Marc Nash's Blog, page 41

The Conversion Gag - Flash Fiction

There was ten feet of dead air between the two men. The air was dead since it seemed impermeable to communication between the pair. Yet it was not empty. For they were hurling imprecations towards one another, but in two different languages so that the precise meaning was not transmitted. The tone was clear enough to relay the hostile intent however.
The men’s bodies too were broadcasting. The fingers and shoulders were goading, inviting the other to squeeze the space between them, for body to fall upon body, while the legs were planted stiffening against any such anticipated onrush.
The motion was too fast to determine which of the men broke first, but what is certain was that the smaller of the two men darted in low at the level of the other man’s knees and brought him to the ground. While they wrestled, he was able eventually able to straddle his adversary and used one of his forearms to parry the blows of the man pinned beneath him. With his other hand he reached into his pocket and withdrew a rag. He then drove his braced arm to brush the other’s flailing punches aside to yield access to the man’s face. He impelled the rag at the man’s mouth which resolutely cut off its oaths and curses as he realised his foe’s intent and started chopping at the man’s ribs from his prone position. The man ignored the renewed onslaught, but started whistling as he wiggled his fingers trying to prise the man’s lips apart. The tune was recognised by the pinioned man as that of his own national anthem. He reflexively scowled at the affront and in that moment the gag was successfully nestled between his teeth stopping up his tongue.
Now his vituperations were muffled behind the deadening wall of fabric. His persecutor shushed him and placed a finger parallel to his distended stuffed mouth and tapped each of his cheeks in turn. It served as the first successful communication of the whole exchange. After a beat, he proceeded to talk in his alien tongue. To his amazement, the other man found he had begun to understand this language. The gag appeared to serve as some sort of translation membrane and its palpations on his tongue somehow beat out a Morse Code transfusing the message to his brain. He ceased his feeble hammerings on the man’s torso and concentrated on the interrogation being made of him.
There was a pause when his interlocutor stopped speaking but which the auditor hadn’t appreciated as the end of the speech. The squatting man jutted his face at him, soliciting a response. His captive audience slowly raised an arm and jabbed a finger at the gag impeding his mouth. The custodian again lightly tapped each of his cheeks, then ran his finger down to the man’s throat where he deliberately traced out a slowly descending path. He left his finger on the windpipe and dipped his head until one of his ears was resting against the gag. He raised his head, removed his finger and nodded. The subject furrowed his brow in confusion, but started giving his reply. If the man couldn’t understand his language in the first place because of its foreign derivation, the distortions wrought by the gag made this version seem wholly unearthly. But the man sat atop his victim unflustered and unblinking.
When the respondent had finished his piece, the superior man merely removed the gag from his mouth, flexed it once with a percussive whip and let it arrange itself into a vertical plane. The other man watched in quizzical silence, not comprehending what he was witnessing. The man brought the cloth to the horizontal, sat flush on his open palm. He then proceeded to incline into it and gave the impression of scanning it in great detail. The other noticed that his lips were moving, which suggested that he was reading something printed there. He couldn’t help himself, he softly cleared his throat and once he’d attracted the man’s attention, gestured for him to show him the cloth. The man obliged him and he saw that indeed there was some alphabetic script printed on the cloth. Somehow his spoken words had been absorbed by the cloth and inked in transliteration. He handed the rag back dumbfounded.
He wasn’t allowed to indulge his amazement for terribly long, since his subjugator having finished reading, his face was now clouding over. Clearly the response had not met his expectations. He rammed the cloth roughly into the man’s face, bevelling it until the victim could not but help part his lips. But the conqueror did not satisfy himself with just resealing the man’s mouth, but continued to thrust it down past the tongue into the man’s throat. He started choking as his glottal aperture was stopped up. Gagging on the gag. The man was hellbent on making the wretch eat his own words. Albeit in a foreign tongue.

