In the post today:

Oh yeah! It’s the kitchen sink* edition of A Secret Wish by Propaganda.It’s 25 years of age now! If you don’t know what this is then you’re missing out on one of my favourite albums of all time, which I first bought when I was a weird 12 year old. That sounds quite strange when I think of it: how did I find out about them? I have the 7″ single of Doctor Mabuse (their debut) so I must have been a fan from early on and in those days I watched every music show on the telly I could find (this was the days of only four TV channels). The ladies of Propaganda did once feature on  the cover of No.1 magazine which I spotted in that expensive shop in London which sells old mags I used to own but that would have come later. Anyway, A Secret Wish on cassette still lives in my Drawer Of Precious Things along with its remix album also on tape and I upgraded those to CD as people  did back then. This new edition has two discs: the first one features the original album plus some alternative subtly different versions of some of the tracks while disc two featuress more different versions. We love those versions! Some of them have never been released before and some were only ever on  the old 12″ singles so it makes for a very nice package. Highlights include a 20 minute extravaganza which was originally a cassette single called Do Well (hmmm…) and it includes all the released versions od Duel and Jewel  in one long track plus a new insrtumental interludey piece called Wonder. Even without all these super geeky  things you get an 80s classic which now sounds even better but always sounded fantastic.

*kitchen sink not included.

Can I tempt you into buying it with these lovely music videos for the singles?

Propaganda had to expand with extra humans when they performed live as the machines would not make for an interesting visual for some people… I wouldn’t have minded personally but I was at home sulking in my bedroom. I found some good stuff from these live performances:

P:Machinery on The Tube

The Murder of Love on Old Grey Whistle Test

Frozen Faces on The Tube

Dream Within A Dream live 1985

It’s back! For the very first time! Following the almost success of my series of blog posts about old vinyl dance music from when I was not an old git with free mp3 accompaniments I have now got round to doing the same for the CD Singles era. Never cassingles though, never ever. So here is the first instalment of the new thing:

01 Suede feat Neil Tennant: Saturday Night (Live) from Filmstar CD single (1996)
I never liked Suede when they first appeared as all that strutting, sibilance and silliness never appealed to me. By the time they got to the Comig Up album era I was a massive fan and ended up owning everything they ever did. This era of Suede reminds me of the gay friends who lived in a flat above a shop in Mile End (no I am not getting my Pulp songs muddled up).

02 Thieves (re-released as David McAlmont): Unworthy from Unworthy EP (1993)
This early David McAlmont song is bloody beautiful but by the time the album arrived the duo had split and it was released as a McAlmont project. The other one aka Saul Feeman went on to form Mandalay who will turn up at some point in this mix series. David McAlmont is still one of my favourite musical people.

03 Shara Nelson: Uptight (Ashley Beedle mix) from Uptight CD single (1993)
Shara Nelson released two solo albums after her dalliance with Massive Attack ended and this is a great example of one of the remixes from her peak. Ashley Beedle can do no wrong in my ears and so he crops up on the next track in this list…

04 Gabrielle: Baby I’ve Changed (Ashley Beedle mix) from If You Really Cared CD single (1996)
I have a soft spot for Gabrielle and her last album deserved a lot more attention that it got. This track from her second album has been mixed by that Beedle man and has a familiar sampled bassline and a slow funky sound that I never tire of.

05 Lenny Fontana and DJ Shorty: Chocolate Sensation (Original Force edit) from Chocolate Sensation CD single (1999)
Remember when eveyone was sampling Love Sensation? Well they all did it again about ten years later.

06 Cevin Fisher feat Loleatta Holloway: (You Got Me) Burning Up (radio edit) from (You Got Me) Burning Up CD single (1999)
At least Ms Holloway gets a credit on this one. I was never the clubbing sort but this was one of those late 90s dance tunes that I couldn’t resist.

Download No Cassingles Volume One here.

Obligatory embedded videos section!

