Sky blue thinking

(I know I robbed the title from the Times; just don't tell them, yeah?)

Via twohundredpercent comes word of Manchester City executive chairman Garry Cook's fascinating insight into the workings of the Premier League's brains (sic) trust (sic). The full account (here, here and here) - presumably given by Cook unaware that all those gentlemen sitting around and pointing dictaphones at him were journalists on national publications, with websites - includes the revelation that Thaksin Shinawatra is "a great guy to play golf with," his belief that the top flight should be reduced to between ten and fourteen clubs with no relegation, and the despairing conversations with Richard Scudamore about the difficulties of "maximising the central entity of the Premier League" ("He rolls his eyes and says, 'If only we would'").

It's not hard to see where this will go, and the tough questions that Mark Hughes' successor (you know it) will have to face around five-ish some Saturday afternoon next April...

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Yet another defeat - that's twelve in a row now. What went wrong out there?

The arbitrational matrix appeared to be malfunctioning, but as a solitary systemic-dependent achievement cell, it would financially disadvantage us were we to transition our cerebralisational emotioning pattern into a verbalised emission statement, so I'll say no more on that.


You seemed to find it tough to get to grips with the formation of your opponents.

Our competitors deployed a risk-minimalisation triad in front of their firewalling node and it was difficult for our goal-facilitation unit to gain any traction in vital market sectors. It's difficult to leverage a task-directioning strategy into a favourable safety outcome at this level.


You appeared to rally after half-time. There must have been some angry words spoken in the dressing room.

There's only so many times you can pro-activate your teacup's action parabola against the war-room wall. I just said, okay, let's leave this baby out in a wood and see if it gets adopted by a pack of wolves, and gave them the 911. I told them that losers choose to lose and that it was time to wake up and smell the Chanel. I was happy with their initial third-quarter output but it went Mexico-way after the deficit mismanagement.


That fifth goal was a real comedy of errors. Why is this defence so bad at the moment?

We don't go in for blamestorming. We're just going to gather as a streamlined tiger team and establish our nodules of fallibilitilisation and head them off at the mini-roundabout. We've already pushed the envelope - now it's time to hijack the postman's van and steer it down the embankment.


You're in real peril now: out of both cups and deep in the relegation mire. For an ambitious club, this must be hard to take.

The metrics on our ground-troop production may look dropsied, but our aspiration credo commits us to exploring by-ways by which we can configure a non-kinetic ring-fencing orientation among our network of fellow bleeding-edgers. We aim to eliminate vertical interactivity while enabling complete horizontal coalescence, giving us access to vital overseas mega-interfaces within the decade. It's not enough to see the big picture - you have to see the picture big.


How have Dr. Shinawatra's much-publicised difficulties in Thailand affected the team?

When we launched Man City 2.0 in Q3, we outlined in our vision statement the central-entitying of our aim-points and a holistic synergising of our core values. We aimed to be to a goal-oriented paradigm KWMer, and our failure to rightsize our outflow bloatation has snowballed into an fiscal artery blockage challenge. And you know how it goes: when the board boom, they shake, shake, shake the dressing room.


You'll know, of course, that much criticism has been levelled your way, and that you have been compared unfavourably to your predecessors. What do you have to say in response?

Some have said I can't manage, but those people are operating within a narrow strategic bandwith. It's not about managing anymore - it's about managementing, and I am in the arrowhead of modern managementing. It's all about making bold polidisciplinary responsibility movements. It's about getting your workers to realise that the shortest path between T and Z is not through Y - it's through U.


In other words, a little less thinking outside the box and a little more shooting inside the box, eh?

Are you taking the piss?

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Photo by sujathafan.

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Olympic Memories: They'll never take our...

With the fortnight that's in it, Sport Is A TV Show presents the first in a series of one classic moment in Olympic history. And because we're feeling all contrary and enigmatic (for instance, witness our use of the first person plural in this post) this clip is from the Winter games of 2006 - an innocent time when the average life expectancy of a YouTube Olympic clip was greater than 9.69 seconds. It features the women's snowboard cross final, and it goes thus:

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Usain Bolt

Jesus.