Happy Sour - Friday Flash

“Bit of a misnomer if you stop to think about it really.”
The speaker jutted his chin forward by way of indication and his three drinking companions all craned their heads as if they were linked by a series of gears and pulleys. Each struggled to focus, until one took in the wall mounted jukebox selector, the second latched on to the optics and the third’s view encompassed some horse brasses on a ledge running just beneath the eaves.
“‘Happy Hour’ is anything but, I would say.” All three synchronously adjusted their necks until they were regarding the sign that read Happy Hour - all drinks half-price 5-6pm.
“People neck drinks at a tremendous rate during that hour, cramming in as many units as possible in some sort of misguided notion of value for money.” He was glancing up at a large clock mounted above the bar as he was talking. His partners all reflexively looked at their watches, other than the one with the naked wrist who picked up his phone and lit it up to consult the time. All synchronously agreed it was almost five.
“At best it provokes a maudlin sensibility, at worst it leads to violence as the alcohol loosens the brakes on pent up aggression. Neither could be said to be consonant with the concept of 'happy'.”
“Happy sours then?”
“Well seeing as we’re here, why don’t we buck the trend and avail ourselves of this advantageous consumer opportunity and yet show ourselves to be fully in control and to leave thereafter. Without causing any fuss or bother”.
“Yeah, why not?”
“Would seem churlish not to really.”
“Well Gavin is the very definition of a churl. A churl in action.”
The first speaker nudged the four empty beer glasses together on the table. He stood up “Would a churl calculate that if he bought the next round, at reduced price, he would then be quids in for the next three rounds bought by his hapless drinking mates?” He plunged his fingers down pincering the inside rims of the glasses and scooped them all up like a mechanical claw in a pier treasure grabbing chamber.
“Wow, talking of bucking the trend, Gav’s getting a round in”. The man whipped out his phone and fired off a photo. His compadres grinned as they pored over the phone’s small screen as if they were disbelieving of the image that would show up there to confirm the evidence of their own eyes.
He walked over to the bar, plopped the glass quaternity down on the counter and followed the publican’s gaze as he levered his head up to contemplate him. He broke off eye contact as he consulted the clock behind the barman’s head. He tracked the second hand’s lick around the dial as it made its hectic progress towards the other two hands pendulously poised on the brink of the figure twelve. As the second hand initiated the three-handed superimposition, it dragged all three over to split the twin digits forming the twelve. “Fill them up again please.”
The barkeep set two of the glasses beneath the taps while the man turned around to grin at his mates, leaning against the bar counter in his insouciance. The barkeep set the full glasses on the counter and set about the remaining two glasses. Gavin turned ponderously to admire the glasses, as their misted effervescence began to clear. The last two glasses were placed down next to them.
“Don’t be doing that thing sticking your fingers in the head of our beers now Gav. It’s alright for empty glasses, but you bring them over unsullied okay?”
Gavin flicked him a two finger salute behind his back as he addressed the man behind the bar. “How much do I owe you my good man?” The barman’s fingers danced on the buttons of his cash register and the pealing chime announced the calculation was complete.
“Twelve pounds on the nose thank you.”
“That doesn’t sound like half-priced?”
“It isn’t. Full price”.
“But it’s after five” as Gavin raised his wrist even while his eyes went up to the large clock behind the man.
“Oh it’s set five minutes fast.” Gavin wafted his watch in the man’s face. “I have to go by the clock in here, otherwise it would all be chaos.”
“You’re cheating. You got it set fast to diddle us honest drinkers. What a con”. He turned round to appeal for support from his fellows.
“Yes poor show barkeep. Low-down and dirty that is.”
“Caveat venditor. Just send the drinks back Gavin.”
Gavin resumed confronting the publican. “That’s a point. We haven’t touched a drop of these drinks and it’s now showing five past five, so we’re officially in ‘Happy Hour’.”
“Sorry, we go by the time on the receipt. Look, four-fifty-five pm.”
“What, that’s set five minutes fast as well?”
“No, that’s electronic. Can’t meddle with the setting on that.”
“Well what is the flipping time exactly?” One of the other men left the table and joined Gavin by the bar. 
“Let’s get it definitive. Why not call the ‘Speaking Clock?” suggested Stevo.
“Do they still even have that in service?” inquired Gavin. His buddy indicated the phone on the counter. 
“Make sure you’ve a lot of change to hand” offered the barman. Gavin glared at him. “If it does still exist, it’s bound to be premium rate. It will fair gobble up your money.” 
The second man turned back to the pair still sat at the table “Terry just look it up on your phone. It’s all satellite linked, so can’t get more acc-”
But Gavin had grabbed hold of the barkeep by the lapels and had lifted him across the counter. “You sir are right royally taking the piss.”
“Jesus Gav, leave it out!”
“Told you he was a churl in action” Terry said even as he rose from the table. 
“Happy sour” muttered the fourth man under his breath as he too rose.
Gavin now pulled the barman entirely over the counter and threw him to the floor and set about him with his fists. Stevo started in with some judicious kicks, trying not to connect with Gavin straddled over the prone barman. Terry had reached  the throng and was stamping on the man’s writhing ankles. The fourth man was advancing slowly, but as he reached the bar he picked up one of the glasses and took a copious swig. 