Suede with Neil Tennant live on film, in surprisingly good quality:

Original Thieves video for Unworthy:

Lenny Fontana’s generic dance music video. Wot no Loleatta?:

Cevin Fisher’s generic dance music video. Still no Loleatta:

Coming soon…

Yes, it’s basically Bedroom Nightclub Mixtape Series 2. But with CDs instead of records. Soon. I promise.

More cool things that make you go hmmm…

Music videos overload this week!

Rose Elinor Dougall’s album release date is almost here and now a video for Carry On  has appeared. It’s very 80s but not in a ha ha funny hair and synthesizers way, oh no. It’s a bit different to the previous singles which were rather more reflective and relaxing but I still love it:

Foxy Shazam may be the new Mika. Or Queen. Or somehting like that, just keep Ben Elton away from them as he might come up with a new horrible musical. Their good album is still not out in the UK but I bought the import a while back and they have  a new video which has been made by someone who enjoyed that Supergrass video. You’l know which one I mean if you watch it:

The Dawson  Bros used to write for Mitchell & Webb’s sketch show buy not any more. Now they write for bloody everything (including that awful thing where Richard Hammond pretends to give a damn about people falling in the water over and over again from the safety of a dry studio in a different country)  and have also made what was supposed to be a short viral clip but it now a full length video for  History by Groove Armada. This is a fun amusing video (alwaays a good thing) and I have liked the song for some time now:

Also cool: zombies!

No, not a remake of 28 Days Later but a TV version  of The Walking Dead with That Bloke From This Life and Teachers. The official site won’t let us watch the trailer but I have found it elsewhere and it is below:

Everything American has to have British  Actors With American Accents since it become the bloody law. Shockingly, I have never read the comics it is based on but am pleased to see another massively geeky TV show is forthcoming.

I spend too much time watching television so if I write a bit about I maybe I can justify my actions. Here’s what has been flickering before my eyes recently:

The Big C is a new series on the network which is as good as HBO aka Showtime. No idea about anyone planning to screen it in the UK, as is often the way with new things that I like (see Party Down and United States of Tara for other examples of this) and this caught my attention because it has Laura ‘The Actor Previously Known As Mary Ann Singleton’ Linney in the lead role and she’s always pretty damn good in everything. She plays a rather uptight woman who finds out that she has cancer but it’s more about how people react to bad circumstances and the weird behaviour of humans rather than a miseryfest pity party ‘dark’ kind of comedy. Only seen the first episode but I liked it a lot.

True Blood is now in its third year over on HBO and is definitely more confident now. The wobbly first season which I temporarily gave up on is a distant memory now and they’ve got that third season peak thing going on like Buffy (if you want a lazy vampiric comparison). This year is pretty much Twin Peaks + gore + sex + silly accents + more gore so that’s all fine by me.

The Great Outdoors is a quiet little BBC Four comedy that did its three episode run with little fanfare but caught the attention of people who like an amusing character comedy. It’s the least ‘sit’ sitcom ever as the characters are part of a walking group and if you liked Rev recently you may well like this too. It’s on the iPlayer (for now) and there’s a link a few lines up on the name of the programme.

Hung is another HBO show and there are a lot of those around as it’s the Summer time. Series one of this was a bit just ok but year two is coming together nicely as we are used to all the characters and the comedy can come a lot easier. Easily my favourite comedy drama about a male prostitute.

Persons Unknown is a nice silly mainstream American mini series (on NBC) so nobody can say fuck or bugger which is a bit weird to me. It’s got a finite lifespan so the plot is rattling along nicely and it is a bit like what the recent disappointing remake of The Prisoner should have gone for. It has Dee from Battlestar Galactica in it as a completely different character (both butch and violent! Excellent!) that what we are used to so hurrah for acting and that.

Grandma’s House is currently on BBC2 on Monday nights and even though we’ve all remarked that Simon Amstell is not the world’s greatest actor the writing is good and it’s a half hour of enjoyable domestic comedy which always contains a couple of moments I can relate to … and so will you if you have been to family gatherings as an adult. So that’s pretty much everybody then and mine are from Essex so I get a bonus point. Bound to be on that iPlayer as well as the telly.

