Avatar A song for Morten

Hello there. Chris here, from the chart-topping band The Papples. Thanks for joining me.

Years ago, when we were hard at work writing and recording songs for our third album, Pop Squared, we made a start on a song about the lead singer of Norwegian pop sensation A-Ha that never saw the light of day.

Well, lucky for you, every dog has his day, and every tired old half-baked Papples idea has its day too. I can now present to you the finished lyrics to a lost classic: “Everybody Fancies Morten Harket”.

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Avatar Ditching the snifters

As close friends of mine, you’ll know I have been battling a devastating addiction for many years now. A horrible, destructive dependency on snifters, which has alienated my family, cost me my livelihood and brought me to the very brink of financial insolvency.

The good news is that I’m making progress on kicking this disgusting habit. Unfortunately, as every addict knows, weaning yourself off will only take you so far. Sooner or later you have to go cold turkey. But if I try that, I might just never breathe again. I need some other breathing aid to see me over the difficult transition to snifterlessness. I need snifter methodone.

The recommendation I got from a professional medical person was a saline sinus swasher (possibly not its official name, I can’t remember). I gave it a go yesterday. Let me tell you what it’s like.

  • The first thing that happens is you get some warm water in a squeezy bottle, and then you add the sachet of powdery stuff to it and give it a shake. Then you tip your head forward over the sink, plug the bottle up your nose, and give it a squeeze. A steady stream of warm water is shoved up your nosel.
  • The next thing that happens is that the sensation of the water heading up your breathing holes gives you the instinctive feeling that you might be drowning and you panic a bit. Then you swallow, which opens up the tubes between your nose and your ears, and all the warm liquid goes into your ears.
  • You stop squeezing the bottle and have a small coughing fit. The warm watery stuff is coming out of your nose and your mouth and your ears and probably your eyes. You can’t see. Everything is awful.
  • Deciding it can’t be all that bad, you compose yourself, stick the bottle up your other nosel, and have another squirt. The same thing happens, but in the other direction, and this time you resist the urge to swallow. Jets of warm, snotty water ooze from all areas of your face. You feel soiled.
  • Having done all of this you wipe yourself down and wait to see if the new treatment has rendered your nose breathable without resorting to the wicked temptation of the snifters.
  • You spend the next three hours barely able to breathe.

There are 60 sachets of weird powder stuff so I can use this thing several times a day, but so far, I haven’t yet had a second go. Ditching the snifters is going really well.

Avatar Live in concert

For one night only, Pouring Beans presents The Porcelainettes LIVE on stage in the concert auditorium below the bell tower. Don’t miss this once in a lifetime chance to catch one of the world’s most hotly tipped up-and-coming ceramic bands in the plush surroundings of this website!

Featuring great covers of classic sing-along hits such as:

  • “Livin’ Doll”
  • Nina Simone’s “Little Girl Blue”
  • Kraftwerk’s “The Model”
  • “Achey Breaky Ceramic Heart”
  • “Tiny Dancer”
  • Annie Lennox’s “Walking On Broken Glass (And Pottery)”
  • “Statue Got Me High” (it’s a TMBG song, I don’t expect you to get the reference, it’s just for me really)
  • “Fade to Grey (Hair)”

And many many many more.

Book now!

Avatar Hot Beans (TM)

This is my last post of 2018.

It hasn’t been the best of years for me personally however 2018 needs to end on a positive note. We must all remember that a new year means new possibilities and opportunities, and we must not dwell too much on the past. Try not to worry, this is not going to dip into one of those emotional, conscientious posts (did we ever have those?). Far from it. 2019 is going to be the year of…

HOT BEANS!

Our demographic has been severely limited to say the least. We need to start attracting a crowd guaranteed to be scouring the internet at least 24/7. And who likes the internet? Everyone. Why? Because porn. Yes, starting next year we will be incorporating the best of adult entertainment into the already racy strands of Pouring Beans.