“Guess we didn’t buck the trend after all” as he proceeded to wipe the froth from his mouth.

For Valentine's Day...

                                                     



"I wish I had choreographed it all out in advance. Maybe a treasure hunt of little ditties placed throughout his apartment. Just to keep pricking the scabs. Closet conference to have read: ‘Love lies bleeding, love lies limp. Forehead’s receding, you dress like a pimp.’ Bathroom meditation: ‘Roses are red, violets are blue. Always said you were anal, now you’re flushed down the loo’. Kitchen corkboard, affixed with pins: ‘Love lies bleeding, love lies limp. Get some other scrubber, dirtying her hands in your sink’. Required bedtime reading: ‘Roses are red, violence black and blue. To the pisshole in your prick, figured to add just a few’. You simply never think of it at the time do you? Just as well really. Doesn’t even scan properly."

from the novel "A,B&E" A revenge tale where it is a dish best served "flush across a bloke's cranium"

Ur, Um - Friday Flash

One morning Patient Zero woke up no longer in possession of his mother tongue. He did not discover this immediately on rising, for as he sung into the bathroom mirror while shaving, he fully understood the words, though they did not scan smoothly with the ditty’s established rhythm. It was only on greeting his wife that the disjunction became apparent. 
She couldn’t quite make out his words so asked him to repeat them thinking him to be still half-submerged in sleep. He couldn’t comprehend her request, so accordingly asked her to repeat herself in turn. His words sounded familiar to her, but didn’t quite accord with anything recognisable. She thought he might have suffered a minor stroke that had afflicted his speech. But listening with sharper focus, she educed his words weren’t slurred but enunciated clearly in their own alien right. Their lifelong marital communication was preserved intact, though somewhat adapted, as he read the confusion in her face, while she gleaned the panic etched on his.
She grabbed a notepad and started writing down her queries, but he snatched the pad and creased his brow in utter bewilderment at the symbols scrawled there. He handed her back the pad and shook his head. She immediately made an emergency appointment for him at the doctor’s and accompanied him as his translator, albeit a non-proficient one. 
The doctor confirmed that the words sounded almost conversant yet remained just beyond meaningful reach. He summoned his Asian colleague who attested to a similar linguistic diagnosis, though when the two compared notes they found significant points of difference in what they had imagined they had almost grasped. The colleague asserted that he was actually bilingual and would attempt to receive this strange speech with both his linguistic portals ready to tune in simultaneously. The other doctor thought his peer a show off, but acceded to the suggestion all the same. The medic now nearly assimilated the man’s peregrine diction in two different tongues, causing him considerable discomfort as his mind was assaulted by a divergent assonance. When he recoiled holding his head between his hands, his associate smirked, even as he picked up the phone to dial the hospital.
The speech therapist was stymied, but had the stoke of insight to place a call with the languages department of the university the hospital formed part of. The benighted man was struck dumb as he was metaphorically prodded and pinched by a horde of eager linguists each trying to draw a bead on his babble that matched their own specialism. He defeated them all, though each felt they almost understood his verbiage but fell just short. Then one had a bolt of enlightenment when he proposed that since the man’s speech sounded familiar to each one of their diverse coterie in turn, his language must be related to them all. That is, the man was speaking the primordial human language, the Ur-tongue from which all subsequent languages were descended. That was why each auditor had perceived the foreign tongue to chime with that of their own native one.
The academics were delirious. A fully dead language, that longest extinct one, had miraculously been resurrected. Those of a less spiritual bent sardonically remarked that here finally was the reverse of the Tower of Babel. What better prospect for the world than if every one of its future citizens all spoke the same linga franca? The Esperanto contrivance had failed for a dearth of authority. But here was the wellspring of all human language, what could be more prestigiously legitimate?
There was the tantalising prospect of an end to all misunderstandings brought on by translation glitches. They still might not agree on ideas and devotions, but at least they could all argue using the same vernacular. Who knows, the linguists felt that in time the Ur-language could replace all languages and that could only foster unity in man rather than the divisiveness of different argots.
They sat the man down to start to debrief his knowledge. They asked him to write down his parlance but he just shrugged at their mime acts of writing. One of the philologists explained that axiomatically the Ur-language had to precede any written alphabet or other symbolic system. There could be no transcribing it into school primers and grammars for ease of transmission across the generations. Not to be outdone, another scholiast interjected that the Ur-language would not make for an efficacious tool for describing the modern world. It’s vocabulary would be extremely limited, lacking in any terminology for much of the extant technology. It would inevitably depend upon importation words from the johnny-come-lately lingos.