Louie is my current favourite comedy. It’s just very very good at being funny and also having a point to it, which sounds simplistic but this is pretty essential. It’s on FX in America so will probably end up of fucking Sky.

That Mitchell & Webb Look is that thing that I have written about quite often on my other blog and it’s still on the iPlayer. The hit and miss sketch show (for that is what it is) is still good fun although by the time it gets to being on my telly I’ve run out of LOLs due to note books, blogs and generally waflling on about it a lot.

Haven is a newish sci-fi-ish show on that American channel they all SyFy and it’s apparently based on a Stephen King book (or is it a short story? I have no idea). It’s corny fun if you’re in the mood for that kind of thing and it uses the following familiar types of plot: city cop and local cop team up, small town with secrets, inevitable sexual tension and big life-changing secret from the past, all with slightly dodgy CGI.

We’ve also been still watching Emmerdale with our dinner as it’s quite fun and not just because of Duncan Preston’s jacket potato fillings plotline, the sheer volume of sarcasm from nearly every character, Amanda Donohoe doing that face at the cliffhanger, an interesting soap opera gay couple or the oddness of Pauline Quirke being there. Yes i am an old pensioner. I blame that trip to the Yorkshire Dales.

Gawd bless the internet and the people I have met from it, especially Twitter and the way it leads to various separate friends ending up knowing each other and getting on due to shared supergeek levels of fandom for things (usually involving Doctor Who) … my pal Bert (from the days of MySpace, bloody hell) ended up becoming mates with my ‘follower ‘ Michael (I am the new Jesus or something) and the three of us all went out to the South Bank last night for some food and drinks. Not been round there for a long time and had lots of time to kill so I wandered about and admired the concreteyness of it all. Weird how it has been modernised yet the old fashioned greyness still shines through , looking uncannily like the future Earth in Frontier In Space…

To kill a bit of time and read a bit of book I went for a coffee in a leading chain which is not bloody Starbucks and found the man serving me to be a rather excited geek, staring at my True Blood t-shirt. He asked where I got it so I told him it was off Amazon and then he grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down ‘Amazon’ on it… sweet. I don’t know if he knew that it was a website and he had not  heard of Forbidden Planet  when I pointed out it was also available there so I hope he finds one. He insisted that I not pay for my drink because of this so finally being a massive nerd pays off. Oh those crazy vampire fans, but not Twilight. Never Twilight. True Blood season three is coming along nicely and is basically Twin Peaks with more accents and a bucket of gore every week, which is not a bad thing at all. I should do a TV round-up blog while I think of it but not right now.

While waiting outside the BFI bar I listened to the next chapter of my Daleks: Mission to the Unknown audio book which is the first one I have actually bought in the ‘Target Books Read In An Interesting Way By Actors Plus Music and Sound Effects’ series. From the sleeve notes I learnt that The Actor Peter Purves has directed over twenty five pantomimes which sounds like something the delightful Matrix Data Bank (follow on Twitter if you are Who Geek) would make up. Then I spotted Margaret from The Aprentice (sorry new lady Apprentice boss with the nice hair but you are no Mountford) walking like a normal human being and then I noticed that the new hipster beard is in fact a hipster moustache and vowed never to be a hipster. We eventually went for a food and drink extravaganza in  the BFI bar and learnt about guest ales:

” A pint of the guest ale please. What is it?”

“I don’t know. But it never changes.”

“So it’s always the same guest but you don’t know what it is?”

“Yes.”

The mysterious guest ale was very nice and I may have had too many of them and stayed out bloody late, meaning I took forever to get home (at gone midnight) which was careless as Jamie had to get up for work in the morning. Oops. We had a lovely time and ended up reappraising Delta and the Bannermen (it’s The Doctor Who Summer Special), listening to unrepeatable tales about Doctor Who actors and impresionable teenage fans (but not me. Never me), made “played a Voord but in a non-speaking role” one of my favourite phrases, and agreed that I had to write a proper review of the forthcoming DVD of Time and the Rani. Hmm…

That’ll be a challenge.