I can already tell you are salivating at the prospect of nudie pictures and hot videos of, erm, someone on someone action. And quite rightly so. We may be British but we can still rock it and shove it up the right place like the best of them.

So stay tuned for all of this and much, much more. Hot Beans (TM). 2019, baby.

Avatar Four Word Reviews: Footprints

Whenever a little CD-sized padded envelope arrives in my postbox, it’s like a time capsule. Where will we go? Terrible cartoon cover versions of the 90s? Forgotten Gospel from the 60s? Or perhaps, like today, we’ll find ourselves transported to a world I’d almost forgotten: the very early 2000s, and a branch of pop music that I mostly tuned out was big in the charts. It was heavily RnB influenced and it gave us “No Scrubs” and Gwen Stefani’s second wind and lots of songs with hi-hat and a whole, horrendous wave of misogyny, from “Thong Song” to “Hot In Herrrre”. And, at the lighter, poppier end of this best-forgotten spectrum, it gave us Australian soap star Holly Valance, and her 2002 album Footprints.

The lead single and the most memorable thing to come off this album was “Kiss Kiss”, a cover version of a song that had been big in the Middle East already, and which was sort of interesting because it had that RnB sound but it also had lots of floaty, Disney’s Aladdin-style fantasy-Arabia instrumentation. It also had a weird kissy sound as its chorus line instead of words, which was a bit embarassing.

If you thought “Kiss Kiss” was a pretty brazen “come and get it” song for a 19-year-old to be singing then you should hear the rest of the album. Put aside the bang-on-trend production – which I am happy to do, that trend being 16 years old and not something I cared for even at the time – and you appear to have an album conceived and directed by male middle-aged record company execs with their trousers around their ankles excitedly working out what they can get a 19-year-old girl to sing without it actually being pornography. And I might be getting old but I was starting to find it creepy by about track 5.

Anyway: let’s see the shape of this thing.

Track Title Word 1 Word 2 Word 3 Word 4
1 Kiss Kiss Kisses instead of words
2 Tuck Your Shirt In Detailed dress code pop
3 Down Boy Quick yet queerly quiet
4 City Ain’t Big Enough Desperate to be TLC
5 Cocktails and Parties Smugly not seducing husbands
6 Whoop “Kiss Kiss”, but “Whoop”
7 Hush Now Eternal meets Leg Jazz
8 All in the Mind “Massive explosion, magic emotion”
9 Harder They Come It’s no Jimmy Cliff
10 Help Me Help You Helplessly slushy twinkly bobbins
11 Naughty Girl Breathily dubious sexiness attempt
12 Connect 2000s RnB harpsichord action
13 Send My Best Sensual acoustic guitar finale

Track 2 is, like “Kiss Kiss”, very Middle Easty, and I wondered whether the whole album would be like that, but the answer is no, it’s just those two tracks. The other 11 could be Eternal, Destiny’s Child, TLC or maybe Cleopatra songs if you weren’t listening too closely. It’s been produced to death, all twinkles and vocoders, and a lot of songs have that stuttery effect in the bridge where it sounds like the song is skipping in time with the beat. You’d know it if you heard it. All those songs did it in those days.

And it really is all very sexual. Here’s some of the lyrics I scribbled down, though this list could have been much, much longer. I don’t need to go into the insinuations that “Harder They Come” is making.

  • “I can be your fantasy, give you what you want”
  • “Keep you up all night”
  • “I’m proud to arouse”
  • “I’m a naughty girl, I can dance what you want me to dance”

In summary, my favourite thing is that, because it was made in 2002, it’s an “enhanced” CD featuring the videos to “Kiss Kiss” and “Down Boy”, and a special feature about the making of them. I didn’t watch them, obviously. I’d heard enough of this by the time I reached the end of track 13. I’d just forgotten that video extras on CDs used to be a thing and it made me feel a bit nostalgic for a few minutes. My least favourite thing about this album is that I’m not sure whether listening to it means I have to go on some kind of register now.