And with that the major nations furiously debated which words should augment the Ur-language so as best to represent and capture the world. These nations came to blows over their etymological claims and thus was the planet plunged into ever greater division and strife. Each country vied to bring the most words into the sacred vocabulary and to outstrip those of its rivals. And rather than resort to a dictionary of insult and point-scoring, the countries turned to arsenals of weapons for which the Ur-language would never possess terms to define them. So that the very language which had accelerated evolution immeasurably, ended up destroying all communication unutterably. 

Half-Lives - Friday Flash

URANIUM:With our mutual leaden marital cores, affection was stopped up by my blockish shields, while it merely passed through yours like gamma rays.
PLUTONIUM:We are each charged with containing the neuroses and blind spots of our partner, it being rare that we both share the same agitators. But such were the reciprocal irritations that more and more were classified as neuroses and blind spots, until it reached the critical mass of every single word out of our mouth, or every single one of our actions being deemed as being beyond redemption. We were both balls of seething fissile material.
THORIUMIn respect of cleaving together in a fusion that makes us more powerful, we manage to effect a fission that only serves to cleave us apart and bleed away any supposedly enriched energies. We were both left depleted.
CALIFORNIUM:Each live radioactive substance will naturally decay and transform into another element, which if isotopic will in turn decay further, until finally a stable, inert element is rendered. My spouse and I have hit our inert basal states and yet I cannot say we went through the transmutations into other constitutions along the way. Spontaneous half-life decay takes eons to occur. We achieved a rapid acceleration of the process.
NEPTUNIUM:It has been pointed out to me that smashing the atom in order to release the pent up energy of rage is a particularly destructive practice. And yet it was one we were both content to pursue.
AMERICIUM:In order for a chain reaction to be unleashed, we both had to stockpile an impressive and intricate battery of sleights, grudges and other grievances. We conducted our own arms race to mutually assured destruction with barely a bat of an eyelid in the direction of the concept of deterrent.
CURIUM:One segment of the fission process could, I concede, be considered as successful. Parts of our material corpus divided and split off. Eczema, weight loss, hair loss, hearing loss, incontinence, ulcers, thrush, hives and a host of other dermatological rashes afflicted us. Although perhaps some of these could be viewed as a gaining rather than a reduction. In a quantitative rather than a qualitative way of course. 
RADIUM:Though we have long separated from one another in physical space, we remain contaminated with one another’s toxic waste, rendering us useless for future generative power. We are both decommissioned. 