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Triple somersault with flip-flop or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the phenom

The Sport Is A TV Show grumplitude metre took a bit of battering last weekend as your emotionally volatile correspondent harrumphed his way through the beginning of the second biggest sporting event on the planet. Well, never let it be said that I'm consistent, because my annoying humbuggery has been dissipating and is being properly replaced by the glory of sport at its best. You may say it comes with being a part Bill Hicks' "docile masses" , the type who invariably reads the sports pages of a newspaper first and is all too easily amused by the arrival of the circus into town to dwell for too long on serious matters lest it make one's head hurty, but sssshhhh...there's sport on.

On which. Apparently, I love gymnastics. This shocking revelation came to me when I realised that I had been watching the men's team event for a solid hour without having once switched to see if a proper sport was on elsewhere.

I had two prior objections to watching gymnastics, which turned out to be like a pair of of sturdy, reliable, old-fashioned English centre-halves about to face a tricky away tie on the continent. The first is similar to that expressed by comedy person David Mitchell on dressage: "it's one of the sports that is scored by judges." It can be baffling to the naive stranger used to the clean and simple lines of, say, the rugby ruck or the interpretations of football's offside rule. It's like returning from a spell of emigration to find that your old friends have a whole new set of language and references that you'll never get.

The other reason - perhaps more practical - is one not exclusive to gymnastics, but is a potential hurdle in the way of following any sport: the absence of context. I couldn't name a single active gymnast bar Beth Tweddle. I had no idea of the narrative. Which way was up?


The gist of it, one rapidly surmised, was that the Chinese were freakin' awesome. But here was the thing: it didn't matter. It didn't matter that I didn't know why China were supposedly so awesome (except that the pitch of the commentators' voices was about a major third sharper when one of their competitors finished a routine) or what the contest meant in the grand scheme of men's team gymnastic things. In fact, not only did I discover that my ignorance of such issues was no obstruction to enjoyment: it actually aided it.

When you follow a sport particularly closely, you can smoke up a right old haze of backstory and opinion and preconception such that you can't see what's directly in front of you. You can have, as renowned cock(ney) rocker David St. Hubbins once said, "too much fucking perspective".


Seen through pure air, you are confronted with the spectacle. I defy even the most chauvinistic sports fan not to marvel at the beautiful, ever-shifting shapes pulled by these remarkable people as they pull off move after move in such rapid succession on the rings or high bar or pommel horse, each with extraordinary precision. Coupled with this is the tension between the need for such accuracy and the knowledge that one slip could ruin the entire routine (and, in the case of the team event, could sink a whole squad's chances).

So, just like that, I sank back into sport's loving breast, to wallow in Michael Phelps' apparently predestined gold run (including a 100m butterfly final whose proceedings are still not fully processable by the average human brain); in a demi-god jogging the first half of the 100m, pausing and hopping the rest of the way backwards on his weaker leg; in the hollowness left behind by Liu Xiang's inability to race; in Yelena Isinbayeva's world record; and, because I'm as prone to sentimental boobery as Captain Darling, in the tinderbox of emotions that gets exposed to a spark once the race is over.

Maybe to get lost in all this is akin to being a lottery-playing prole from Airstrip One. Maybe Steven Wells is right: that to engage in the Olympics at all is to be Satan's fascist little cock-sucker. My rationalisation, for what it's worth, is to remember that the Olympics is not entirely the same thing as the IOC or the Chinese government or Coca-Cola. Sure, many of the participants are on the payrolls of various sportswear manufacturers, and the main reason for the existence of the IOC is the existence of the IOC. But - and maybe this is like being Winston Smith, his soul white as snow - at it's heart, it's still a bunch of human beings sincerely engaging in athletic competition for its own sake. In the fray, it's person versus person, team versus team. It can be beautiful even when unpleasantly framed.



