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Time is an unforgivingly impudent little monkey… Neil Kinnock led Her Majesty’s Official Opposition for nine years, fought two general elections, and delivered two of the best platform speeches of modern times:
“If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday: I warn you not to be ordinary; I warn you not to be young; I warn you not to fall ill; and I warn you not to get old.” (7 June 1983).
“I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council - a Labour council - hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.” (1st October, 1985).
So there’s something rather poignant that the search-term ‘Neil Kinnock’ on YouTube yields only four results:
And, of course, the Tracey Ullman video, My Guy’s Mad At Me, from a 1982 edition of Top of the Pops. It does at least start to make webcameron look like mature politics.
Here it is in all its glory:
In case that was all too gruesome, cheer yourself up with the rather fabulous Rufus Wainwright singing ‘The One You Love’:
It’s Friday, I’ve had a hard week at work, I’m off out for a drink.
So for those Divine Comedy fans out there (and I know the Lib Dem blogosphere is teeming with them) here’s La Blogotheque’s video of ‘A Lady of a Certain Age’ (from Victory for the Comic Muse).
There’s a good - if slightly pretentiously written - interview in today’s Indy with that musical virtuoso Jarvis Cocker. (And if you’re still looking for a Christmas present for any wannabe indie ‘90s’ throwbacks you know, then I heartily recommend his solo album, Jarvis.)
His monochrome Sheffield drawl pretty much guarantees anything he says - bon mot, or simple statement - can be defined as deadpan:
… we have to get ready to drive off to a photo shoot. He dons an overcoat, woolly scarf and bobble hat. He looks like an adorable, sexy Where's Wally. "May I run to the loo?" I ask. "You can walk if you like," he says.
There is a terrific track on the album entitled From A To I - the A stands for Auschwitz, the I for Ipswich. As his interviewer, Hermione Eyre, notes, it has acquired a “chilling prescience”. Here’s the first stanza:
“They want our way of life”. Well, they can take mine any time they like. Cos God knows - I know I ain’t living right: I’m wrong. I know I’m so wrong. So like the Roman Empire fell away – let me tell you; we are going the same way. Ah, behold the Decline & Fall. All hold hands with our backs to the wall. It’s the end: why don’t you admit it? It’s the same from Auschwitz to Ipswich: Evil comes I know from not where. But if you take a look inside yourself – maybe you’ll find some in there.
Jarvis has always explored, with naively lascivious curiosity, the dark underbelly of modern living: most notably on Pulp’s 1998 album, This Is Hardcore - for my money, their best - which did so unapologetically and (it turned out) uncommercially. The penultimate track, Glory Days, sums up its big-band misanthropy:
Oh it doesn't get much better than this, cos this is how we live our glory days. Oh and I could be a genius if I just put my mind to it and I, I could do anything if only I could get round to it. Oh we were brought up on the Space-Race, now they expect you to clean toilets. When you've seen how big the world is, how can you make do with this?
It was Jarvis’s precocity for eulogising the mundane and seedy which inspired one of Chris Morris’s finest parodies on Brass Eye (which, though almost a decade old, is still the freshest, most brutally brilliant, satire around):
Fan though I am of Girls Aloud - Sound of the Underground was a throbbingly good Christmas No. 1 four years ago, while Racy Lacey (the bonus track on Chemistry) is 3 minutes of perfectly pure pop pap - I detected some signs of double-standards in their interview in this week’s New Statesman.
… the Girls have a complaint: none of their high-powered admirers has actually bothered to ask them what they think about politics…. says [Sarah] Harding: “It just isn't talked about in normal magazines and newspapers. We never get asked who we would vote for. It could be a general question to ask us in an interview, but it isn’t.”
Cheryl, Nicola, Nadine, Kimberley and Sarah are, you see, party political animals. Well, fair enough. I’ve nothing against popstar polymaths. However, they seem less willing to concede such latitude to politicians:
“Politicians know that we get listened to by more young fans than they do [says Cheryl]. That's why David Cameron said he fancied me. He was just trying to be cool. I bet he couldn't name a single song of ours. Do I fancy him? No! Politicians should stop trying to be cool and get on with running the country.”
To which I’m tempted to rejoin: pop stars should stop trying to be serious and get on with entertaining their fans.
Of course, in a sense, GA are right. Mr Cameron’s view of the aesthetics of members of popular beat-combos is perhaps not the most crucial piece of information we require in order to determine whether he should be handed the keys to Number 10. And yet popular opinion asserts that there is something ‘other’ about politicians, a stereotype some are attempting to debunk by showing how down wiv da kidz they truly are.