URANIUM:
Two half-lives do not make a whole. 

States Of Mind - Songs about mental states

The music that was birthed by "The Blues", personal laments of woe, depression and the like, mental states have always been present in rock music. So here's 15 songs around the theme of mental states.


No prizes for guessing the first one-
1) Black Sabbath - "Paranoid"

I was never a fan of Heavy Metal, but this song broke through my natural resistance and affords the grudging acknowledgement that it is undoubtedly a classic. Doesn't excuse hair and clothes though as demonstrated on this video. I own a pair of Ozzy Osbourne style slippers by the way. Oh what has become of Heavy metal? it's become merchandised into asininity like every other music sty;e.



2) Jimi Hendrix - "Manic Depression"
Not great quality I'm afraid, but in a way it only lends to the unsettling nature of its subject matter. Of course mental health experts would insist on the track being renamed Bi-Polar disorder. My father suffered it under its old guise. Not easy to live with, not knowing if he would be bouncing off the ceiling one day, and refusing to get out of bed to go to work the next.



3) Clipse - "Ego"
The heart of it all if you're a Freudian. In an industry dominated by the exaggerated projection of the ego, perhaps Rap projects it the furthest. In this particular case, Clipse's album tracks are littered with song titles drawn from therapy such as "Counselling" and "Life Change" as they struggle with the trappings of their success.



4) Talking Heads - "Psychokiller"
David Byrne is a curious egg, (though not as odd as David "Behemoth" Thomas from Pere Ubu, must have been something in the New York water in the late 1970s) but I've just bought his learned tome "How Music Works" which I'm looking forward to reading.



5) Rolling Stones - "19th Nervous Breakdown"
Not one of my fave tracks of theirs, I prefer "Paint It Black" to be honest and it's such a strong song it even survived a murdering by the band The Mo-dettes.



6) Pink Floyd - "Comfortably Numb"
The shadow of founding member Syd Barret who succumbed to mental illness possibly brought about by rug use, sits large over Roger Waters' composition with other titles such as "Brain Damage" and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond".



7) King Crimson - "21st Century Schizoid Man"



8) The Kinks - "Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues"
Ray Davies was know to have the odd quirk or two wan't he?



9) Cypress Hill - "Insane In The Brain"
Or kids, don't do drugs...
I recently tracked down a book called "Whispers -  The Voices Of Paranoia" for some research, but was very disappointed that although the case studies were interesting stories, most were prompted by drug abuse which wasn't quite what i was after. The author did that to me deliberately...



10) Coil - "Panic"
Coil were a band who actively pursued the lesser known regions & emotions of the human mind in their music. Partly through drugs and also through the occult, myth and ritual. Big Alastair Crowley fans. Still, I don't hold that against them.



11) Sonic Youth - "Schizophrenia"
Their best ever song was called "Expressway To Yr Skull" which I saw them play live and was blown away by and couldn't wait to own on the forthcoming album. And when the record came out, they'd renamed the track "Madonna, Sean & Me" which doesn't quite carry the same impact somehow...



12) Suicidal Tendencies - "Institutionalized"
I first came across this song on the movie "Repo Man" and what a great song it is. But then the band went all stupid skate rock and that was that.



13) Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers - "She's Cracked"
Trouble with Jonathan Richman is that you can't really take any of his songs too seriously with his droll delivery. Still can't disguise how great some of his songs were though.



14) Breeders - "Happiness Is a Warm Gun"
Yeah I know it's a Beatles song but I infinitely prefer this version. So shoot me. Mind you even the Beatles' original is better than U2's version.



15) Nirvana - "Lithium"
The fact that Kurt Cobain put a shotgun to his head probably suggests her knew what he was singing about in songs like this one. My father was prescribed lithium; imagine putting a metal into your bloodstream, well that's what lithium treatment is.