If it’s not the Twitter tea bot following me when I mention tea it’s the self-searching ‘helpful’ types:

Then the phone rang. It was another bloody robot.

Canvey Island is a real place even though it sounds a little bit made-up to most people. We took our mothers out for fish and chips there on Saturday as it was Jamie’s mum’s birthday weekend and my mum used to go there as a child (we are a big old Essex family). I like the bright but grey aspect of this seaside town where there there is not a lot of seaside related activity anymore, maybe because it reminds me of that year I did the arty farty foundation in Southend on Sea. This time round I decided to bring my camera and capture some of the vibe. I may have succeeded:

We resisted the paddling option.

This week on  the internet we learnt a new word: sodcasting. The Guardian article here. Rather good: Sodcast [noun]: Music, on a crowded bus, coming from the speaker on a mobile phone. Sodcasters are terrified of not being noticed, so they spray their audio wee around the place like tomcats.

Also in that Guardian was an amusing article about pop stars coming out of the closet.  I wish some had stayed in, wonder if George Michael can have his next tour sponsored by Snappy Snaps? : The Moment I Realised can come in many forms. For Joe, for example, the “penny dropped” after an internet whispering campaign (see: Internet Whispering Campaign). However, The Moment I Realised must never, ever involve looking at a man and thinking, “Phwooarr, I wouldn’t mind a bit of that.”

Bryan Ferry has some good new music coming out soon but the Daily Mail was more concerned about the famous 65 year old man looking a bit paunchy: Love used to be Bryan Ferry’s drug. But by the look of his portly body, his addiction these days is extra helpings. Weirdly, my comment on that article was the highest rated:

I can’t bear to watch Eastenders because it’s an inconsistent wobblyset shambles and I prefer the freaky multi-tone oddness of Emmerdale these days but was amused that top comedy character Karen from Pulling has apparently turned up and is now calling herself Rainie. She has already managed to get Phil Mitchell hooked on crack and cause outrage on the Mail site:

Pulling is out on DVD (except for the final ‘special’) and is almost as more-ish as crack.

I finished watching my Revenge of the Cybermen DVD and it was neither dreadful or excellent (no pun intended) enough for a full review. Good human characters in this one but the Cybermen start their journey to rottenness with the wrong kind of dialogue, acting and voices. They’re still quite creepy and not anywhere near the stompy stompy noisy marchy style of recent times and bring the (oddly redesigned) Cybermats  with them to attack humans in scenes with lots of acting involved. The familiar messy back story with major rewrites and a disgruntled writer made it interesting to hear about and I would have to agree that yes those emotionless Cybermen really should not be so angry all the damn time. Jolly good fun though even though I found myself unable to follow the plot but that may have been because I was doing Wii aerobics for most of it. Definitely worth a go though, and the person who wrote the production notes subtitles deserves at least a biscuit.

*shakes fist* Excellent. There is a rather lovely documentary about the VHS piracy market in the bad old days before the BBC released everything, if that can tempt you a little bit more. I must warn you that it contains images of an Ian Levine nature.

It’s that musical time of the week again.

The Mynabirds looks like a throwback band but is in fact one lady named Laura. Honest. Jamie got me into them so I’ll probably buy him the album for his birthday. This is the song that got my attention, the rather lovely Numbers Don’t Lie:

The Like are back with another great single, this  time it’s the turn of Wishing He Was Dead. How cheerful sounding! But seriously,  it’s from a good album although it may grate a bit if you’re not into a bit of pastiche of the past. I quite like it:

Janelle Monae’s album is out and you may wish  to buy it. I know I did. Perfect antidote to all the tedious bland autotune plop dirge I keep seeing on  the musical television  channels at the moment. She’s releasing Cold War as the next single and the video is here, where she stops doing her usual funky dancing and goes all stationary:

Winner of video of the week just has to be Bright Light Bright Light because Rod is a very nice man and now well on his way to becoming an actual proper popstar with his forthcoming Ellie Goulding support slot, proper single release on the Popjustice imprint and this rather popstarry video:

The b-side is also rather awesome. See? (hear)