A Fully Trained Actor Reduced to the Status of a Bum

Oh actors, poor loves. They just don’t get enough attention do they? Centrelinked decided to do something about it in Oscar’s week by celebrating anyone who has been name checked in song. There’s more than you think – and that’s just James Dean songs. Names of actors in brackets if not in the title.

What Got Played
• 20th Century Fox Fanfare – London Symphony Orchestra
• Robert de Niro’s Waiting – Bananarama
• Clint Eastwood – Gorillaz
• Jo Jo's Jacket - Steve Malkmus and the Jicks (Yul Brynner)
• Lenny Valentino – the Auteurs (Rudolph Valentino - possibly)
• Scream - The Stuntcar Drivers (Neve Campbell)
• Rattlesnakes – Lloyd Cole and the Commotions (Eve Marie Saint)
• John Wayne is Big Leggy – Hayze Fantayze
• Look at me (I’m Sandra Dee) – Stockard Channing (Sandra Dee, Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Troy Donahue, Elvis)
• The Unknown Stuntman – Lee Majors (too many to mention)
• Purple Underwear (Michael Caine from Get Carter)
• Michael Caine – Madness
• Mohammed Ali and all his friends – the Lovely Eggs (Kirstie Ally)
• Raquel – Neon Neon (Raquel Welch)
• Bruce Lee – Underworld
• Lee Remick – the Go-Betweens
• Fanny Ardant et Moi – Vincent Delerme
• Initials BB – Serge Gainsbourg (Brigitte Bardot)
• Tom Courtney - Yo La Tengo
• Julie Christie - Stephen Duffy
• Grace Kelly Blues – Eels
• Like Dylan in the Movies - Belle and Sebastian (Bob Dylan)
• Marlon JD – Manic Street Preachers (Marlon Brando)
• (He’ll Never Be) An Ol’ Man River – TISM (River Phoenix)

Ran Out of Time (or usurped)
• Tom Baker – Human League (Tom Baker of Dr Who fame)
• Just like Fred Astaire – James
• Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle – Nirvana
• Butterfly McQueen – The Boo Radleys
• I helped Patrick McGoohan Escape - the Times
• I Hate Nerys Hughes – Half Man Half Biscuit
• Kylie's got a Crush on Us – Teenage Fanclub (Kylie Minogue)
• Zombie Zoo – Tom Petty (Boris Karloff)
• Shoot Doris Day – Super Furry Animals
• Michael Douglas - Neon Neon
• The Right Profile – the Clash (Montgomery Clift – post accident)
• Sean Penn Blues – Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
• Clark Gable – The Postal Service
• Celluloid Heroes - The Kinks (Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino, Bela Lugosi, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe, George Sanders and Mickey Rooney)

Suggestions and Requests
• Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Bauhaus or Nouvelle Vague
• Lee Remick – Hefner
• You Jane – Stephen Cummings (Kris Kristopherson and Genevieve Bujold)
• Frank Sinatra – Cake
• Hackensack – Fountains of Wayne (Christopher Walken)
• Whatever Happened to Corey Haim? – The Thrills
• Winona - Matthew Sweet
• Candle in the Wind and Roy Rogers - Elton John
• Grace Kelly – Mika
• Marlene on the Wall – Suzanne Vega (Marlene Dietrich)
• Halle Berry (She's Fine) - Hurricane Chris
• Bill Murray – Gorillaz
• Crispin Glover - Starling
• Denzel Washington – Charmillionaire
• David Duchovny – Bree
• Kurt Russell – Ultrasound
• Rosanna – Toto (Rosanna Arquette)
• Cary Grant’s Wedding – The Fall
• Shelley Winters - Charles Jenkins and the Zhivagos
• 2 HB – Roxy Music (Humphrey Bogart)
• Keanuville - Rain Perry (Keanu Reeves)
• Madonna, Sean and Me – Sonic Youth (Sean Penn)
• I Want to Do it With Madonna – The Androids
• Bette Davis Eyes – Kim Carnes or Gwyneth Paltrow
• Kung Fu – Ash (Jackie Chan)
• Steve McQueen - Drive by Truckers
• Where Do You Go To MY Lovely - Peter Starstedt (Marlene Dietrich)

James Dean Tribute list
Many thanks to Peta for a glut of James Dean related songs including: James Dean by the Eagles, Movie Star by Harpo, Rock On by David Essex. Jimmy Dean also cops a mention in Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire, Vogue by Madonna, Blue Jeans by Lana del Ray and is the subject of Suede’s Daddy’s Speeding from Dog Man Star… pretty fly for a dead guy.

This week, we’re celebrating International Women’s Day with all-lady bands.

