There are times in life when we stumble unwittingly into awkward conversation with those with whom we should never have made eye contact. We’ve all been there: cornered by a creepy uncle with clammy hands at a family wedding; harangued by a wily tramp angling for pennies; aurally assaulted by terrifyingly radiant graduates in waterproof jackets trying to get you to send £400 a month to save the universe, man.
When it happens to ourselves it can be irritating, frustrating, claustrophobic and intense. You try your utmost to retain a sense of decorum: have patience, be civil, nod at the right moments, avoid causing offence. Mitigating the pain of these occasions is an art which can be developed and honed over time.
However, when we sense that someone else has been ensnared by unenviable company, all we can do is sit back, count our blessings and enjoy the unfurling episode…
May 2011
8 posts
April 2011
15 posts
The follow-up to their first LP is out now. It’s called Dye It Blonde and has been given a satisfying 4/5 by the Guardian.
Frankie and the Heartstrings are a band from Sunderland who ply their trade in jangly, upbeat numbers, with the occasional dalliance into songs with a slightly rougher edge. Their singer, Frankie (no surprises there, then), enunciates his words in a thickly coated Wearside accent. The band’s songs endure a surfeit of gibberish yet melodic ‘wo-oh-ohs’. Before setting down to write this review, I consciously sought not to draw the obvious comparison between Frankie’s band and the Futureheads. Alack.
Mapping the relative demise of the Futureheads – which culminated in their being dropped by their label and having to set up their own – it is curious to consider the way that Frankie and the Heartstrings have emerged with what is essentially the same musical template. The band have picked up a number of cohorts as they’ve entered the mainstream, not least in the way of 6Music’s Steve Lamacq, and have benefited from the extended airtime afforded to the singles ‘Hunger’ and ‘Ungrateful’. It is clear from their performance that these two songs easily remain their best: they are infectious, colourful, playful and positively memorable.
However, the rest of the set falls disappointingly short of the mark, especially for a band whose recently released debut album was produced by Glasgow’s laudable patron saint of post-punk, Edwyn Collins. The lyrics are, for the most part, rhyme-heavy, and their inherent gaiety soon mutates and becomes nauseatingly sugary. ‘Tender’ is a ham-fisted attempt at something remotely intelligent. Rather than draw on F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night, it seems to scribble on the text in crayon (‘I’ll read you Tender is the Night / Because I like it by candelight’), before drowning it in a pool of niggling guitar notes. Sadly, the performance seems stagnated; the slower numbers fail to captivate and the quicker, louder ones fail to move out of third gear.
Visually, meanwhile, the band’s members don’t hold together. Throughout the set, Frankie tries his very Sunderland best to invigorate the crowd through (very good) Morrissey impersonations – arms all flailing, lips a-pouting, feet a-scuffling – while the seemingly bored Heartstrings play with the vigour and enthusiasm of an anxious, perhaps Heart-broken, string of kittens. More to this, it would appear the band have all just met at a ‘favourite band’ fancy dress party: the bassist has come as the indiscriminate early-90s Britpop throwback, beavering away in a heavy parka; the second guitarist dons a patterned tank top that might as well have ‘Mumford and Sons’ woven into it – and lone behold, is that Alex Kapronos on the keyboards over there, replete with lovely haircut and skinny jeans/fitted blazer combo?
I’m sorry, Frankie; this time your strings just weren’t quite attuned to the beat of my heart.
As the dawn cracks and breaks its back,
Curtains twitch and the moon starts to fade:
The world yields to the morning sun.
Gears click into motion:
Cogs turn and ratchets scratch;
Rivets fasten and clocks fashion
The course of the Everyday.
And as I nestle in the contours of your body,
I know: it would be good to say, arm in arm,
Nothing else matters; no one else cares.
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.” —Edward Thomas, ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)’
It happened at once -
Time unravelled itself in a fleeting second
Like it did for the women when the rock had rolled away.
Life was laid bare.
