2005-11-22 - 11:16 a.m.
Ever felt like someone is pointing the finger?
Last week I was at a lot of travel industry guff as I droned on about in the last few entries. One recurring question was ‘how did you get into what you do?’ and I always feel a bit embarrassed, not because I kidnapped an editor’s family and held them to ransom until they gave me a commission, or slept my way to the bottom (though a chance would have been a fine thing), but because I don’t really know.
One week I was a slack office temp doing HORRIBLE music reviews for a crappy free magazine, the next I was a slack office temp occasionally getting to go on press trips to nice places. Music journalism’s gain, and it is a big gain let me assure you, is travel journalism’s loss, or at least travel journalism’s slight inconvenience to be tolerated.
I was taking a few, well let’s just call them ‘files’, off my old pc the other night and I stumbled upon a collection of my CD reviews from about 1998, or something. After I had finished gagging, I decided to keep them so that future generations may avoid prose that could turn milk at thirty paces.
The one curio, that I will share with you here YOU LUCKY PEOPLE is a review of a band called The Karelia who, and this is the only reason I bring it up, were fronted by a boy called Alex, who grew up to be the lead singer of…Franz Ferdinand. Needless to say, my finger was on the pulse so hard my fingerprints had worn away, and I predicted great things. Well, things, at least.
The Karelia -Divorce at High Noon
Vaunted by certain sections of the music press as The Divine Comedy meets Noel Coward, though surely this isn’t the greatest of characteristic divides to surmount. I would throw a high-camp version of The Ukrainians in there too. Nevertheless, their suave, smoking-jacketed disaffection is set to sneeringly sleazy meanderings which seem to creep from just about every decade since the 1920’s. The opening “Divorce At High Noon” sets out their decidedly nonchalant stall, with its rallying call to a lethargic break up – “I feel quite bored now that we’ve shared / Every secret, every thought , every fear and every fault…”. Confirmed arch-cynics will warm to “Love’s A Cliché” and the faux Middle Class aspirations of “Life in a Barrat Garrett” (“I want a bath robe in which to lay my stools / I want some offspring to send to private schools”). Driven by quiet disgust which spews forth in cutting finisher “Garavurghty Butes”, the Karelia prove suave rockabillies with a nice line in suits and vitriol to spare. Ones to watch.
Yeah, sorry about that. I promise not to force my juvenilia on you again.
