Always a dance floor filler this one, and as the title suggests it’s a song about shoplifting.  The band were all hooked on drugs when was released.  I think they all hated each other by this point too, but friction often makes the best music doesn’t it.  I’ve never been caught stealing, I’ve always been too careful.  The trick is to cautiously scope out your target and, over time, get to know the layout of the store, who the in-store detectives are, where CCTV may be located, and so forth.  Next, carefully enter the store and shout “Help! Look out! Shark!” and when everybody runs for their lives you can help yourself. 

Well, not really a rant, more a huff.  The Times falls over itself to make as many cliches about libraries as possible and thus fails to cover the issue about how appallingly library services and librarians are treated by local authorities.  My wife’s library has been threatened with closure recently – yes, there is a new library opening in town and no, the council haven’t given serious thought to how bereft the Old Town community will be once it closes.

Mind you this in a town which has it’s main post office inside a branch of WH Smith, well, no suprise really.

I’ve just finished reading Dave Wood and Nicky Sewell’s Haunted Swindon book.  It’s terribly well researched and each of the so-called haunting cases is approached with scientific rigour.   I didn’t know that the Wyvern Theatre had so many hauntings attached to it – although I’m not suprised.  I have to say in all my years of going there as both watcher and performer I’ve never seen anything out of the ordinary.  I’ll have to keep ‘em peeled.

Our Gilbert & Sullivan group reconviened last night, and started rehearsing for The Sorcerer, which we will perform next March.  It was a tough vocal work-out after a lazy singing free summer.  Throat is sore. Still it will get better with time.

The 1970s were a very rich period for German bands, Can, Faust, Neu!, and of course Kraftwerk. All of which were highly experimental and individual in their approach to music.  Arguably Kraftwerk’s body of work reflects an obsession with many transport and technology issues; High speed rail (Trans Europe Express), the rise of the PC (Computer World), and this track, Autobahn, about motorways.  No ordinary motorways, but a utopian, utilitarian future where we’d use the motorway to flit safely, quickly, democratically, and efficiently between all the major European cities.  Of course we know that future never came, and even Kraftwerk turned to more sustainable transport in the end – bicycles (See Tour de France, Tour De France Soundtracks).

To be honest I won’t know what a large hadron looked like, let alone be filled with the desire to collide them into one another, yet today our understanding of the universe will advance a tiny step forward by doing just that.  BBC reports the switch on and has a whole day of programmes devoted to the LHC.  In depth information on it can be found here and here. Silly information on the LHC can be found here.

I can report that at the present time of writing, reality (whatever that is), has not changed.  I only hope the boffins have plugged the device into a really hot cup of tea.

I once heard the music of Sonic Youth described as the sound of a fax machine being sucked through a jet engine.  That’s probably about right.  I’ve always been of the opinion that guitars are for making noise, not making music, and Sonic Youth are very good at making noise with guitars.  They have a reflective side too, illustrated by this song about Karen Carpenter from the album Goo.  The song is about anorexia, and is completely heartbreaking, much like Karen’s life.

The BBC reports on research by Professor Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University into the link between music tastes and personality.  people have done this sort of thing before, but what makes this research different is the scale with many thousands taking the online questionnaire.  You’ll see on the BBC website that a number of musical genres are featured along with the personality traits of those who listen to it.  Being the BBC it’s all fairly broad brush-strokes kind of stuff.  For a genre hopper like me (I listen to a number of the genres identified), my personality traits are:
High self-esteem, creative, gentle, outgoing, not gentle, Low self-esteem, not hard working, at ease 

Some contradiction in the esteem and gentility department, but then every human on the planet is a glorious mess of contradiction, the rest is pretty accurate.  I’d quite like to read the full research outcomes though.

There aren’t many good songs about Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou, but this is one of them. Who else but The Pixies could have made the line “Slicing up eyeballs – ha, ha, ha, ho!” such singalong fun.  They are my favourite band.  I loved the way that they didn’t look like a rock group, and that they made deliberately boring videos so that MTV wouldn’t play them.  I was in a nightclub in Swansea, that teetered on the edge of the sea, when the news appeared on a video screen that The Pixies had broken up.  My reaction was to buy more drinks and become less sober.

This is a new feature of this blog, where I select one of many songs I like and write either about the song or about a time, or something in my life that it represents.  It’s a bit like a continuous Desert Island Discs only without anything useful or illuminating to say.  I like the idea of choosing my favourite songs, but unfortunately I can never narrow it down to eight.  I’ll post the first ones soon.