From a simple ten minute channel hopping adventure on the music area of Sky tonight I have discovered the following things.

1, Esmee Denters can fuck off.
2, Avenged Sevenfold are not as good as they used to be
3, Paolo Nutini has failed miserably if he was attempting to copy Jackie Wilson and his Reet Petite (which always sounds like a Geordie trying to describe a thin woman, why-aye man, she was reet petite etc).
4, I would probably do Queen’s Roger Taylor but only if he was wearing his outfit from “I Want To Break Free”.
5, Welsh rap peaked with the GLC.
6, Shakin’ Stevens should have avoided that pullover in “Merry Christmas Everyone”.
7, There are only so many times you can watch a video on channel AKA where one person sings, ish, and the rest all dance around behind him purely to get on the TV.
8, All Saints – Never Ever, still a bloody good bit of pop history.
9, The X Factor “stars” with You Are Not Alone can fuck off.
10, Florence and the Machine have DESTROYED one of the greatest dance tracks off all time (You Got The Love, courtesy of Miss Candy Statton) and turned it into yet another indie kid tune by a band that should never have got out of the college recording studio it probably started in. Oh and they can fuck off as well.
11, If it is so easy to find hot, young ladies in my area by text then when I was 14 where the bloody hell were they all.??
12, Mud, Lonely This Christmas, one of the best things about this time of year… but play it in May and people look at you weirdly.
13, 30 Seconds From Mars and their 300 cyclists are mostly breaking the Highway Code by having flashing LED lights attached to their bikes.
14, Watching East 17 sing “Stay Another Day” is like watching a gang of ‘yoofs’ karaoke “When A Child Is Born” whilst carrying big knives.
15, The Darkness were sooooo good for one album (Permission To Land) and two songs (One Way Ticket To Hell And Back, Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)).
16, Why can’t black people keep their hands still when they sing.
17, If it’s female, singing and hairy then it’s Nelly Furtado
18, If it’s male, annoying and rapping then it’s wearing a crap hat and being 50 Cent.
19, Cascada looks about 15 years older than she is but she can still belt out a reasonable dance track.
and finally…
20, La Roux can fuck off. All the way off, not just a little bit. If I wanted a high pitched woman to whine at me then I will date the squeaky one off of Will and Grace. Please just stop, you are turning quickly into Robin, who started off so well about a decade ago and now produces predictable pop shite. Take your hair, take that bloody car and piss most considerably off.

Well that does feel better. Music really seems to have lost it’s way though. Makes me sound rather elderly but it’s as though everything nowadays is so easy that no one bothers trying anymore. Autotune, 160 track overlays (even Oasis were bad for that), reality TV shows promoting the worst as well as the annoying, it is all falling off the edge of the world. Years ago dance music did that. Then rock. Then pop. Now EVERYTHING is heading towards the abyss in the same way the world is heading to oblivion. Maybe it doesn’t matter then…

…oh but it does. The trouble is that the people pulling the strings are Dani Minogue (much as I love her music, she isn’t exactly the best qualified to dole out musical expertise), Simon Bloody Cowell, Cheryl Fucking Cole (who is about as talented as lice) and Louis Walsh… who brought us Boyzone for goodness sake.!

Might I suggest a murder/suicide pact Mr Cowell.? I will ever buy you the vodka and tablets.

PS. I missed a few…

21, Dizzee Rascal, for what you have done to ‘Dirty Cash’, I hope someone pushes a tuba up your rectum and you become part of a Salvation Army marching band, ommpahs and all.
22, More bands should copy Slade’s idea of using Brummie spellings on their single releases.
23, I do hope all these ‘Bad Boys” Alexander Burke keeps singing about take her to the cleaners.

What on earth was going on with the weather today.? There was a mini tornado along my road a few hours ago, very scary, with the wind and rain and hailstones going in all directions accompanied by leaves and bits flying through the air like someone had got a big bag of stuff and was scattering it in front of one of those large fans they use on Casualty to make Charlie’s hair blow around when he looks pensive in outside shots.

