Play For Today: Land of Green Ginger (1973)

 

On this day . . .

They all add up.

18/50

The Storytellers One by Roger Mansfield (Schofield & Sims Ltd, Huddersfield 1971)

 

Maybe he wasn’t joking, Ernie thought. Bob was clever with hands and brain, the stop-gap of the shop with micrometer and centre-lathe, a toolmaker who could turn off a candlestick or fag-lighter as soon as look at you. ‘Do you mean it about a .303?’

Bob pulled into a lay-by and got out. ‘Keep clear of the headlights,’ he said, ‘but catch this.’ Ernie caught it, pushed forward the safety catch, the magazine resting in the net of his fingers. ‘God Almighty! Anything up the spout?’

‘I’ve a clip in my pocket. Strictly for rabbits’—Bob smiled, taking it back.

‘A waste,’ Ernie said. ‘The twelve-bore would do. Mixer-matosis has killed ’em all off, anyway.’

They drove on. ‘Had it since I left the army,’ Bob told him. ‘The stores was in a chronic state in Germany at the end of the war. Found myself with two, so kept one. I have a pot-shot with it now and again. I enjoy hunting—for a bit of recreation.’

Ernie laughed, wildly and uncontrolled, jerking excited shouts into the air as if trying to throw something out of his mouth, holding his stomach to stop himself doubling up, wearing down the shock of what a free-lance .303 meant. He put his arm around Bob’s shoulder by way of congratulation: ‘You’d better not let many people know about it, or the coppers’ll get on to you.'

‘Don’t worry. If ever they search, it’s a souvenir. I’d get rid of the bolt, and turn another off on the lathe when I needed it.’ ‘Marvellous,’ Ernie said. ‘A .303! Just the thing to have in case of a revolution. I hope I can get my hands on one when the trouble starts.’

Bob was sardonic: ‘You and your revolution! There wain’t be one in our lifetimes, I can tell you that.’ Ernie had talked revolution to him for months, had argued with fiery puritanical force, guiding Bob’s opinion from voting Labour to a head-nodding acceptance of rough and ready Communism. ‘I can’t see why you think there’ll be a revolution though.’

‘I’ve told you though,' Ernie said loudly. 'There’s got to be something. I feel it. We work in a factory, don’t we? Well, we’re the backbone of the country, but you see, Bob, there’s too many people on our backs. And it’s about time they was slung off. The last strike we had a bloke in a pub said to me: ‘Why are you fellows allus on strike?’ And I said to him: ‘What sort o’ work do you do ?’ And he said: ‘I’m a travelling salesman.’ So I said, ready to smash 'im: 'Well, the reason I come out on strike is because 1 want to get bastards like yo’ off my back.’ That shut ’im up. He just crawled back into his sherry.’

(From 'The Other John Peel' by Alan Sillitoe.)

Hiding on my phone

Just get it sorted.

17/50

The Shoe by Gordon Legge (Polygon 1989)

 

One

‘Buy a couple of fags, mister?’

The enquiring youth wore Wrangler jeans and a Wrangler jacket. The jacket sadly failed to reach his wrists. His T-shirt read AC/DC. You could smell the shampoo and talc, see the shiny hair and smart trainers but he was still a Heavy Metal fan; he’d rather have been scruffy. He had acne. Bad acne.

‘Don’t bother. It’s okay,' said Archie, declining the offer of 16p as he handed the youth two Benson and Hedges.

‘Save your money and buy some cream,’ scorned The Mental Kid.

‘Thanks,’ said the Heavy Metal fan, embarrassed by The Kid’s remark. He lit the cigarettes using a disposable green lighter and returned to his two friends in the next carriage, handing one of the cigarettes to the smaller of the two, who in turn nodded and smiled appreciatively at Archie.

‘Heavy Metal,’ mused The Kid, ‘it’s okay if you don’t have a brain, I suppose.’

