Many, many years ago I wrote a post here on the Beans about my porridge loyalty card. I seem to remember it was not deemed as impressive as I had hoped and nobody else really seemed very invested in the level of loyalty I was showing to a simple breakfast food.
Anyway, a lot of time has passed since then, so I thought it would be a good time to look through my wallet and take stock of all the loyalty cards I now possess. By doing so we will learn something about where my allegiences lie in 2024.
A couple of months ago we took a trip to the ancient world of 2010, when Ian and I were hard at work recording our second album, Masterpiece. Now we’re firing up our time machine again to pay a visit to November 2011, and a series of photos taken during the recording sessions for our third album Pop Squared.
There are three acts to this extremely dramatic album. The first pictures are taken in my old flat in Crystal Palace, as we recorded our brilliant and ground-breaking music. There’s only a few of those. Then we quickly get into a second group, which are pictures we took of ourselves while the other one was getting ready in the bathroom. I think the idea was to get potential album pictures while saving precious time, so I would capture the essence of my music while Ian was brushing his teeth, then we’d swap over so Ian could attempt to photograph the ineffable nature of his muse while I was having a wee. Then after that we went out to Keston Common, where it was very cold and misty, to take some moody outdoor shots, some of which turned up on the album cover.
I urge you – in fact, I implore you – to take a look at them for yourself, but if you want a taster, there are moments of great joy to be found in there, like these highlights.
Ian really loved his dinosaur hoodie. This was the album of “Dinosaur Gal”, of course, so it was completely appropriate that Ian appears in a dinosaur-themed garment.
We really wanted a picture where I was on the phone and Ian was a dinosaur. We took lots of them. Most of the ones I deleted were like this.
2011 was a long time ago. A long time ago. And we both look so unbelievably young. Look at that hair. Look at that wrinkle-free face. Look at those terrible, terrible shoes. Unbelievable.
Anyway, that’s as much 2011 as we have time for. If I can find any photos from the time we recorded The Eponymous Album, you will be the first to know.
This scarcely seems believable, but it’s true: the first post on this incarnation of the Beans was made ten years ago today when Kev published A Brave New Beans. I still think of this as the “new” Pouring Beans, but it’s been running nearly twice as long as the original. This blog, and all it contains, now forms a record of the whole of our thirties.
Anyway, I wanted to make a post marking this slightly unbelievable milestone, so I have taken my inspiration from Kev’s original post. His “A Brave New Beans” was just a test to make sure everything was set up, and it just contains the word “words” repeated 127 times (I counted). So let’s see how many words we have produced in ten years.
Good morning. Thank you for joining me. It’s wonderful that so many of you have made the journey to be with us today here at the Hollywood Bowl. My name is His Holiness The Honourable Sergeant-Major Professor Lord Sir Elbert Louche, KBE, QC (Retired). I hope you agree that the trip to Los Angeles has been worth it, and I’d like to confirm at the outset that we are unable to reimburse your air fares.
Earlier this year, I had a go at learning a new language on one of those language apps. It wasn’t very successful and started to feel like a bit of a chore, which isn’t the point, so I gave up after a few months.
I still have an account, though, and this particular app isn’t keen on letting you go. I occasionally still get a jolly email from them asking whether I’m going to come back. I don’t mind that. I do my thing and they do theirs, and everyone’s happy. Things are OK.
Until now.
Suddenly it’s not OK. Now the little cartoon owl is angry.
The message just gets worse from there. “Keep Duo happy, do your lessons” it says. Then it tells you an ominous parable about your feckless ways: “Every year, learners say they’ll learn a new language and Duo gets excited. Then they almost forgot their lessons, and Duo gets sad. That won’t happen this year, right?“
Then there’s some other distracting guff, before it finishes with an outright threat. “I’m going to make you do your lessons… by any means necessary. No one wants to see Duo when he gets upset. A few minutes of daily practice can keep Duo smiling in 2024. And a happy Duo means a safe and happy you.”
We’ve visited the nineties before, in our Four Word Reviewing Time Machine, and found it a strange place. Suggs was there, of course, which wasn’t so bad, but on other visits we were left traumatised by Clock and Vanilla Ice. So it was with some understandable trepidation that I opened the CD case for “Tubthumper” by Chumbawamba. Released in 1997, this might be the most nineties album ever made – the first single, Tubthumping, was a massive worldwide hit, but nowadays it doesn’t get the nostalgic airplay that, say, Oasis or the Spice Girls or Dee-Lite do. It belonged so much to its own era that it seems to have stayed there.
Do you remember eight and a half years ago, when we were rap stars? What did we do with all the fur and gold chains when that all ended? And how did three thirtysomething white northerners ever get away with recording four terrible, terrible rap songs?
The EP Space for an Ace might not be something you revisit on a regular basis (though I still think Turd Picnic is pretty catchy), but a far more appealing prospect is the video footage we recorded over the course of the weekend while we were making it. I’d just got a new camera and wanted to try it out, so we filled a tape with more than an hour of nonsense. A few bits have leaked out over the years (like this and this and this), but now I’ve finally edited the rest to make a pretty watchable 18 minutes of new stuff.
A lot of material was trimmed because it was rubbish. Other parts have been lost forever: a fair slice of the creative process for “Crash and Burn” exists only as silent pictures, because of a microphone mishap that Kev kindly makes me explain in the film. There was also a five-minute sequence with the three of us sitting on the sofa, talking to the camera and to each other. It looked hilarious, but we’ll never know what we were talking about now. Never mind.
Still, lots of stupid stuff survived, so I’m delighted to present – at last, eight years late – the Rapples in action, live from 2015. It’s pretty good.