I don't know if sport can really transcend commerce and nationalism and politics, at least in any permanent way. I suppose the very best that it can do is offer us is a temporary intensified glimpse of the fascinating complexity of the earthbound human. It's something more than a mere distraction from the grey and hopeless world, though. It can be - not is, necessarily, but can be - as revealing and fulfilling and life-affirming as art. It may be played out as an analogy, a somewhat safer version of real life, but how can one be sentient and not feel some connection, however slight? How can one be totally unmoved by it all, by the big improvised, intricate, intimate show?

Photos (1, 2, 3) by Manic.D, Tamara _in london! :D and TT FAUGHAN.

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Year of the Podge, Year of the Hat

No, no. This won't do. Firstly, Drogheda United come within a missed sitter of defeating Dynamo Kiev and reaching the third qualifying round of the Champions League (I've read and re-read that last bit and can still barely believe it, for so many reasons). Then, Pádraig Harrington only goes and wins another major. What the hell is he playing at? Is he not aware that not only is he messing with the meticulously mussed-up hair of Irish sporting tradition, but is in danger of dissolving the very fabric of the universe with the faulty, corrosive detergent of high achievement?

There's something altogether unnerving about it. It's not just how he's developed the knack of raising his game when it appears all is against him (rounds three and four: 66, 66). It's not just that he now actively relishes walking the tightrope of the back nine of the final round. It's how much he appears to be in control of his game, how he appears (however temporary or illusory it may prove to be) to have this golf thing sussed.

In the latest edition of the Sunday Tribune's monthly magazine Mad About Sport (crap title, good read), sportswriter and sports psychologist Kieran Shannon discusses a common trap for sportspeople, in which they become too caught up in their final goal to appreciate that it's the process that matters. All you can control is what you do and how you do it. All you can do is get the process down, and que sera sera. Shannon quotes Joe Jacobi, American gold medal-winning canoeist in Barcelona in 1992: "Our coach liked to say, 'The Olympics are like a poker game. You spend time trying to build the perfect hand, then with as much confidence as you have, you throw down the cards and say, "This is what I've got."'"

Harrington, never one to shy from the cerebral element of sport, seems to have mastered this: "I've got to focus on what I'm doing. Tiger focuses on what he does, I focus on what I do. I could win nineteen more majors - if Tiger wins twenty, have I failed?...I understand that I may win or may lose. That's the difference...If I went head-to-head with Tiger and I lost, I'm not going to think I'm any less a player. I understand that you can win or lose at this game. The idea is, put your neck out there, take your chances, take responsibility. Some days it will go, some days it won't."

And he lives for the do-or-die of the majors: "I can't wait for the next major. Seven months away, the Masters. All I want to do is play major golf. I just love the intensity of the last nine holes of a major championship...I like to have that responsibility in the final round."

Harrington is fully confident in his ability and has total control over that which he can control. He is seriously contending to be the greatest player in the world, perhaps one day (it's not impossible - see Nadal, R.) to overtake Eldrick T.

This is just wrong.

Where's the plucky loser gone, Paddy? Where's the snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory? Have you forgotten that it is your solemn duty to give us something to gripe about, something to really sink our bleached little incisors into?

Where's the creative incompetence? Could you not just have, like, accidentally-on-purpose slipped an extra putter into your bag? You could have discovered it halfway through a final round in which you've made a blistering start, nine straight birdies having left you in a nigh-on unassailable lead. We could have seen the shocked, anguished look on your face once you'd discovered your error and realised that the resultant eighteen-shot penalty had rendered your divine golf utterly useless.

But no! You had to go and be all steely and Zen and make the important shots and win another goddamn tournament. There's a delicate balance to the world, Pádraig, and your unremitting brilliance is threatening to throw it all sorts of weird-ass ways. There's a rumour going round our way that a cow has given birth to a foal and a three-headed chicken which took wing and fled into the dark night. I'm not saying you're responsible. But you are.

