Just for a little bit of fun. This is actual footage of North Korean TV news (source: NK News), but I thought it deserved a more moving soundtrack.
"…don't you ever / Lower yourself, forgetting all your standards"
:(
Long-time WoSblog viewers will already be aware that I’ve embraced my gay side when it comes to Eurovision now, thanks to the simple expedient of entering into the spirit and watching it with other people. (If everyone else is even briefly out of the room for some reason I get very twitchy.)
But for those of you still struggling, here are this year’s highlights, with the minimum of campness and the maximum of ROCK!
(NB “Maximum” does not necessarily mean “a lot”.)
We all remember this, right?
(Click the pic to watch on YouTube. We can't have it embedded here because the repellent corporate nightsoil at Sony Music Entertainment have laid a copyright block on it and there STILL isn't a remotely decent video plugin for WordPress. This is the original TV version, incidentally.)
It's fantastic, of course. But on this occasion it's not the truly awesome thing.
Because I never thought I’d ever see this again:
There are two reasons I’m incredibly happy about suddenly and unexpectedly rediscovering it – as I just have – of which the first is the less important.
Malcolm McLaren RIP. This is a version of a piece I originally wrote for WoS a few years ago, reprinted in tribute to one of the world's great chancers.
The world would have been a much more interesting place if he'd managed to become the Mayor of London.
or how one record changed my whole life.
(To enjoy this feature TO THE EXTREME!, install the excellent Spotify and click the song titles to hear the songs. Failing that, I’ll just have to try to paint you a picture of some sounds, but made with words instead of paint.)
In the heady atmosphere of 1985-1986, I never thought I’d live to see the day when The Jesus And Mary Chain – musical revolutionaries, performers of shambolic 20-minute sets of hellish white noise and inebriated chaos, banned from Student Unions across the country because of their concerts’ tendency to end in (sort-of) riots, scruffy council-estate urchins from the industrial wastelands of West Central Scotland – would be having their music celebrated and given away free with copies of The Times.
I guess if you’re right, and if you wait patiently enough, the world sometimes comes round to your way of thinking eventually.
Alert WoS viewers will have seen this a while ago, but as it's my all-time favourite piece of videogames-related art it's worth repeating for the hundreds of new readers of WoSblog. Once you've grasped what it is you won't expect that you're going to watch all nine minutes of it. But you will.
Hello. I am the Rev. Stuart Campbell,
a semi-obsolete neo-culture journalist.
Click here to contact me, if you want.
Lightforce (FTL, 1986)
