Mandolin – A Song

Let’s crack off 2019 with something that I should have done in 2018.

I set myself a challenge whereby I was to write and record a song about a Mandolin (the chocolate bar, not the musical instrument) using a Mandolin. I wrote the song words, or lyrics as they are commonly known, and even worked out a basic rhythm with which to astound the listeners with. Sadly, when I tried to record it all on my very primitive phone, it was not good enough. I did expect this to happen, as I don’t own any proper recording equipment like everyone else does, so the project was duly shelved. That said, I do not want to deny the public what is a very beautiful song. Here we are then. Make up your own tune. It’s yours for the taking:

“Hit me, mandolin,
You don’t think that I can handle him so
Hit me, mandolin.
My arms bent over like a pangolin so
Hit me, mandolin.
You see that growing? It’s a dorsal fin!
That’s right, yeah, mandolin,
It’s much, much bigger than a phantom limb.

Oh, trick me, mandolin,
Writing my way to the loony bin.
So strict, yeah, mandolin,
The nurse on hold for my next of kin.
I left my mandolin,
Picking up pieces of a mandarin.
You’re on me, mandolin,
Hiding in shadows like a mannequin.
So leave me, mandolin,
I’m sick an’ tired of ya panderin’.
You heard me, mandolin,
I’m done, it’s over, time fo’ finishin'”

If Pharrell Williams or Dr. Dre are listening, I am free in March to collaborate on any future projects you may have.

Four Word Reviews: ‘Til Their Eyes Shine

I started these reviews when I got sent a Wang Chung album as a joke, and Kev and Sarah had just reviewed a Papples album in this format, and I thought it was a fun thing to do with a CD I’d been sent. Then more CDs started arriving. But I never thought we’d end up here. The CDs that arrived were just crap albums, and I would write reviews of how amusingly bad they were. Until now. Now I’ve been sent… I mean, what is this? It’s called “‘Til Their Eyes Shine: The Lullaby Album”. It’s a 1992 charity compilation of slow, snoozy numbers by female artists that will supposedly put a child to sleep, though for my taste half are too lively for that and the rest are too disturbing.

Am I being punished, somehow? Is this horrendous mush the price I pay for some indiscretion I committed? I don’t know. I just know it was awful.

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.

Four Word Reviews: Double Wide

Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to just read these reviews, never having heard the music I’m reviewing. Sometimes I wonder if a casual reader would believe that I actually do listen to the whole album in its entirety before writing one. But I do, and that is why I have very mixed feelings when another CD-shaped package mysteriously arrives in my postbox. Sometimes the contents of that package are familiar to me and maybe even borderline palatable, like when Sade emerged from her Jiffy bag. Other times I find myself facing up to an album like Double Wide by Uncle Kracker.

What is a Mandolin?

A wise person once asked, “Where is my mind?” I often find myself coming back to this question as a reference point during the day because I know where my mind is physically, however there are times when certain acts of stupidity make me question whether it is really there at all.

You must remember to question everything. Nothing is for certain anymore. If you’d have told me fifteen years ago that I would have a tiny device in my pocket that could download cute videos of cats walking around like human beings at any time during the day I would have laughed right in your face. YOUR. FACE.

Do you know what a mandolin is? If you think it’s a stringed instrument in the lute family then you’d be so wrong I would have to stand on a precipice and tell the world. This is actually what a mandolin is:

It is a small, thin chocolate bar from across the sea, from a world where other chocolate bars clearly don’t exist. Quite what music shops have been selling all these years is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they have all been misspelling it all these years and those instruments of 6, 8 and 12 strings are, in fact, mendolins or mandolines, or possibly something else. If the decision were up to me, I believe a mandoloin would be an excellent name.

Faced with the possibility that all those times I have been getting mandolins all wrong, I have therefore proposed two outcomes to this predicament:

I will write, perform and record a song using the aforementioned chocolate mandolin;
I will eat one of these other “mandolins” you find in music stores.

It is the only way to find balance and harmony between these two vastly different things with the same name. If I am only half successful then the whole thing will be a total loss. If I can achieve both then the sun will come out and there will be a tomorrow to look forward to.

Wish me luck.

Report from Brighton

This week I have been to Brighton, another seaside town, where large numbers of people who like red things best have gathered for a conference about what it would be like if people who like red things are in charge of everybody. Some of them seem to be under the impression that they already are. Others are arguing about what sort of people who like red things should be in charge of the people who like red things and whether some of the people who like red things like red things more than some of the other people.

As before, I have decided that it’s important I should share my findings of this place with the magnificent readership of the Beans. I learned three things in Brighton.

First, I learned that sand can be really big. Brighton beach is made of sand so big that it’s basically pebbles. Like, each grain is properly pebble sized. I’ve heard it said that they actually are pebbles, but that’s clearly silly because beaches are made of sand.

