Paul Rooney – Lucy Over Lancashire.
Music
Skip the movie, watch the video: Falcon and the Snowman
Part one in what may become a series. Way back in the stone ages, or the eighties as it was know at the time, the movie footage videoclip became a common way to both promote a movie and provide a band with a cheap videoclip. For many of us growing up that time who were too young or lacked the opportunity to catch these movies in the cinema, these clips were the only way in which we saw some of the eighties’ biggest movies. And often once you did watch them, they were nowhere near as good as the video. Case in point, The Falcon and the Snowman, late Cold War spy thriller that never lived up to the promise of its melancholy Bowie theme song.
Put a donk on it
Current musical obsession fed by listening to to much 6music in the early afternoon.
Are ‘Friends’ Electric?
Back in February, The Grauniad had Gary Numan look back at how he wrote Are ‘Friends’ Electric and what it meant:
All my early songs were about being alone or misunderstood. As a teenager, I’d been sent to a child psychiatrist and put on medication. I had Asperger’s and saw the world differently. I immersed myself in sci-fi writers: Philip K Dick, JG Ballard. The lyrics came from short stories I’d written about what London would be like in 30 years. These machines – “friends” – come to the door. They supply services of various kinds, but your neighbours never know what they really are since they look human. The one in the song is a prostitute, hence the inverted commas. It was released in May 1979 and sold a million copies. I had a No 1 single with a song about a robot prostitute and no one knew.
Of course now it is thirty years later and while its vision of the future never quite came to pass, it still sounds as futuristic and chilling as it must’ve done in 1979. That both Ballard and Dick were influences on Numan doesn’t come as a surprise; it’s clear from the music.
Bonus: Nine Inch Nails invites Numan up on stage for Cars.
Grief comes in spurts
Tomorrow it will be exactly 21/2 years since Sandra died, so it’s no wonder she’s been on my mind the past weeks. It’s funny about grief, it stays away for days or weeks on end and then suddenly it stabs you in the heart again. in popular culture it’s supposed to be this massive, all overpowering emotion, something that hits youn in the guts and keeps you down for weeks, then mostly disappears apart from late nights spent with the whisky bottle and the handy portrait of your lover whenever it’s convenient for the plot.
Real life is different. What I remember emotionally from the weeks just before and immediately after her death was sadness, but also peace and even a bit of relief that it was all over. For three-four years we’d been living with her illness and the hope that finally her health would improve. When that hope turned out to be futile and Sandra choose to put an end to it, after denial came relief. An ending was better than more sleepless nights listening to her crying out in pain and anguish. The week after she died there still wasn’t that grief the movies had taught me would be there; instead I had to be relentlessly practical, set myself to tying off all the loose ends her death left behind.
It’s only in the months and years after that, when life had turned back to normal again that the emptiness hit. Four years fighting for Sandra’s health, always with that goal of getting her better in mind, not to mention over a decade of having been with her and suddenly it had all ended. Suddenly there wasn’t anybody I needed to take into account anymore, suddenly it was just me and the cats and being able to everything I want but nothing really to come back home for. I’ve never been as comfortable as i’m now, but what’s the point when you’re just living on your own, day in day out without purpose?
That’s how I feel whenever the reality of living without Sandra hits me again; late at night going to bed with just the cats, in the supermarket staring at the vegetables, every now and again seeing something she would’ve Had an Opinion About. That’s when the knife hits. It hits with the little things, remembering the small touches of living together, of having somebody other than cats to talk to.
(There isn’t much pop music that does well with grief, but Sinéad O’Connor comes close.)