All women mind, no token blokes (I’m looking at you Elastica…)

Centrelinked is on your wireless or streaming live on 98.9 North West FM (http://www.northwestfm.org/) Saturday mornings at 10.30 Melbourne time.

Wish Fulfillment

"We're banning Charlatans fans from our gigs because they all have moustaches."

Nicky Wire, Manic Street Preachers (1992)

OK, so when I said this week that I’m an old git that only gets excited about touring bands when its embarrassingly personal it wasn’t necessarily an open invitation to every band I’ve irrationally adored to come play for me in Australia. That said I do very much appreciate the Manic Street Preachers and Charlatans getting off their bottoms and scheduling tours down under for this November. Whatever your reasons, thank you.

Clearly the Charlatans weren’t put off by their first ever Australian tour just two years ago despite what was technically stalking by me and my friend Julie (who achieved one of her proudest moments in life helping Tim Burgess rearrange his sweaty fringe – at his request). Northwich’s grooviest fuckers will be back to promote their 11^th studio album Who We Touch,out through Shock on 17 September.

I understand the words ‘11^th studio album’ aren’t generally associated with a band at their peak, but 2008’s You Cross My Path was a little gem and I can assure you the three times I saw them in 2007/08 were as good as any other time in their career. The truth is a night out with the Charlatans is always worth your bus fare and even a taxi home, if only so you can experience the high of Sproston Green live. When you’ve followed a band every step of the way for 20 years love tends to obscure all logic but if the idea of dancing euphorically for a couple of hours appeals in any way then just take my word for it and go.

Tickets for the Charlatans November 2010 tour of Australia go on sale Friday 20 August through Custom-Made or from venues: Wed 10th - Brisbane, Hi-Fi; Thurs 11th - Sydney, Metro Theatre; Fri 12th - Melbourne, Billboard;Sat 13th - Adelaide, Fowlers Live; Mon 15th - Fremantle, Metropolis

Having given up on ever seeing the Manic Street Preachers again, news that James Dean Bradfield, Sean Moore and Nicky Wire have decided to temporarily swap South Wales for New South Wales after an 11 year absence has left me both cock and a-hoop. If my love of the Charlatans (and no Nicky, I’ve never had a moustache) is about something spontaneous and irrepressible that I can’t resist - my devotion to the fortunes of the Manic Street Preachers is more akin to supporting a football team. I feel like I no longer have any choice in the matter; for as long as there is a Manic Street Preachers I am doomed to follow. It’s no longer about whether they win or lose – indeed losing is pretty expected - but that they exist at all that draws me in. Not that I expect many in Australia to share my glee. In all my time living here I haven’t met anyone who shares my enthusiasm for the Manics

This isn't unique to Australia. Apart from two or three unlikely years in the mid-nineties the Manic Street Preachers (and their fans) have operated under the old Millwall FC adage of 'nobody loves us and we don't care'. Hated by many in the pre-Britpop indie world for their punk-style sloganeering, big-gob proclamations ('We will always hate Slowdive more than Hitler') and tendency towards mainstream American rawk, they have been derided since their post Holy Bible/Everything Must Go popular nadir for being a sanitised version of the band they used to be.

What's missing here is the story and having lived it with them (well, you know, from my own bedroom) I will always love the Manic Street Preachers more than Pavement, Belle and Sebastian or any other bands of a similar vintage that Pitchfork says it is OK to like. It still excites me to think about even the idea of four Babycham-drinking working class boys from the Welsh Valleys dressed in Top Shop blouses and glittery make-up spouting Camus, Chuck D, Octave Mirbeau and Sylvia Plath being the biggest band in the world. It’s the kind of excitement that inspired me to walk to one of their gigs through dodgy areas of Dublin dressed in bright white army surplus clothes, a Belgian army helmet and a ton make up. I got an apple thrown at me by some teenager, which is getting off quite lightly really considering what I looked like (though the green stain never came out which was a shame).

The Manics' story is Control, Billy Elliot and Rocky wrapped into one tragic and beautiful epic, and yet many people can't see past the soundtrack. If I may steal an analogy from the current election coverage, the Manics are a bit like the Australian Green Party; loved too much by their supporters and hated too much by their detractors. The result is a distorted public view of a band who deserve more credit than history has afforded them, but perhaps - based on music alone - not as much as their devotees think.

Even I can't claim the three or four piece Manics were ever able to consistently create music that matched their lofty ambitions. Still songs like Faster, Design for Life, You Love Us, Too Cold Here, Of Walking Abortion, No Surface all Feeling, If You Tolerate This Your Children will Be Next, Motown Junk, PCP, Black Dog on My Shoulder and Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky are reason enough for anyone to go and see them live.