Talking of television, the BBC has been told off for their story line on “Waterloo Road”, the iffy Grange Hill-esque programme about life in a school (not a patch on Teachers though). You see a group of pupils in the programme got pissed up on neat ethanol, a stupid thing to do, which resulted in much pain and sitting in Accident and Emergency for a while to regain their sight and sober up.

Now the reason the BBC (one of those companies that always pisses me off, maybe it is because they insist on keeping shit DJs like FUCKING MOYLES on Radio One) got a bollocking was because a group of real life kiddies, having watched said show, got hold of a bucketload of neat alcohol from a school science lab (which in itself is ridiculous, what ever happened to locks on cupboards, in my school days you couldn’t even get a piece of chalk without three tumbler locks and a padlock the size of your hairy fist being opened by some Lab Assistant). They then copied the programme and mixed it with Ribena, Toothkind I hope so it doesn’t rot their little tossie-pegs, and then drank it.

The BBC were lamblasted as being irresponsible because they showed the act of necking stolen chemicals and the aftermath of such stupidity. No one appears to have pointed out that these dumb fucks in real life obviously watched the programme but chose to ignore the implications of pouring neat alcohol down your gullet.  Why has no one mentioned that there is a cause and effect thing going on there. They saw it, they copied half of it and then moaned when they became ill. It’s a bit like Mr Ap Rees moaning “Oh no one told me that the Tropicana would fall through again”.

Thankfully, for them but not for me as I am a taxpayer and their hospital stay was paid for partly by me, they survived. That is the trouble with the modern age, medicine to prevent the culling of stupid people by nature. If this was 1930 then they would have heard about it on the wireless and then removed themselves from the gene pool of England by 3.30pm the following day.

and on the subject of bad gene pools…

…Jeremy Kyle, from the 20th of November. Words fail me. That last story about the 63 year old guy who was fed up of his 25 year old girlfriend beating him up, lying to him and putting it about. Fucking hell, did you SEE that woman.? It was like something from Little Britain. She was the chaviest, most offensively faced sponger that the world has ever bought into being. Greasy lank hair, bright pink slacks, she looked like a slappy bulldog chomping on a brick covered in wasps and nettles. He was getting annoyed because she was shagging men and women in his bed and couldn’t get it into his skull that she was only in it for the money. He kept saying “I want to help her, she has had a bad life”…

… how.?? She obviously hasn’t worked a day ever, she spends it drinking cider in a park somewhere, she fucks every guy in sight and is a typical council estate princess from ‘oop north. She is loving every bloody second of her life, all at the expense of us and him, the dopey old git. Now in a perfect world she would be knocked down by a speeding tax inspector as she leaves the studio, but alas, I bet that never happened.

And now as the rain lashes down once again and I turn my heater up a little, listening to what appears to be fireworks but could be someone shelling Cardiff (or Korma induced wind somewhere in Weston), I must be off.

“Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain”.

PS thanks to Hwang, as usual, for his moving the site to a new and faster server… seems to have done the trick. Maybe I should upload some home movies from the household of Kerry Katona to say thanks… or not.

My letter in the Mercury…

“Hands up how many of us foresaw the Henry Boot deal falling through and “other less ambitious proposals” being considered, eventually.?
Perhaps I am psychic. I predicted the Mace deal going off the rails and now I have predicted the Henry Boot plans failing. Maybe I should get a job on television, move over Derren Brown.
 
In all seriousness though, what was Mr Ap Rees and his motley crew over in the Council thinking.? Well over a decade of nothing, deadlines being put back again and AGAIN and everything comes crashing down at the end. This whole debacle is the economic equivalent of throwing balls at a coconut that is nailed to a pole, perhaps sense will prevail in the near future and someone will fill the place with water and stick a roof on the top.
 
I am still baffled by the blinkered nature of our mighty leaders with regards to this matter, even my pet rabbit could have seen this result coming. Might I suggest the Council hire a new cleaner, their crystal ball appears to be dusty.”

Fluffy Bunny, News at Ten, Weston-super-Mare

Well it’s hello from me… and hello from him. So nice to have a split personality is it not? Yes? Good, then I have instantly doubled my reader base. Anyway, enough of that shite…

…I have rediscovered two things this week.