Thankfully, the Olympics are here, and the discombobulation which accompanied the unadulterated joy of the Harrington triumph has been mercifully offset by some exquisite buffoonery.

The official caps for the Irish swimming team were ruled to be illegal, owing to the fact that the manufacturer's logo was printed on them twice, one more than the permitted amount. Unfortunately, this contravention of IOC regulations was only discovered in Beijing, leaving the Irish swimmers with boxes full of useless equipment and a scramble to find some new hats. One member of the team, Melanie Nocher, had to hurriedly borrow one from her colleague, Andrew Bree, who had a spare.

Unfortunately, it was too big for Nocher's head, which meant that instead of wearing her goggles with the strap on the inside of the hat as usual, she wore them with the strap on the outside, to try and hold the hat on her head more securely. When she dived into the pool at the start of her 200m freestyle heat, the strap moved up the back of her head and water filled the goggles. This forced her to stop in the middle of the race to adjust them, costing her a potential place in the semi-finals.

All of which resulted in much embarrassment and a good old-fashioned round of 'It Wasn't My Fault'. It's just like Irish sport should be.

Some people just don't get it, though. Canoeist Eoin Rheinisch finished in a remarkable fourth place in the K1 slalom, leading coach Déaglán Ó Drisceoil to bemoan the state of facilities for the sport in Ireland. Apparently, Rheinisch has to spend 220 days a year abroad to train and compete. Well listen here, paddle-boy - if it's good enough for our footballers to have to leave the country in order to get anywhere, it's good enough for you, bud.

Honestly. This country.

Flickr photos by GeorgieR and Mike Bartley.

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The breath of God

From the front page of the BBC's football site, a quote which compresses all of the innuendo and gossip of the summer into one handy soundbite:

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Chairman Meh: the belated Sport Is A TV Show Olympic Preview

Let's get it out of the way, then: the opening ceremony, eh? What a load of crap.

I say this even without having watched it because it's always crap. Seen one eighteen-hour fireworks-and-giant-costumes-and-mass-formation-dancing-and-athletes-walking-around-the-stadium-fest, seen 'em all. It goes without saying that this was the biggest, most craptacular fireworks-and-giant-costumes-and-mass-formation-dancing-and-athletes-walking-around-the-stadium-fest in history and the world is abuzz with how well-spent the $983 trillion dollar outlay was. No doubt Yao Ming carried the torch into the arena while wearing a sweatshirt with a diamond-encrusted portrait of Mao on the front.

Anyway, the art of the opening ceremony was perfected in the 2006 World Cup when a group of German gentlemen in lederhosen stood around in a large circle, each ringing an enormous cowbell dangling from their midriff in a synchronised salute to Sigmund Freud. You'd be mad to try and top that.

Yet, astonishingly, organising committees seem to think that they can - nay, must - put on a better display of quasi-nationalistic eye-poking than the last lot, as if engaged in a globally televised international pissing-up-a-wall contest. No sooner had the madness ceased this time around than the British Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, was desperately seeking to reassure the majority of her compatriots opposed to the staging of the 2012 Games in London that their gigantic display of pretty colours and vaguely interesting lighting effects would actually bring about heaven, heaven right here on earth!

Still, it's over (until the closing ceremony, anyway - the bastards have you every which way). And hooray! Two weeks of sport! Wonderful, magical SPORT!!!

And yet, and yet...I can't help but feel a little underwhelmed by it all. I'm not as giddy about it as before a World Cup, say, or on the discovery of an Iceberger in the freezer when you thought there were none left. The whole deal about it being held in a country in the thrall of totalitarian regime which reveres a man responsible for more deaths than any other individual in the history of humanity...call me squeamish, but that kind of sits uncomfortably with me.