More encouragingly the band are coming off the back of a genuine return to form in the album Journal for Plague Lovers. It might just be that I like the Manics more when James Dean Bradfield is struggling to sing all the words (Plague Lovers' lyrics were solely drawn from notes and poems left to the band by Richie Edwards when he went missing in 1995) but it was the first of their albums to really grab me for a decade (the remix album, featuring the Horrors, Four Tet, Underworld and Fuck Buttons amongst others was also surprisingly worthwhile, unlike the majority of similar projects).

Like the Charlatans, the Manics also have a new album to flog, Postcards from a Young Man (the cover of which features a very Edwards-like photograph of a young Tim Roth). Described by Bradfield as "one last shot at mass communication" and Wire as "heavy metal Tamla Motown. Van Halen playing the Supremes" it will no doubt promise more than it can ever deliver. But hey, that's the Manic Street Preachers and if that's what it takes to be able to share a room with them one last time, then I for one am happy.

Manic Street Preachers’ Postcards From A Young Man Tour:
Saturday 13th November – The Hi-Fi, Brisbane
Monday 15th November – The Metro, Sydney
Thursday 18th November – HQ, Adelaide
Saturday 20th November -The Forum, Melbourne
Monday 22nd November – Metropolis Freemantle

Tickets on sale Wednesday 18th August

Clean Up Crew to Aisle Six

For the first time in a decade I’m genuinely excited about the idea of a new Manic Street Preachers album. I admit I’ve fallen hook line and sinker for the marketing ploy of Journal for Plague Lovers (that the band has finally chosen to use lyrics left to them by former member Richie Edwards just before he went missing in 1995) but I like Manics songs where James Dean Bradfield has to gallop to make the words fit; something sadly lacking since Richie’s disappearance.

 

All the pre-release talk is that the album revisits territory covered by 1994’s Holy Bible, their notoriously bleak masterpiece - all words designed to lure people like me back into the fold. My copy of the album hasn’t arrived yet so this isn’t a review, but there is one thing that I read at the weekend that made me want to scratch an itch.

 

As with The Holy Bible, the cover art of Journal for Plague Lovers is a painting by British artist Jenny Saville. As you can see below, it’s a headshot of a young boy, with an implication that it could be Edwards (it’s not). Regardless, it’s a great painting and a striking image for an album cover.

What then to make of the news that at least four British supermarkets have said that they are not prepared to display the album with its current artwork and have requested that it be covered with a plain slipcase? Their tenuous argument is that the picture might upset some people because the boy’s face appears to be flecked with blood. 

 

Artistic interpretations aside (and the Manics have done the right thing by stepping in to protect Saville from to having to explain her work to a bunch of dickheads) there are two big issues here. Firstly that of the power of supermarkets to determine how we consume our art (and let’s be honest this entire project is art fodder for fans – this is not going to be a commercial album with song titles like She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach and Virginia State Epileptic Colony.) 

 

Secondly – and this is where I release my inner pensioner – what about the albums on supermarket shelves every year with semi-naked pop stars on the cover. They’re OK are they? I’ve always had a kind of prudish bee in my bonnet about the Pussycat Dolls (really? Pussy cats? Really? You’re so funny) and their playground pole dancing shtick but in the face of this kind of hypocrisy from British retail outlets they just feel even more wrong. 

 

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man (too late, I know), what kind of artists should we be encouraging as role models for young people? A group of young dancers dressed like prostitutes who sing ‘I wanna see the world, drive nice cars, I wanna have groupies.’ Or a woman who has made a career in the fine arts through challenging gender norms and body identity issues through her own confronting and powerful canvasses?

 

Pop music and titillation have been part of youth culture since Elvis and I’m not suggesting that should or even could change. The general public has a taste for it and they’ll be damned if a bunch of pinkie lefties are gonna change that. But honestly, we should cherish and support artists like Jenny Saville because for people who tire of being told that being a Pussycat Doll is something to aspire to (and there are plenty of kids who want more for themselves) we need artists like her – and the Manics themselves over the years – to show that there is another way.

 

At the end of the day this is not anything as noble as a stand on moral values; it is about money. It’s a commercial decision about not upsetting customers. It’s pathetic and but also sad, because there are some young kids who might never go to a gallery and the idea of such a brilliant work of art standing there on a supermarket shelf for anyone to see is part of what pop culture is about.   

 

Related stuff:

Jenny Saville Bio by the Saatchi Gallery 

Guardian Interview with Jenny Saville

The Holy Bible glory days: Faster on Top of the Pops. Dance kiddies.