Firstly I have been listening to the delightful Brothers In Arms album from one of the all time greats, Mark Knophler and Dire Straits. Released back in 1985 it contained the first CGI video (for the Money for Nothing track) and gave them their highest ever chart hit (Walk of Life). As usual it is the less commercial tracks I focus on and aside from the sublime Brothers in Arms (which almost makes me want to sob for past memories, both my own and imagined, everytime I hear it) it’s Your Latest Trick that bounces in with a wailing saxophone and plenty of soul. Hearing it after a good few years, properly end to end at least, did prick up my ears to a few of the little elements I had never realised were there though. The slap bassline is straight from the mid 80s and familiar to those of you who enjoy the work of Japan (the band not the little dudes blowing up American battleships). Also the unlikely, I think, influence of reggae makes itself known here too…

…maybe that isn’t so odd as the ska movement was just beginning to fade out and reggae was becoming it’s replacement as the 80s moved on.  Regardless of my feelings, if you haven’t heard the album for a while, or ever, then go and bloody well hear it.! Try out the other albums as well, plus his solo work.!

Secondly I rediscovered my love of kippers. Smoked fish is bloody marvellous. Not something to be eaten before going out though, unless you desire smelling like a lesbian with a forty a day habit.

The Tropicana deal has failed. Again.  Hands up who couldn’t see that coming… *looks around* ah Mr Ap Rees and your other fellow “cunt”cillors, well done. Have this award I have suddenly came up with… it is called the David Blunkett Award For Not Seeing Anything. Ever.

COME OOOOOON, I mean, how bloody obvious does it have to be to these esteemed persons.?? I sent a snotty mail to MACE when they pulled out asking why the hell they bothered, no reply came back, I can only assume it was the faeces smeared across the letter in lieu of a signature. I wanted to know why any respectable company would tit a community around for so long. As soon as Henry Boot (wish we had told them to shoe… sorry) arrived on the scene it was like MACE had run off, put on a false moustache and come back again and what happens…?

…the “cunt”cil bends over, lowers it’s trousers and bellows “MORE PLEASE” through gleeful teeth.  How come little old Fluffy Bunny, underpaid, overworked, retail team leader with no real qualifications, can spot the one chilli in the box of chocolates but a group of men and women paid to make decisions and with far more life experience than my tender, young self seem unable to give birth to the concept that a large company that is only interested in filling it’s bulging cheeks with all the nuts in the forest might grab all the nuts and then order a pizza and a curry at the expense of the people “employing” it. I can only assume that the whole band of bloody fools is sat around a table, stoned off their collective tits and the smoke rising from their many reefers, bongs and pipes is obscuring their view. They also seem to forget they are dealing with a development company… and they are generally as honest and truthful as a bag of lawyers covered in a Tony Blair sauce.

It’s bloomin’ crazy.! Maybe now they will build something that WE in Weston actually want and not some 83 story monolithic slab of concrete that would be more at home in Stalingrad during the 1920s that is designed to squeeze out as much revenue as possible for the “cunt”cil like a well baked turd from a dockers backside. Ap Rees (a man who has now taken over the Crockford-Hawley mantra “As welcome as dysentry in a rowing boat”) has said they will now “entertain smaller ideas” in other words ‘I am sorry we couldn’t build a hotel that looked like a multi-story car park, but now we can bulldoze it and replace it with a new building so scag heads and pissed up Londoners who have failed rehab can hang out somewhere new and clear the town centre’.

I am just watching Jeremy Kyle (and talking of the aforementioned ladies who dine at the Y) there is a 17 year old girl who is trapped in a girl’s body and wants to be a boy. I was trapped in a 17 year old’s body once… but a little Vaseline helped me out.

Bye all.!

Saturday the 31st of October marked the end of a special era in Weston. Hobbits, the most homely and friendly nightclub I have ever had the joy to enter, closed for the final time.