The time difference is a problem for the Greenwich Meridian-straddling sports fan, of course, but though it would be churlish to complain about it ("Dear Mr. Rogge, I am incensed that you have not seen fit to force the Chinese government to adopt Irish Summer Time for the duration of the Olympic Games..."), it does make things damn awkward. I'd love to watch the preliminary round of the softball, I really would, but I quite like to sleep. Sorry. Maybe I'll get reincarnated as a US TV network.

Then there's drugs, corruption, freedom-of-speech issues, drugs, drugs and drugs to factor into the equation, which if plotted onto a graph would come out as a big frowny face. Sigh.

I've usually experienced the games (I'm aware how lame it is to equate sitting on a sofa watching the TV with 'experiencing' anything, but bear with me) by just diving in, but in an effort to stop the thing from passing me by completely, I've decided to plot my course beforehand by picking out the events I, in theory, am looking forward to. And, lucky you, here is my guide to stuff I might like if I'm awake and it isn't rubbish.

Swimming Or as it's usually known in my house, 'I can't wait 'til this shite's over and the athletics starts'. There are only two reasons to watch swimming: (a) a compatriot has improved at a suspiciously rapid rate in the years leading up to the Games and you might get the chance to hear a horribly mangled version of your national anthem a couple or three times in the opening week; or (b) some mad bastard has come up with the crazy notion that he might win eight gold medals. I really hope Michael Phelps succeeds, and that after his final gold, he runs across the pool. And that he's not on drugs.

Track cycling I've had a fondness for the British track cycling team ever since Chris Boardman's astounding individual pursuit victory in 1992, and his and Graeme Obree's tussle for the hour record in the mid-'90s. Since then, they've developed into a multi-headed medal-grabbing behemoth, obliterating all comers at this year's World Championships (albeit on a home velodrome).

Displaying the kind of clear-thinking for which sports administrators are so widely reknowned, the 1km time trial has been scrapped. However, we still have the pursuit, the keirin and, best of all, the sprint: a brutal one-on-one test of nerves as each rider waits for the other to make the first move before a dash to the line. Note this: cyclists in some events reach 70km/h, and track bikes have no brakes.

Football No, the Olympics is no place for a glorified under-23 world championship. But there are at least some teams who really do give a damn about it, and Messi and Ronaldinho and Agüero are there, and besides, it's football. Of course, there's also the women's tournament, which is unequivocally significant, and it's got Marta.

Tennis Definitely shouldn't be in the Olympics. In fact, I think they should cancel all tennis - all sport - because nothing will live up to you know what. I'll be watching this mainly because the US Open is on a station I don't have access to, and I have to stock up on mental pictures to accompany the radio commentary from Flushing Meadow.

Basketball In the late '90s and early part of this decade, an Irish TV station would broadcast highlights of the big NBA game of the week, and got me hooked. Then they dropped it, and it is now only accessible in Ireland if you live on a big hill within spitting distance of the border, where you can pick up the British channel which holds the rights. Given that my only source of quality basketball is via nba.com's 90-second highlight reels and internet radio commentary, the chance to properly see what all the fuss is about regarding Lebron James, Chris Paul and Dwight Howard is quite exciting.

Diving I have no clue how to tell a good dive from a slightly worse one (you're expecting a Ronaldo joke here, admit it), but it just looks cool. Plus there's the great story of 14-year-old Tom Daley, the youngest of this year's Olympians.

Hmmm...let's counteract some of the dangerously pro-British sentiment expressed so far...

Athletics I've nothing against British athletes, mind you, but quite a bit against Auntie Beeb's track and field coverage. During the Atlanta games in 1996, there was plenty of criticism of the US media's habit of going on at length about the plucky American who finished in 36th while neglecting the foreigner who performed so well that the heavens parted and he was lifted up to sit on God's right-hand side. The BBC don't go quite this far, but, while focusing on their own is understandable, the degree to which this is done, in combination with their addiction to the immediate post-race interview (when an athlete is at their most articulate and mentally alert, of course) makes viewing frustrating. Or maybe I'm just wilfully petty (there's no 'maybe' about it).