Human Viscosity - A Short Tale about Human Fluid Dynamics

(This is a densely written story about density. It's left open as to its interpretation, but some may find this study of human fluid dynamics a tad unsettling, so this is a content warning. Of sorts)

Oil slicked the inner thighs. A sleek insulation coating the skin. Dampening all subsidiary neural agitation amid its cloying diffusion.

The basted skin’s temperature began to rise. The glaze slowly began evaporating as it was warmed from beneath.

But the grease also served to adhere the tissue to the abrasive material of the bare mattress, as it gently tugged the hairs and skin into its coarse embrace. Such suctioning choked the swaddled suspension of sensation, returning the body to an awareness of its proneness.

The fumes of the unguent engulfed the olfactory system. The brain was firing frenziedly as the liquid slither leavened the weight of the body where it was in contact with the mattress, while the unrestricted flesh was surfeited beneath the clamp of the dense liquid.

The oil was continuing to cede the surface, as it either seeped in through the pores in the epidermis, or percolated the mattress where the leg abutted the fabric. Goosepimple promontories rose to signal the balefire of a tremulous chill invading the body in its wake.

With the unctuous cladding duly degraded, the body’s water table was on the rise once again. Stopped up previously, the pores hadn’t been able to respire, so their tributaries had turned tail and seethed inside. Stretching the integument tight under its tamped swell, the humectation buffeted and surged against the subcutaneous membrane, as if trying to dissolve its dam. Now finally the moisture could muster, cohering into beads of perspiration. Like paratroopers awaiting the green light, they blistered and twitched at the aperture of each of the numerous glands. Finally with the surface tension now as unbearable as the mental discomposure brewing up the effluvium, they absconded. Distended globules forging their cooling runnels down the glistening flesh. Some fell prey to the tangled follicle foliage and became fatally snared. Others were beached upon impermeable vestiges of the oil. But the surviving sapper drops achieved their mission and delivered localised alarum to the recoiling flesh. Each one was eventually picked off as it evaporated, leaving only a dirty salt sediment smearing the quaking skin like dried up stream beds.

The next pressure was far more parochially located. It had been present from the onset, but displaced by other deeper piercing insistencies. Now its prod was pushed to the fore once homeostasis had regulated and relegated oil and sweat from bodily sentience. For this was the most regulatory flow of them all, the one customarily controlling waste. Its constriction was plenty fierce, but when the spill came there was not the anticipated spate. A dribbled exudation of urine rather than a gush. The discharge was warm against the flesh which served to exaggerate its imagined volume, but the laggardly flow rescaled its attributes back to a trickle. The acid tang corroded the mind’s levees as to an appreciation of what this flux portended. It represented an elongated tributary of fear. Its source high up in the brain’s troughs and crevices, fermented by the realisation and concomitant reflexive reaction to terror. This liquid release sirened that there was unlikely to be any such release. 

The final emission was the most viscid of them all. 
Again a bubbling up, but a reluctance to cleave from the arterial wellspring for all the seething. This serum was too thick to squeeze through the fissures of pores, but rather required greater gouges for its proliferation.

Pulsing like magma, finally the haemal weep was reluctantly birthed through a cleft canal. A rupture in the embankment of the skin.
The beads formed were more conspicuous than the previous deliquescences. They had burnished the horripilated flesh as they slicked along, whereas the globules of blood eclipsed the very skin beneath its deliberate overlay.

Nevertheless its course was laboured, meandering over the contours of flesh made salient by muscle flex, pausing at any hairy scrub like a tourist stopping at every beauty spot to take in the vista. 
Eventually the first drops of this metallic Nile forged its path to the mattress and stained it red as it pooled and washed up hard against the flesh scarp of the legs. 

