It’s been a funny old weekend really – starting with all the excitement of my ‘private viewing’ and culminating today in a long and extremely arduous walk. In between there has been lots of wind and rain. I hope the weather is getting it all out of its system so there is good weather for next weekend…..I want my family to see a good reason why we came here, rather than see the same as they did last time…in other words, nothing! It was so dreadful for the whole weekend last time they were here, hopefully not this week.
Anyway, the funny old weekend has skipped through some fabulous stuff. I was sent a link by my pal Shazbop, last week to Steve Lambert’s site. Steve is an old buddy, ex singer from Roman Holliday and now doing solo stuff. While I was browsing his site, I noticed that it’s now possible to buy their album ‘Cookin on the Roof’ on CD. I was in a jolly mood after seeing the site and decided I’d part with twelve quid for this gem of an album, which rarely sees light of day on vinyl in my home. It’s a sad fact that my vinyl rarely comes out these days and when it does, it’s usually late at night after a few drinks and it’s all my ‘anthems’ that I play – you know, stuff like Something’s gotten hold of my heart – by Marc Almond and Gene Pitney, Jacob’s Ladder by the Monochrome Set, Closest thing to heaven by the Kane Gang – you know the culprits – they’re the things I rave about from time to time in these pages.
The album arrived on Friday, while I was away and so yesterday was my first opportunity to get the album onto the kitchen Teac. Which I did. Several times. I think DM may be ready to chuck the album out of the window, so many times has he heard my dreadful renditions of ‘Zodiac, Cadillac, I’m a motormaniac’ and ‘Stand By' belted out at the top of my voice while prancing around the kitchen with the most humungous smile on my face!!!
The album is a Japanese import (RH’s biggest market I believe – a Japanese woman in full-on geisha gear was at their ‘reformed’ gig in London about three or four years ago) and it’s quite fascinating because it has the lyrics of the songs printed in Japanese and English inside the cover. Except there has either been something lost in the translation or alternatively, the person who was responsible for the re-mastering and getting on to CD simply decided to dispense with the idea of scanning the lyrics from the original sleeve. So, the line ‘on a ten-stop, one star, three-chord wonderland’ has become ‘ on a ten-stop, three-comp wonderland’ and the line ‘kiss goodbye the beauty you were gonna drive and hop aboard the midnight bus’ has become ‘just go by the beauty on the corner drive hop up on the midnight bus’. The whole lyric booklet is riddled with these strange and rather marvellous non-lyrics and I have a vision of thousands of Japanese women of a certain age (mine) singing along and getting them all completely wrong because of this…..
After listening to the album several times, I decided to widen out my listening of the day to include some Bauhaus, Cure, Edwyn Collins, Pete Wylie, Echo and the Bunnymen and a few others….these GREAT songs were needed as a kind of good music insurance prior to our evening spent in the company of the dulcet-toned Terry Wogan and that bastion of naff music, the Eurovision Song Contest. I have said before and will say again, I am an unashamed addict of the contest and absolutely love its strangeness.
Last night’s show has to be the most bizarre I have ever seen in as much as the runaway success of the night was the Finnish entry, an act called Lordi and lordy were they like some strange throwback to the days of Iron Maiden. Of course most of the contest is twenty-year out-of-date europop so it was a hugely refreshing change to have twenty-year old thrash metal instead but it was like entering a timewarp. I have been to Finland and had an utterly marvellous time there. Helsinki is a fabulous place. The one thing I will say about it though is that the capacity for drinking among the Finns I met is spectacular – I actually saw some Finns drinking wheat beer at 7am. Mind you, of course there are many Brits who will happily down a pint at that time of day too but I always think of our European friends as being a bit less like that than us so it was a surprise to see. Perhaps that’s why an act like Lordi was able to slip through the net and make it onto Eurovision.
The only disappointment was that I didn’t hear a single ‘nil points’ uttered all night and every country managed to score at least one point in the evening. After all the excitement of watching all thirty seven countries vote, we went to bed late and were up late this morning. So, late in the day, we decided it was time to blow away the cobwebs and walk. Walk we did. We walked many miles across the moor and have come home knackered. On the final leg, we saw a camp site that is now populated with a few caravans and this wall, complete with barbed wire…..what we can’t work out is whether the wall and wire are to keep out the locals or to keep in the tourists!
There was a lot of gushing going on last year - unashamed too!