The back door open, the garden alive,
I took to my seat, and keenly felt
The fall of leaves, twigs and guano,
The tree’s outer reaches wobbling to and fro.
In the glimmering yawn of the sun I spied it:
Flapping periliously, trying to grip and grapple
On something more stable. Its flap and fumble
Revealed the underwing: gleaming electric blue;
Specks of familial black and white.
And then it settled in its own red-brown tinge.
The tremors of its call did not fall my way;
It took up flight and made no hint
Of its coming again.
Maybe I’ll attach bells to the bark
And watch it move in time to Sunday’s chimes.
If it ever comes back again.
We cycled through the crisp summer night
Trying to forget events in town.
You rode with me in tow;
You rode out of town and over a plastic cup,
And I did too.
We crossed the city’s river:
Evening unfurled; two birds flew abreast;
The sun winced and the sky was left blotted -
Tie-dyed shades of fading day.
We pushed ourselves away
From what had been in town.
Our pedals turned and our hands clenched grips.
Buttocks saddled we rode on -
No taste of wine or cigarettes -
Making traceless tracks away from it all,
With the listless flap of wings above us,
And the stirring of foxes over some wall.
12.4.11
The sun shone
Through the naked branches
In the city backwaters.
I was walking, again
In a polo shirt and jeans
And forgot it was February.
The gentle breeze
Told me it was Sunday;
Told me where to go.
The tea-time sun threw flashes of gilded light
Across the metal rails.
The magnolia petals peeled back
Their own delicate mass,
Awoken with sudden surprise;
Frogspawn twitched in back-door ponds.
Childish wails cascaded over garden walls.
The month came of age, down in St. Paul’s.
April 2011
March 2011
5 posts
It was bright and calm:
Mid-morning, we sat upstairs with coffee and bacon.
Below us cyclists threaded through traffic;
Pigeons pecked at the path;
Couples passed and laughed.
And I couldn’t hear a thing.
The lines of your face.
That thing you do with your lips.
The smell of chlorine in your hair:
I’m not going
Anywhere.
27.3.11
The ubiquitous, nigh-unrelenting nature of today’s media doubtless has its merits; it feeds - even fuels - our epistemic desire for constant, up-to-the-minute updates. So much so, perhaps, that our thirst is symptomatic of the resources we have at our fingertips: portable internet devices are increasingly rendering newspapers as antiquated as papyrus leaves.
Reportage is essential. Editorials step back and offer (often insightful) perspective. Video allows for graphic portrayals; ‘realisations’ of events relayed to passive recipients.
But at what point does media coverage become invasive, clinical or insensitive? And to what extent is this related to the rate at which news output is produced, broadcast and ultimately turned over?
On Friday a tsunami hit Japan. On Monday evening, bbc 1 aired a ‘special edition’ epsiode of a relatively bouncy, informal and informative show called ‘Bang Goes the Theory’. Its subject was the tsunami that hit Japan on Friday.
Cue the opening credit scene, the ‘attention grabber’ as you can imagine it being referred to on a ‘how to’ guide for would-be producers. A chirpy female voice recounts, in breathy sentences packed with inane adjectives, the events of the past few days. Footage ensues. And then we are informed of what we’ll learn over the course of the next 30 minutes. We’ll visit a workshop where two pieces of wood held in a vice will gradually be forced together until once suddenly juts above the other, thereby explaining how the tsunami occurred. That chirpy voice will return alongside two casual would-be science types garbed in check/denim shirts (incorrigibly interchangable) and chinos, talking about the devastation in Japan. Talk, that is, over the drone of echoey voices beneath them. They are hanging out on a mezzanine in a recently-opened, chrome-laden, interactive science/learning centre for kids, of course.
Only, the show isn’t pitched at kids. It feels so far removed and so very hypothetical. Nothing they say seems to be remotely related to real life. It fails to resonate and it seems incredulous. Their words are light, frivolous, buoyant; they seem to float away like helium balloons.
How soon is now? Too soon, perhaps.