It was back in 1995 that myself and a few college mates first popped into the Richmond Street original place (where Liquid Lounge is now, interestingly the former home for the reception office of the transatlantic cable) and got used to the small club, legendary sticky floor and dim lighting. Sounds awful but that was exactly what made it great. Saturday nights were always packed so you had no choice but to meet new people as you brushed up against them in the queue for the bar or to request a song from the DJ (ah the days of Born Slippy, Alanis Morrisette, The Fugees). I spent my 18th birthday in there, mostly so drunk I was sat on the dancefloor trying to get the music out of my head, but it was still brilliant.

At one point we were in there EVERY night it was open (all week save for Monday I think) and it would just be a few of us, dancing like loons to old Britpop numbers. It still felt like home after the few months I didn’t go there during 1999 and the last time I went through those doors and up those stairs back in 2001, two weeks before it closed, it was still home. The music was still great, the people still friendly, the trouble that infested other clubs rare if at all apparent.

So then I was introduced to the new Hobbits thanks to Sexy Dave. I was so fed up of places like Time and Voltz but didn’t know anyone who went to Hobbits anymore. Thankfully Mr Matthews did and one night I appeared, he made me welcome, introduced me to a lot of people and suddenly I was home again. I belonged somewhere.  I wasn’t constantly looking over my shoulder wondering which tracksuited buffoon would wonder if I was looking at his badly tanned, underdressed, whore first. I could dance, drink and be merry among a group of people who were genuinely nice. Was fun to be popular for a bit too.

And now it has ended. Saturday night was great. I have never stayed so late in a club and I was so tired I just missed the last few minutes but I was there for the last time… and it will never be the same. I am glad I have so many photos over the past few years that I didn’t have from the first club, it will be a lasting memory to an important era in my life and so I would like to say thank you… to Hobbits, to that dance floor which I often covered in beer whilst swinging around madly, to that bar where I stood and waved money in return for strong liquer which I saw again later, to those badly lit toilets and doing my eye liner in the reflection in the sink, to the VIG area pre-refurb and watching bad horror films and Saddam’s execution on TV, to the chairs where I stood with Dave and Andy Moss reviewing the people on the dance floor, to the stage which I helped pack away so I could get on with that dancing thing…

to Mark (keep getting better mate, you are doing a wonderful job and thanks for the bat SO much), Mark, Emma W, Helen, Mike, Dom, Magna, Derrik, Baz, Tony, Colin, Paul, Pete, Merv and all the staff who made the place like it was and to all the people I met, let me see how long I can make this list (and in no particular order)…

…Hwang, Chilli, Pouty and Stu, my Dear Brother – Paul, Christina and Rich, Mike and Harry, Ben D, Joe D, Joe A, Carl W, Rose B, , Angel, Jim, Emma D, Giles, Paul, Jade, Monkey, Sexy Dave, Marie, Dave V, Sam U, Beth L, Hally, Stacey, Justine, Kryssa, Andy M, Zoe, Craig, Charlie, Charmian, Chris R, Matt H, Ria, Andy, Kate B, Kate S, Sarah H and Mark P, Nat B and Rich, Russ and Robyn, Mel H, Miss Lily Rogers, Jamie L, Katie B, Mark H and Hannah C, Lemony, Caz, Justin, Matt, Brownie, Blondie (and all her friends), Mr Cheek,  Dory, Alex K, Bluey, Bugsy, Keith and Becca, Jon R, Colin, Kitten, Katie, Lil Oddy, Brem, Emma H, Emma D, Lexi, Danny H, James, Chris and Kate, Chris S, Terri and Terri, Gay Dan, Hannah, Baz, Sam S, Doc Robbins, Thongy, Kev, Dave C and Natalie, Adam W and Ginge, Lorna W, Claire ‘T’, Rachel W, Neil, Del, Flea and Claire, Lindsay T, Gem, Row, Nick, Lovechild, Bob G, Monkey Boy Jim, Seb, Neil, Dan R, Wayne, Sarah H, Stephage, Nay, Pugs and anyone I have missed…

… you all made those times when Hobbits could have been so like everywhere else, like NO WHERE ELSE.

Hobbits, you are not gone, merely closed until “tomorrow”.