This conundrum illustrates a wider point - society’s disinclination to trust politicians unless they can identify with them. Fair enough, you might say.
But why? Why must we conflate the personal and the political? Is it the case that we do not have enough confidence to make up our minds for ourselves based on our own analysis of the facts as presented? And therefore must place our confidence in another’s hands? In which case we must be able to identify with them - culturally as well as politically - in order to know their decisions are in fact ours?
If so, this is an intellectually bankrupt argument.
Of course we must trust our politicians enough to feel sure they are presenting us with accurate and relevant information. But then it is up to us, as citizens, to form our own clear, cool judgments as to which policies are best able to solve society’s problems, and to vote for the party that best advocates our assessment. We should not abdicate this democratic right and duty to our politicians simply because it makes our lives easier.
Forget the Arctic Monkeys (pretty easy, actually), it’s time to out the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, as a fan of popular New York disco-combo, Scissor Sisters.
Yesterday, Mr Brown and his Tory shadow (in every sense), George Osborne, went mano-a-mano at their monthly House of Commons duel. I’ve just watched the exchange on ParliamentLive.tv, and the deep contempt in which the doughty old Labour lugger holds the upstart young Tory Turk is electrifyingly clear.
This edited extract from Michael White’s Guardian sketch captures the scene:
The chancellor wore his usual bush-backwards look, crumpled blue suit, pink-ish tie and glower, the Heathcliff of Kirkcaldy. More to the point, he came heavily armed with facts, every one of them fine-tuned to destroy Tory attacks. But anything Mr Brown can do the competitive Mr Osborne is keen to do too, even being annoying. Mr Osborne challenged the chancellor to admit ("I know you don't do humility") ruining the pensions industry. "Answer, answer," roared Tory MPs. The Kirkcaldy Steamroller steamed on. "No one believes what you say about your own policies, let alone ours," smirked young George. He gives good smirk. At this point Mr Brown lost it and tossed a clutch of papers across the dispatch box, presumably those Tory tax plans.
And the link to the Scissor Sisters?
Well, the stand-out single on their latest album (Ta-Dah) is I Can’t Decide, and seems - if only to me - to sum up the furious enmity that burnishes between Gordon and George.
I'm not a gangster tonight Don't want to be a bad guy I'm just a loner baby And now you're gotten in my way
I can't decide Whether you should live or die Oh, you'll probably go to heaven Please don't hang your head and cry No wonder why My heart feels dead inside It's cold and hard and petrified Lock the doors and close the blinds We're going for a ride
It's a bitch convincing people to like you If I stop now call me a quitter If lies were cats you'd be a litter Pleasing everyone isn't like you Dancing jigs until I'm crippled Slug ten drinks I won't get pickled
I've got to hand it to you You've played by all the same rules It takes the truth to fool me And now you've made me angry
I can't decide Whether you should live or die Oh, you'll probably go to heaven Please don't hang your head and cry No wonder why My heart feels dead inside It's cold and hard and petrified Lock the doors and close the blinds We're going for a ride
Like Mr Cameron, I’m a big fan of The Killers, so I’ve been listening tonight to their latest album, Sam’s Town. (Brilliant, btw, and thanks for asking.)
No idea what made me think of Dave and the Tories... It might have been the song, Read my mind (“Coz I don't shine if you don't shine / Before you go / Tell me what you find when you read my mind”).
Or it may have been When you were young:
You sit there in your heartache Waiting on some beautiful boy To save you from your old ways You play forgiveness Watch it now Here he comes He doesn’t look a thing like Jesus But he talks like a gentleman Like you imagined When you were young Can we climb this mountain I don’t know Higher now than ever before.
Or how about going back an album (Hot Fuss), and Smile like you mean it:
Save some face, you know you've only got one Change your ways while you're young Boy, one day you'll be a man Oh girl, he'll help you understand Smile like you mean it Smile like you mean it
So I've been on a bit of a nostalgia-felch courtesy of YouTube tonight... one of the clips I came across was the first pop video I remember: Shakin' Stevens' 1981 hit, This Ole House.
I cannot tell you with what innocent wide-eyed amazement I watched Shakey jump off a roof and land with cushioned adroitness. To be honest, nothing that's happened to me since has ever quite lived up to that moment, aged four.
His new album, Now Listen, is due out on 23rd October. I may just have to.
Vaguely interesting fact: Shakey was the biggest-selling UK singles artist of the 1980s.
I’ve been Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice – the #1 independent website for the Lib Dems – since 2007. I combine this with my professional life as Development Director for the Education Endowment Foundation.