Second, Brighton is full of very attractive people. Everyone in Brighton is not just beautiful but also very cool, in a sort of unintimidating and effortless way. I feared that I would not fit in with this sort of demographic and feared being rounded up by the police and removed from the town on account of my decidedly ordinary appearance. In the end my boss cut my trip short and redeployed me back to London two days early, which I think was just a cover for the fact that he’d got word from the authorities that I would be exiled if I didn’t leave of my own accord.

The third thing I learned is that you can get a machine that automatically makes pancakes at the push of a button. I know because there was one at breakfast in my hotel.

I was so amazed that I made a video of it, which I have presented here for your enjoyment. The video is soundtracked with an excerpt from the 1996 hit song “Coco Jambo” by Mr President.

You’re welcome.

Four Word Reviews: Bugs & Friends Sing the Beatles

1995 is a fertile year for the albums that randomly arrive in the post without any indication of their provenance. That year has already brought us The Lone Ranger and It’s Time. Now it brings us a third forgotten horror, Bugs & Friends Sing the Beatles, subtitled “The Furry Four Sing Their Fab Four Favourites!”.

I have to be honest, I don’t really know where to start. I loved Looney Tunes cartoons when I was a kid. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck were my favourites, and Disney could absolutely do one. So I had a small glimmer of hope that there might be something entertaining about this. Then I put the CD in and – in a Four Word Reviews first – I genuinely had to pause it at the end of the first track to try and gather my thoughts and steel my nerves to get through the rest.

I don’t even know what’s worst. Is it that they’ve taken on brilliant, beautiful songs and wilfully converted them into vehicles for terrible puns on other Beatles song names and cartoon fights with lots of sound effects? Is it the fact that almost every song breaks down in the middle into a spoken-word sketch of some kind? Is it that even when they’re not talking, they mostly speak the lyrics in “funny” voices or respond to them in some way? Is it the patronising Indian accent in “Fool on the Hill” when Elmer Fudd is asking his swami for spiritual guidance?

Actually, no, I do know what’s the worst and it’s none of those. It’s that you’re not even listening to Bugs, Daffy, Elmer and Taz. You’re listening to four bad impressions of Bugs, Daffy, Elmer and Taz and they are slowly battering eleven Beatles songs into an early grave. Taz doesn’t really matter because he’s not in it much, but his character isn’t really meant to speak. Elmer’s voice is wobbly and cracked and sounds awful when singing. Daffy is vaguely convincing until he does his catchphrase “woohoo!” and then the actor loses the character a bit. And Bugs is… well, I don’t know who Bugs is, but he’s not Bugs Bunny. It’s not convincing at all. He doesn’t even speak in the right register. I have never missed Mel Blanc so badly.

Track	Title	Word 1	Word 2	Word 3	Word 4
1	She Loves You	She	wouldn’t	love	this
2	The Fool on the Hill	Elmer	Fudd’s	harrowing	vocal
3	Birthday	Includes	reference	to	Laserdiscs
4	Hello Goodbye	Joyless	Bugs/	Daffy	argument
5	With a Little Help From My Friends	Elmer	bludgeons	another	classic
6	It Won’t Be Long	It	was	too	long
7	Yesterday	Daffy	Duck	singing	“suddenly”
8	Penny Lane	Oh	god	I	can’t
9	Help!	Yosemite	Sam’s	unwelcome	debut
10	Can’t Buy Me Love	No	no	no	no
11	The Long and Winding Road	Featuring	Roadrunner	“meep	meeps”

The jokes are bad. The sketches are bad. The scripted-to-death ad libs are bad. The changes to the lyrics are bad. The way they shoehorn other Beatles song titles into their jokes is beyond bad. The instrumental version of “The Long and Winding Road” that featured only backing vocals and Roadrunner – “the long and winding road MEEP MEEP that leads to your door” – was painful. But I think worst of all is that I listened to the album and it made me realise what brilliantly written songs these are and how sad it was to hear them being taken for granted and pillaged for cheap laughs that mostly don’t land by people without even half the talent of the original songwriters. It’s a horrible parody of brilliant music by people doing a horrible pastiche of a brilliant voiceover artist. There’s no joke at the end of this paragraph. It’s just really sad.

In all, this was among the worst things I’ve ever listened to, though still not as bad as “To The Extreme” by Vanilla Ice which is the worst thing that has ever happened to me and will never be matched. My favourite thing about this album was Daffy Duck singing “suddenly!” in Yesterday. My least favourite thing was basically everything else.

Garforth takes its place in the history of rave

You might think that our humble home town of Garforth has a very low key history that starts with coal mining and ends with the time Tesco moved into the old Safeway’s. The people living there might have enjoyed listening to music but it has no famous musicians. Nearby Kippax can claim The Music as their own local band, but Garforth remains quiet. There is absolutely no way it could have played a role in the Eurodance scene of the mid-1990s.

Well, I am about to blow that idea right out of the water, because it turns out that Garforth played a very central role in mid-90s rave music. It happened right next to the Old George. Don’t believe me? I will explain. Let’s talk about N-Trance. (And if you don’t want to talk about N-Trance, that’s a shame, because we’re going to.)

Pouring
Beans

Category: Tuneless