Athletics was my first real sporting love, but it's lost some of its sheen. When you're half-expecting a sub-nine second 100m race, it'll do that. I'll still watch; out of habit, I fear.

The Irish Of Ireland's last six Olympic medals, one was won by a doped-up horse,and four by someone who subsequently gave a drug test that smelled like a distillery. Now that we've used up our secret weapons, even one medal would be cause for celebration. My hope is that as many Irish Olympians as possible can excel and put in the best performance of their lives.

Despite my Beeb-bashing, their coverage looks pretty spectacular. As well as broadcasting on BBC 1, 2 and 3, their interactive service will show up to six different events simultaneously. They also commissioned this, of course. It's almost enough to make someone enthusiastic. Hello, caffeine poisoning.

Flickr photos (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) by jessiqua, still awake, mixmilch, dinghysailor16, danforth.

Horse by Ted.

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Clash in the playground: how football fuelled London Calling

In the spring of 1979, The Clash were in a funk. Despite coming off a tour of America's east and west coasts during which they were treated as visiting heroes, they were, as lead singer Joe Strummer later recalled, "at [their] lowest ebb". They had acrimoniously split with Bernie Rhodes, their domineering manager, and subsequently parted company with the temporary replacement. In addition, their fractious relationship with their bosses at CBS continued, as the label dithered over whether to back the band's third album.

Deprived of their usual rehearsal space, which had been leased from British Rail by Rhodes, the group had to find a new base. They settled on Vanilla Studios, a spartan facility in an upstairs room of a garage in Pimlico in central London. It was here that the new sense of brotherhood fostered during their American adventure, unencumbered by the "hectoring" of Rhodes, bore fruit. Thoughts and ideas were freely exchanged. The band worked diligently, eschewing the attractions of the White Swan pub down the road, and a collection of diverse, multi-dimensional songs soon emerged.

It wasn't just music, passion and work ethic that drove the process along. Across the road from Vanilla was a playground, on which the band and assorted friends and associates would every day have a game of football. The band attributed the nurturing of this atmosphere within which their creativity could flourish to this daily ritual. "We'd play football 'til we dropped and then start playing music," said Strummer. "It was a good limbering-up thing." "What they got out of that was unity, a sense of togetherness," said Kosmo Vinyl, trusted member of The Clash's entourage. Lead guitarist Mick Jones concurred: "I just think we really found ourselves at that time and it was a lot to do with the football. No, I'm serious! Because it made us play together as one". Pat Gilbert notes the echo of Bob Marley and the Wailers in this routine, adding that taking out their aggression in this manner must have had a hand in the lack of vitriol in the new songs, relative to their previous work.

Where they became most aggressive was when executives from CBS would come to Vanilla to check up on the band. Invariably dragged into the game, they would suffer at the feet of The Clash. "Brutal, brutal football matches. I mean, war!," said Vinyl. "Boy, they stuck it to them guys!" The band set upon their employers with glee. "They were kicked in the shins, they were pushed over...that was quite fun!," said Paul Simonon, the Clash's bass player. It seems they saved some of their fury for the rehearsal room, however. "I don't think anyone was hospitalised," said Jones.

It's tempting to see whether there is any correlation between the individual football style of each member of the band and their respective musical styles. Simonon remembers himself as "not[...]the most skilful footballer...I tended to chop everybody, so whenever I had the ball, everybody would run away". Strummer was another whose lack of technique was masked by a surfeit of energy: "Joe was the workhorse who'd be struggling to try to get there". Roadie Johnny Green recalled: "Joe would be well-meaning and try hard but wasn't very good". Simonon thought of Jones as "really swift and nimble," whereas Green said "Jonesy was really flash, but we all laughed at his style, because he wasn't as good as he thought he was". It appears drummer Topper Headon was the best of the lot: "pretty nifty," according to Simonon; "skilled and nimble," said Green.