A Literation - Flash Story

Children carbon copied their creators. While the physical outcomes of the genetic wheel of fortune retained a whisper of protean unpredictability, speech and acculturation remained utterly undifferentiated from that of their parents. Glossal guardians, stagnant syntactical statuary. Consummate chips off the old blocks, kids were cultivated colloquial clones.
Initially imbibing milky morphology mutely with teat-stuffed mouths at the mammary, while mum suckles safe words for them. Sat at her knee, bottled blather iterated, infused and introjected. Mounted in the high-chair of babble, being spoon-fed more solid sonant syllables minced and mashed into building brick morphemes. Until the child evidenced an incipient ability to word string sentences for himself. From there on in, the parlance predisposed, perpetually prefigured and impervious to independent importation.
Scions were unable to shuck themselves from their die cast speech stamp. They artlessly echoed the same means of articulation as their extraction. Whatever their emotional bent, which like their physical features could lie anywhere on the continuum provided by the DNA chemical crap shoot, they were devoid of the vocal means for varying its expressive pitch.
The theories of Sigmund Freud darted back for favoured diagnosis, as Oedipal dissonances were played out in the most derisory fashion, since none had the diction to defy the discourse. Juvenile abstractions might fleetingly seem unregimented, but they were soon shunted along tramlines once terminology was brought to bear to transliterate them into tangible thought. 
Bilinguals were to some extent immune. For they could slip in and out of their twin vocabularies in any manner of their choosing. Thus was their language uniquely minted beyond predictability. So radical educationalists swept aside the Sciences and even English, in order to place primacy on second languages. But the rote inculcation by lifeless textbooks proffering limp assimilations of Jean-Paul’s first day at school, or Otto writing to his pen-pal, were no less arid than the way adolescents had acceded to their own mother tongues. Fluctuating between two stuttering fluencies furnished them neither felicity nor facility. 

Yet a few whippersnappers managed to strike out on discoveries of their own that enabled them to snap their linguistic shackles. They didn’t enter such a course knowingly in a spirit of seeking to expand their verbal palettes, but merely ventured into the neglected libraries- (there were no bookshops anymore) and picked up novels to read. They were swept along the unadulterated imaginations of authors and buoyed by exposure to the words therein which cast them free of their own constricted palates. They envisioned new horizons, disinterred wonderment and evolved the means to encapsulate it in voiced reactions of their own. Then they set to work writing books to liberate the next generations that would come after them. 

Cover Versions

I've never seen the point of cover versions that just replicate the original. Then there are those cover versions that simply murder the original, check out Grace Jones and Swans' cover versions of Joy Division songs "She's Lost Control" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" respectively.  Both make me want to rip my own ears off.

But occasionally the cover version is neither homage nor pastiche, but actually manages to improve on the original. Maybe it just has better quality of the recording. But more likely it's either more deliciously taut than the original, or perhaps more camp and reveals what was present in the original composition all along but had just got hidden.

So here's 15 of my favourite cover versions. Enjoy.


1) The Specials - Message to Rudy
The Specials did several cover versions of Ska songs, launching off with a cover of "Gangsters". But this just throbs with emotion that lifts it from the original by Dandy Livingstone whose vocals are a bit tentative.



2) The Stranglers - Walk On By
While Dionne Warwick's original is pretty damn fine, the sheer dirtiness of the bass sound and Hugh Cornwall's guttural vocals just make this a totally different song. Someone should do a mash up of the two it would be ace.



3) Flying Lizards - Money
Deborah Evans does her best Nico impression and this knocks the Beatles' original into a cocked hat. It's so basic, so stripped down, it's almost perfect pop, or anti-pop.



4) Devo - Can't Get No Satisfaction
Robot-aping geeks pleasingly lance the self-contentment of Jagger's priapic original.



5) Saint Etienne - Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Yes they were Camden Town music hipsters playing fast and loose with musical post-modern irony, but since I've always found Neil Young's voice a bit reedy, having a deliciously fragile female vocalist sing it made much more sense. Know it all pop that turns out to be just perfect pop in its own right.



6) The Klaxons - The Bouncer
Another of those rarities where I like both versions equally, but the tribal nature of the two clans, the old school dance mob who love the original versus the Nu-Rave devotees of this version go at it hammer and tong in the comments section.



7) Gun Club - My Man's Gone Now
This is the inverse of the Warwick/Stranglers scenario. For here is Nina Simone's full-bloodied original dripping with regret, hurt and a touch of bile, turned into a camp late night whisky bar song (and sung off key to boot) by one of the hardest living & rocking bands in the world. I can't get enough of it.



