Wednesday, August 18, 2004  4:46 pm 

So come and prance with me Michael…

Michael Nyman - Anglefish Decay

When i was a poncey English lit/Drama student the only good English movies being made were by Mike Leigh and Peter Greenaway (dear Derek Jarman and his beutiful garden, but Jubilee …wow Adamant about this).

Through Eno and the Peguin Cafe Orchestra i started going to more avant garde stuff that my previous roots would have suggested (metalica and public enemy). I was even lucky enough to go see Laurie Anderson at an early age.

For me Micheal Nyman was as new wave as Devo, and we jumped about in Stephen Murrey’s bedroom to this as much as The Buzzcocks, he just used different instuments.

His compositions from The Cook The Thief his Wife and Her Lover either made me want to cry or fuck, and the truly genius music from Drowning By Numbers is still so much fun to make my Kubrick bears throw shapes too, it’s surly dying out for a rathergood animation.

Juan recently got me to listen to the Polysics version of My Sharona and it reminded me of this, so i thought i would post it.

BUY Michael Nyman

Franz Ferdinand - Michael(Simon Bookish version)

More Michaels in the Blog, this one makes special sense as Simon Bookish plays tomorrow night (20th) in the Freebutt with the gloriously decadent Miss Pain and Celebricide, we’ll probably be there even though we are supposed to be DJing at the Penthouse (upstairs) for the launch of the night that gives this blog its name and raison d’etre. What we’ll maybe do is slap a 45 minutes song in the stereo and let it stomp along, and run and see Mr. Bookish and be cutting edge and very avant garde (who plays 45 minutes songs?? hey, some progressive techno djs and James Lavelle actually do!) at the same time or maybe not, because we are hard working boys, why play a 45 minutes krautsong when we could be treating our customers to 45 1 minute nowave ones?? Depth, breadth, what? Hey, breath, ah, with good and eclectic taste you can have it all…

Anyway, I’m ranting, thing is I really want to see this Simon Bookish person because I don’t know much about him besides his amazing name and this ‘edit’… what he’s done with ‘Michael’, by the (relatively fairly) hyped up Franz Ferdinand is genius: he has peeled away all the boring faux-new-wave guitars that marred the original and replaced them with a razor wire bass and a chrome beat that goes from lofi post punk electroracket to gabba hey jump along with a twist of the best oiled hips in the dancefloor (knuckles in the mixing deck).

He has freed Michael from the mainstream rock production straightjacket in which he was trapped and Michael has escaped, running away from the dull boring plastic radio-station NME sponsored events, he has gone where he belongs, a neonlit messy dark club full of beautiful dancing boys, he has jumped the queue and walked through the door, Michael, a leatherclad psycho gay stalker, chasing, shrieking for… Michael? I get confused, but isn’t that what clubs are for? Whoever he is he does it all with style, and for all his deranged screaming he sounds the way Jarvis Cocker looks (or used to look) onstage, sex, perversion, glamour and sweat that smells like perfume because that’s what class is about after all, looking your best when you are behaving your worst.

So yes, the reason I want to find out more about Simon Bookish is he has grabbed this Michael by the hand, whispered something in his hear and taken him cruising underground. Maybe he’ll do the same with me, it sounds exciting!

BUY Simon Bookish

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