Archie smiled at The Kid’s smug disdain while wondering if it was worth getting upset at being called ‘mister'. The previous Friday, a door-to-door salesman had asked if his wife was in. Archie had blushed and said ‘No’. They never asked that. It was always 'Is your mother in, son?’ And now a fat, ugly (Archie had decided to get upset) Heavy Metal fan called him ‘mister. Twenyy-four next month. Older than Johnny Marr and Pat Nevin.

‘Who was playing in Edinburgh tonight, anyway?' asked Mental, three months Archie’s junior.

Archie shrugged a don’t know don’t care whilst wondering how old The Kid looked. Pretty rather than handsome, punky rather than cool; the triumph of content over style. The Kid wore a black Royal Navy raincoat, Levi’s slit at the right knee, black Doc Marten shoes and a Celtic scarf, which until a couple of years ago he had worn with the regularity of a birthmark; now he only wore it for the Hun games and when it was cold. After every Celtic defeat he would begin the post-mortem with the words, ‘What a nightmare, I was going mental!' The Kid’s concession to ageing was an increased dependency on cliché. But he was still too lean and gorgeous to be addressed as an adult. The Kid leaned forward, resting his elbow's on his knees while tapping his fingers in accompaniment to the noise of the train. Bored out of his skull, like.

‘What time is it?’ he asked.

‘11.18.'

‘Okay. So we get food and drink, go to the Apollo, watch the fights, more food and drink then home.' Mental related the forthcoming events as if he were a hesitant bank robber. Mental didn’t like Glasgow and he didn’t like staying up all night. Were he a bird, he would have chosen to be a budgie. ‘If the Hun had brought his van we wouldn't have had all this hassle.’ The Kid referred to the sleeping hulk across the hallway.

Big Davie looked married (within the year it was expected he would be) and he looked twenty-four (which he was); a ‘mister’. Big Davie wore an old man’s bunnet (10p from a jumble sale), a quilted blue jerkin, brand new Levi’s and brand new Sambas. Solid rather than fat, a team man rather than an individual. The Daihatsu van remained at home so that Davie could have a drink on his night out. He couldn’t be arsed driving to Glasgow, anyway.

‘Work does that to you,' said Mental pointing a derisory finger at the sleeper. ‘Fat bastard!' shouted The Kid, hoping, but failing, to wake Davie.

Work was laying insulation for the council. Ten weeks into a six-month job, Davie hated it, but needed the money. He shared a private flat with his fiancee, Terasa.

Mental had never worked in his life. After school he attended college for three years, switching courses continually until one day he had the flu and never went back. The Protestant work ethic was anathema to him.

Archie left school at eighteen with three Highers: English, Modern Studies and a crash course History. His father was disappointed with Archie staying on at school. ‘Get a trade, an apprenticeship. You'll always have it to fall back on.’ Archie asked what the difference between a twenty-year-old tradesman and a fifty-year-old tradesman was. An argument ensued. Arguments never seemed to resolve anything, never a means to an end. Just an outburst of frustration. The father thought in terms of the home rather than holidays, relatives rather than friends, and work rather than play. Archie didn’t know what he wanted, but when Morrissey sang about never having had a job because he was too shy, Archie understood, while his father would never know or admit to knowing.

For Archie, work had been a petrol pump attendant, a double-glazing salesman and a brickie’s labourer. He had been unemployed for three years. The work provided fond memories and a few anecdotes but at the time it all seemed embarrassment and confrontation. He didn’t know' if he would ever work again; he supposed he would.

Unhappy-Go-Lucky by Ian Pattison (Tindal Street Press 2013)

 

When people die, their memories die with them. But their memories are not their exclusive domain, encompassing as they must, the lives of others. Contained within our memorabilia, other people walk and speak, inhabiting our dreams and anecdotes. The only person one never sees in a memory is one’s self, since we are otherwise engaged, crouched behind our mental camera. Memories, therefore, are not only a personal but a social history. One of the things Vaughan had said to me that day on Byres Road was: ‘I wish I’d got it all down before she died.’ He was talking about his own mother. I’d heard that same utterance several times from different people. But why didn’t anyone ever take their own advice? The reason, in my case, was simple: who the hell ever listens to their mother? Like a Facebook home page, they talk in an ever-flowing, unedited stream of trivia, gossip, local news, repetition, received opinion, stale myth, whimsy and spite. To listen out for items of true interest amid the babble is to risk turning oneself into a crazed prospector panning for decades through murky silt in the hope of turning over a golden nugget or two.