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A clutch of new material in hand, The Clash decamped to Wessex Studios in Highbury, north London to record the new album. They selected Guy Stevens to produce. Stevens had been a stalwart of the London R&B scene, turning the Rolling Stones onto much of the music which would make up their earliest work, as well as naming Procul Harum and Mott The Hoople. The words most commonly used to describe Stevens are 'maverick', 'manic' and 'alcoholic'. He was summoned to helm the LP by Joe Strummer, who trawled the pubs of central London in search of him, and finally found him dishevelled in a watering hole off Oxford Street: "I found a row of blokes sitting slumped over the bar staring in their beer...I spotted him because of his woolly hat. I went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder, he looked round and it was like son-find-father in one of those corny films".


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During the making of what would become London Calling, Stevens had a daily ritual of his own. He had found out that there was Clash fan among the employees at Arsenal. Having bribed said employee with tickets and t-shirts, he would have his taxi-driver stop off at the ground every morning, whereupon he would enter the stadium and walk out onto the pitch. He would then kneel down in the centre circle and pray, teary-eyed, to Liam Brady.

The Clash thrived on Stevens' near-lunatic method, which contrasted markedly with the meticulous approach of Sandy Pearlman, the producer of their second album Give 'Em Enough Rope. "He used to believe his job was to get the maximum amount of emotion on a record," said Bill Price, the engineer on London Calling. He achieved this by means of what Price described as "direct psychic injection," which involved leaping around the room while the band played, often stopping to bellow into the face of one of the musicians; trying to smash a plastic chair on the floor; whirling a ladder above his head during a take (Vinyl: "it keeps you on your toes...you've got to pay attention to what you're playing and what's coming...it kind of worked for them"); pouring a bottle of wine over the keyboard of a brand new Bösendorfer piano to "improve the sound"; and playing a recording of the commentary from the famous 1979 FA Cup Final at ear-piercing volume over the studio speakers while holding aloft a scarf bearing the words 'There's only one Liam Brady'.

The Clash released London Calling in December 1979 in the UK and in January 1980 in the US. It received the accolade of 'Album of the '80s' from Rolling Stone. At the risk of editorialising (hey, it is my blog), it's as near as dammit to the perfect rock and roll album.

Guy Stevens died on August 29 1981 after overdosing on a drug intended to combat his alcoholism. Three weeks later, The Clash recorded 'Midnight to Stevens,' an elegy to their friend:



(He may have had a shitty death, but at least he went out to a Mick Jones guitar line.)

The anniversary of Stevens' death falls tomorrow three weeks. It would perhaps be inappropriate to raise a glass to him, but I'll at least be rattling my prescription medication, having a kickabout and returning to stick London Calling on the gramophone before turning to face north London.



The information in this post has been culled from: Passion is a Fashion: The Real Story of The Clash by Pat Gilbert; The Complete Clash by Keith Topping; the article How I Met The Clash by Kris Needs; and the documentary The Last Testament: The Making of London Calling by Don Letts, from the 25th anniversary edition of London Calling.

Photo of the playground in Pimlico from Don J Whistance's Clash site.

With thanks to Vandal-prone for, obliquely, inspiring this post.

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He Thought Of Car(toon)s

I don't know exactly why I love the trailer for the BBC's Olympic coverage so much. Perhaps it's the music composed by Damon Albarn, the second best songwriter of the Britpop 'era' (who's the best? Need you ask?). Perhaps it's the gorgeous animation. Perhaps it's just that it's so different to the none-more-literal shite that TV stations usually go in for (I'm looking at you, RTE) - slo-mo out-of-context shots of faceless athletes, music either ickily sentimental or, more usually, vacuously bombastic (this has what sounds very much like an 'eighties drum machine in it). Anyway, it's both amazing and great, and makes the almost unbearable gap between that programme where people buy some cheap crap in a flea market and sell it at auction and one of the other programmes where people buy some cheap crap in a flea market and sell it at auction quite pleasurable.

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