El Pibe

Was it the upper left quadrant of your liver?

Aaah, Greta Kellar, the magical voice of Blue Moon and Mad about the Boy, here in an early recording of that popular classic Ich H?tte Dich So Gerne. I guess we could consider it the 'number one pop record' of it's day, in Saxony at any rate.

Booze? Yeah, been rubbish ever since they said you can't have dead rats from the brewing tuns.

NO! Plus I haven't got any weight to lose. I look like a poster child for famine relief as it is!

Touch? :-$

Social networking, txt speak, everyone locks their front doors. I don't understand any of it, whatever happened to jumpers for goalposts, vicks vapo-rub eh? That's what I want to know. That David Cameron is an awfully nice young chap though. Mind you, since knocking drink on the head I seem to be losing weight. My wedding ring has fallen off twice!

Obviously Purcell's best religious inspired work was "Knoweth They 'Tis Yuletide?" But here's a lovely bit of his music for your delectation that he didn't colaborate with Midge Ure on.

Whenever middle class English folk discuss hip-hop / gansta rap, I can't help but be reminded of the opening scene in Office Space where Michael Bolton surreptitiously turns down the music on the stereo and winds up his car window as he nears the black council worker raking the leaves at the road verge.

Basically yes Brendan. Who'd a thunk I'd turn into a boring, middle-aged, tee-totaller* working for a bank eh? *for a couple of months anyway.

I was doing the orbital raves in 89 as a sixteen year old growing up in a boring town in the home counties. It was genuinely magical and exciting, new vistas opening up. For me and my mates it was all trips and puff back then, it wasn't until 1990 that I discovered pills and it all clicked for me. It was sadly a short lived thing, disillusioned by 93, thoroughly fed up by 94. Some of the best times of my life tucked in those five heady years for sure though.

That may well be true too Bob. I think I'd had it with the whole scene anyway. Even people I liked became tedious anoraks about the music and DJs; the focus of an entire week and all conversations became about scoring good drugs (which were inevitably rubbish, I'll never forget the night we all nodded off in club uk "noone else complained" said friend you soon realise is a superficial aquaintance in it for his own ego and starting to screw people over) and getting all excited about the inevitable anticlimax that was wherever we went. DJ's. They play a bunch of records. The quality of my night was definitely predicated upon the attitude of the people and the quality of the drugs (these may well have gone hand in hand). I for one didnt give two hoots who was playing as long as I was having a good time, which I wasn't. Then it all started taking it's toll on health. People acted weirdly, some became depressed, one dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of his sunday roast. I left the scene shortly thereafter and realised that proper conversation, you know one that wasn't all about some obscure mickey finn remix of the Bagpuss theme over some deep chicago house *yaaaawen* or discussing the merits and demerits of your blue meanies versus your grey doves *double yaaaawn*, over some pints was far preferable than all that 'what's your name what you on?' shouted into someone's ear rubbish. Yes the scene went crap, but I don't think I'd have carried on with it even if it had stayed good. Ultimately I got bored. Plus that excitement that we were living a real social revolution is definitely beaten out of you by a ?20 entrance fee and ?5 bottles of water whilst the taps are shut off in the bathroom. Still love those old tunes though.

anapau Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Why vicks vapo-rub? anapu, 1990 was a happier time, the fsahion was daft, the dancing unselfconcious (ok daft), everybody hugged and sometimes someone would massage some vicks vapo-rub into your shoulders or smear a bit across your forehead. It, well, it felt nice. You probabaly had to be there. By 93 the scene had already fractured and that vibe was missing, but when I arrived in London in 94 I was confronted by horror. It was all attitude and posturing, noone was friendly, anything luminous or noisy was definitely out, and not a hint of the vicks or the friendly, caring atmosphere that went hand in hand with it. Blame me growing up, or that the music started to take itself too seriously, broke off into too many genres, or the resurgence of booze or the domination of speed and coke, or the degradation in quality of the pills *ahem, I imagine* but the scene was dead for me. I carefully packed away my long-sleeved watchmen t-shirt, silly baggy shorts, my manc hat and plastic whistle, got myself down the pub and got bladdered. I never looked back. Anyway, to happy times:

"And a version of Squeeze are still doing the rounds." Yeah I saw them at the Cambridge Corn Exchange a few years back. It was a bit cringworthy to be honest, especially when they invited people at the front up on stage to sing-a-long and there was a chap who stood next to Tillbrook and did the fingers-to-the-ear-whilst-pulling-a-vinegar-face thing whilst singing. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry but it's an image burned indelibly into my mind unfortunately. Good shout on Steely Dan, they may not have enhoyed a resurgence themselves, but there are about a million bands these days who sound like them.

This sounds all rather tame these days. Well I say these days, I saw him get booed of stage at kinetic in 94 as for the yoof there it might as well have been Teddy Bear's Picnic

eyes like saucers, jumpers for goalposts, vicks vapo-rub, dancing to the sound system in the car-park, hospitalised with pneumonia. Aaaah, the folly of youth.

15000, sell out!!! If it's not a cat being castrated with some rusty pliers set to the sampled thrum of a malfunctioning Iraqi air conditioning unit looped through a Roland 303 then it's just pandering to the masses.

....tip of my toungue, there was a sasha remix, or was it robertson, I think they played at Shelley's loads.

Good shout *Bob*. Remember that fantastic choon that kind of went mm tsk mmm tsk, and had that woman going OooOh occasionally, and yeah, the break man, just awesome?

Squeeze. They never enjoyed a renaissance. The Cure? I know they were sort of cool back in the day, but they've not really had a second wind either have they? Ooh, oooh, The Sisters of Mercy!!

"...and the oooonly water flowing there is...."

Actually I nicked it from the ingracious Best Man speech from The League of Gentlemen. "And then there was the time our mums both got cancer. My mum got better and your mum died. Iiiiiii won thaaat one!!!!!!!"

Ha! Iiiiiii won thaaat one!!!!!!!

I have literally no idea. Perhaps it was patched to allow this? ETA - Aah, apparently the nnnX format was introduced in Office 2007.

Microsoft make a lot of mistakes but then they have a HUGE suite of products. I'm not a big fan of office 2010, but sometimes if you need to do a leap forward you might need to make a break with the past (though in this case I think they got it very wrong, part of their weird obsession with xml). On the whole I'm ambivalent about them, they also get a lot, on balance, right (though with something like SQL Server it took them 20 years to get there). But for all the Evilcorp mud that gets thrown at them, Jobs cut Apple's outreach programs and much oif their charitable activity, and Gates gave away 30 billion dollars, so credit where it's due. And the only other thing I have to say is iTunes *shudders*

fair point. Let me rephrase that. In order to view a docx you would require word 2010 with its lack of backward compatability and its useless and functionally opaque 'ribbon' thing. Mind you there's nothing in that document that couldn't be presented in good old fashioned ascii in a txt file.