I tried though.

I found out that in Tradeston Church, Kathleen Cairns had married Ivan Moss. The bride wore a white dress with matching white skin, patent black shoes and a discreetly visible foetus. Father looked dashing in his naval uniform with its braided cuffs and faint reek of engine oil. Father’s brother Rolf was granted shore leave to attend as best man. Father was overjoyed at the prospect of fatherhood.

'Are you sure it’s mine?’

‘Of course it’s yours,’ protested Mother. ‘Who else’s would it be?’

‘I was away for months, anything could’ve happened.’

‘That cuts both ways – do you want to swap separation stories?'

Father demurred. Though back on dry land, my guess was that he would have felt himself all at sea – things were changing too quickly, too decisively, for him to keep a telling grip on life’s rudder.

Mother was close to tears. Father tried to put her at her ease, with silken words.

‘If it’s backward, we can always bung it into an orphanage.’

Mother grew alarmed. ‘Why would it be backward?’

‘It’s a precaution. A first child’s either the pick of the bunch or the worst.’

‘You’re a middle child,’ observed Mother.

‘I know,’ mused Father, darkly.

Giro City (1982)

 

Freaks and Geeks (1999)

 

Veep (2019)

 

Butterfly Kiss (1995).

 

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

 

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013)

 

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver (Vintage Contemporaries 1976)

 

The boy rocked from one foot to the other and looked at his father, and then he dashed into the house and began calling, “Mom! Mom!”

He sat on the porch and leaned against the garage wall and stretched his legs. The sweat had dried on his forehead. He felt clammy under his clothes.

He had once seen his father—a pale, slow-talking man with slumped shoulders—in something like this. It was a bad one, and both men had been hurt. It had happened in a café. The other man was a farmhand. Hamilton had loved his father and could recall many things about him. But now he recalled his father’s one fistfight as if it were all there was to the man.

(from “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes”)

Girls (2012)

 

Play for Today: The Reporters (1972)

 

Play for Today: One Bummer News Day (1978)

 

Pope-tastic

Brilliant last line. Pure quality. Reminds me that I need to dig out his autobiography. I dipped into it a couple of years ago. I should have stuck around.

The clip was found on Twitter but the bloke who posted it is notorious for posting other people's stuff without proper credit, so I thought I'd just bypass him and find the clip on YouTube.

Psychocandy by Paula Mejia (Bloomsbury Academic 2016)

 

The pink-and-black skid mark Psychocandy left on culture is partially due to how utterly extreme this pop record sounds, from how it resonates with the body (and potentially shatters eardrums), to the dualities it forged into one album. It is at once the manic and the depressive, the sun covering the shadows, the life that distracts from the inevitability of death, the noise crashed against lilting pop: In other words, the psycho and the candy. Elements that shouldn’t work together somehow do on Psychocandy. “If Nancy Sinatra had Einsturzende Neubaten as a backing band, that’s how we wanted to sound,” Jim Reid recalled thirty years later. “We wanted to fuck with the genres.”

And they did. Dense clouds of psychedelia and drone, pummeling white noise, sugar-drenched pop harmonies, skittering proto-punk, galloping percussion, and the melodrama of Motown converge in Psychocandy, a cocktail of noise that shouldn’t even be palatable to our ears. It’s more than palatable, however. It’s desirable. One might say just like honey.

"Echoes down my track . . . "

 

16/50

"I'm going to hum this tune forever . . ."

 

15/50

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

 

I Get Knocked Down Trailer

This trailer has been sitting in my drafts since 5/27/21 7:17 AM. Did this documentary ever get released? I think I need to hunt it down.

Play for Today: The Sin Bin (1981)