat to the masterful creation that is Baby Brent in Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. Brent is the epitome of the deluded and spoilt, trading off his one iconic moment as far into perpetuity as possible, rather like a Big Brother contestant still attempting a northern nightclub tour five years after their series ended. Clearly threatened by the emerging talents of inventor Flint Lockwood, it’s testament to the story’s wider vision that the pair eventually see eye-to-eye and, indeed, that Brent finds a fluffy new incarnation totally suited to his gifts. Point yourself at your nearest multiplex pronto for more…
No comments:
Post a Comment