October 2010 Archives

Have you been watching The Million Pound Drop on C4? Probably not, you probably have a life.

It's a curious competition show that would be better titled 'Who wants to stand no chance of being a millionaire' as the contestants start with a million quid and then slowly (or quickly) lose it over the space of eight questions (or less).

The main attraction to me is seeing how dumb and/or annoying the contestants are. They take part in pairs - so far we've had couples (gay and straight), gay man and his fag-hag and currently male twins, non-identical variety.

The one thing the contestants currently seem to have in common is that they've all seemed to be aged between 25-30. Some of them seem to have never read a newspaper or clearly rarely had an adult conversation - politics, history or otherwise.

Last night's annoying couple (trying to win money for their wedding) even placed money on the concept of Kerry Katona being named as 'best celebrity mum'. WTF? The time they spent arguing over the answers suggests that marriage may not be a good idea - perhaps it was a good job that they didn't win any money. That's another thing that all the contestants seem to have in common. I've seen no-one win anything as yet.

Another couple lost their stack on record number of youtube hits, despite clearly thinking they were 'trendy' and having earlier made a disparaging comment about the over-30's answering one question much better than they had.

You see the hook for the show is that you can take part at home online and as ubiquitous host Davina revealed last night, the most successful age-group participating were the 'over 80's'. So does that mean we should expect to see some over-80's on TV soon? I wouldn't bet my (non-existent) million on it.

When you get to my age there are constant reminders of it, your age that is. If it's not someone making an apparently jocular remark about your creaking limbs then it's the sound of the creaking limbs themselves that act as a reminder.

Similarly, if it's not people reminding you how much younger they are then it's the simple fact that they are so much younger. You know, people like the Conservative Prime Minister; perhaps you only really know you're old when the 'most important man in the Country' is younger than you.

Of course it's not just him; since Cameron's life has been so different to mine that it bears no resemblance. He was born into privilege and spent his days at Eton, I was born in Oldbury. It's more likely to be the daily reminders, things like meeting your son's 'form' teacher and spending the entire ten minutes trying to work out whether he is old enough to actually start shaving yet.

As I work in media I'm obviously surrounded by 'bright young things', the media industry chews them up and spits them out. You probably recently read about the new controller of BBC1 and how he's not long out of his teens.

I got side-tracked when bombarding you with new soul videos last week, but maybe events provided a fitting conclusion.

Solomon Burke was one of the unknown soul heroes, you know him best for this song - beloved of all bar bands everywhere.

An amusing story I heard claims that his rider insisted upon a 'throne' to be provided at every gig. Seeing the above clip made me think that this was clearly true. If you deserve a throne then you should get one.

Great music is all around you. Don't just follow the herd or stay with the obvious. It isn't always easy but it is usually rewarding.

Like Tuesday's tip, today's musician works under a pseudonym or stage-name. Don't ask me why he doesn't want to be known as Clarence, but Citizen Cope does sound cooler and this is very cool.

Citizen Cope - A Bullet and a Target

Citizen Cope works outside the mainstream, releases his own music - bought himself out of his record contract. Like Aloe Blacc his songs also feature in TV shows, it's all about the syndication. It's the future, happening now and it's all online.

Do you think talent like his would squeeze through in X Factor? No, he's probably not pretty enough. Do we really need to look at what we listen to? I'll leave you with that thought for today.

This week is about tunes, you get sucked into your x-factor nause-fest and ignore what's out there? Shame on you - and me.

This is outstanding. Ed Sheeran is 19. Acoustic-soul-brother?

Follow the links here and here, it's not all this good but I should remind you - Ed Sheeran is 19.

It's hard to be a music fan in this generation. Frankly there's too much music and if you have wide and varied tastes (like me), then it's even worse. I find myself bemoaning the existence of shitty-karaoke TV shows when really I should be sharing the love.

So, I like a bit of soul every now and again and though my record collection is largely white-guitar-based-rawk there are the occasional glimpses of soul, hip-hop, etc. No-one wants to listen to the same things over and over, do they?

Over the next few days I'm going to share some of my recent discoveries. Some of them are not recent at all, or weren't recorded recently. This one was though, and this is where the idea started (today). This is Aloe Blacc's I Need A Dollar