8) Butthole Surfers - Hurdy Gurdy Man
And then there are some that are just weird and wonderful. Donovan's original was a bit odd in its own distortion pedalled right and the Buttholes just turned that up to eleven in their hilarious version.



10) Soft Cell - Tainted Love
Marc Almond takes Gloria Jones' Motowny feel and manages to make it both seedy and full of pathos at the same time. One of the songs that perhaps shows the biggest differential between the two versions.



11) Minutemen - Have You Ever Seen The Rain
Another example of a beefier modern sound improving a slightly hollow 60's version as Creedance Clearwater Revival's genius is suggested by having so many modern bands pay tribute to them with cover versions.



12) The Clash - Armagideon Time
Even live the quality and musical noodles going on here put Willie Williams' version into the shade I'm afraid. And this was only ever a Clash B-Side!



13) Rachid Taha - Rock el Casbah
Boot on the other foot now and The Clash have one of their songs claimed in another style. This sounds somewhat more authentic somehow.



14) Tricky - Black Steel
Tricky takes a plodding Public Enemy standard and turns it into an genuinely unnerving version.



15) World Domination Enterprises - Funkytown
I can think of few songs that have so utterly had the band's stamp smeared and coated all over it like this. West London blight stamped all over a disco number by Lipps Inc. that was more likely to have been played in the clubs of the West End.



Bonus Track:
William Shatner - Mr Tambourine Man
I say bonus track.... There is always the spectre of non-singing celebs doing terrible cover versions, like Paul Gascgoine singing Ferry Across The Mersey. Shatner here does to pop music what he did to method acting.

Hyperbolic Songs

The Supremes, Super Furry Animals, ZZ Top, The Fab Four...

So it's a new year and there haven't been enough days yet for my usual pessimism to reassert itself over the fresh slate newness of the year. Everything's hunky dory super right? At least for another 5 minutes. So in honour of that, here's a music chart on all things exaggeratedly upbeat and optimistic.

1) Holy F*ck - Super Inuit
Even the band's name expresses a level of incredulity, but this jaunty little number fairly sweeps along. I wonder what the destination in mind was however...



2) The Fall - Fantastic Life
You just know acerbic curmudgeon Mark E Smith is laughing the other side of his face when he pens any song with "Fantastic" in the title. I once saw this live and the organ break just wen on forever. It was erm fantastic...



3) Jimmy Cliff - Wonderful World, Beautiful People
Is this not the man who sung the gritty "The Harder They Come"? Whatever was he thinking? Maybe he was thinking of the royalties...



4) Mos Def - Life In Marvelous Times
Wonderful building tension in this as you think def's gonna hit you with the chorus, but just cranks the lyrical torque up some more. You can hear the disbelief in his voice when he does pronounce the title.



5) Gang of Four - Not Great Men
Post-punk feminism, as played by 4 geezers. While one welcomes the handclap on the rock record, the disturning sight of Jon King's Arsenal shirt counters any kudos going their way.



6) Public Enemy - Don't Believe The Hype
I won't if you wont... Have you noticed how this chart has veered into pessimism? From the band who's debut album claimed "Mi Uzi Weighs a Ton"



7) Jon Spencer Blues Experience - Blowing My Mind
From the man whose first band was called Pussy Galore... Everything about Swampblues is hyperbolic really. Nowt wrong with that mind.



8) The Specials - Too Much Too Young
Classic SKA, what a band. No hyperbole involved when describing them.



9) House Of Pain - Top O The Morning
Their follow up to "Jump Around". Not that good really. Plastic Paddies I'm afraid.




10) Beastie Boys - Finger Licking Good
Yes, probably that type of smutty innuendo rather than Kentucky Fried Chicken




11) Schooly D - Mr Big Dick
Um, er... Tongue firmly in his cheek... no not that cheek, get your mind out of the gutter





Bonus Track:
Lou Reed - Perfect Day
Lou Reed RIP