Bang your tin ear

I was thrilled to hear David Sylvian talking a little about his career and artistic process on a special feature for Mary Anne Hobnobs on BBC Radio Six Biscuits. Sylvian doesn't pop his head out much these days - certainly it's been many years since he last begged me to collaborate on a new piece. Disappointingly, he didn't say anything in the Hobnobs recording about how he writes his remarkable lyrics and what on earth they might mean. So I thought I'd take to the blogwaves to rectify that omission - or, at least, to share my beehive-style secrets for interpreting these dense, allusive texts.

Take Red Guitar, for example. This song is almost certainly not about a red guitar, or indeed any musical instrument of any (forbidden) colour. We learn that the titular red guitar is both "the devil in flesh" and "the iron in my soul". We also learn that the singer turns to the red guitar at times of despair and discombobulation. The common substance that figuratively unites the colour red, the devil and iron is surely blood. Therefore we can deduce that the lyric is a carefully coded admission of vampirism - perhaps even a celebration of this ultimately life-enhancing practice.

It's all there in the song - and you don't even need to play it backwards.

I will reveal much, much more about the hidden meanings of Sylvian's lyrics in my forthcoming book Quit Life: How Noo Romantic Art Rockers Japan Introduced A Generation To Stylish Nihilism. There's an especially convincing bit about Gentlemen Take Paracetamols. 

"At least she left you your records."

If we don’t rewrite reality soon, it’s going to get cancelled.

When exactly did reality jump the shark? It would be neat to say that from a global perspective the whole show went out the window when Donald Trump fulfilled the prediction of a Simpsons episode of 2000 when he became president – life following art and all that. But that won’t work because – fake news! – the Simpsons made no such prediction. Nevertheless, the orange dawn of the Trump White House is the mother of all watersheds.

Zooming down into the increasingly unrecognisable mini-savannah that used to Britain, it’s harder to pinpoint a similar era-defining moment. It wasn’t the moment the outies “won” the referendum, because at that point Nigel Farage was busily plotting the next stage of his campaign for the UK’s economic and cultural isolation on the basis that they’d lost. It might well have been the day David Davis and his crack team were photographed opposite their EU negotiating oppos with nothing on the glass tabletop to hide their shame. We all doubtless have our favourite memories of the moment when we heard ourselves saying out loud: Now it’s just got ridiculous. I’m not going to watch this rubbish ever again.

Some soaps follow threads that turn into nasty knots and the only way of avoiding cancellation is a desperate reinvention. Emmerdale famously did it by having an aeroplane plough into the village. Most of the alarmingly perfect characters in Dynasty survived a season-end hail of bullets supplied by “Moldavian” terrorists though it can’t have been a very relaxing vacation for the cast. And now that Dominic Raab has referred to changes in Brexit responsibility at the top of government as a “shifting of the Whitehall deckchairs”, it’s surely time for a major script conference. Iceberg ahead!

My guess is that we’re all living in somebody’s dream and, like with not-dead-after-all Bobby Ewing from off of Dallas off of the seventies, it’s time for Pam to wake up and smell the shower. Then we can all get back to worrying about whatever we used to worry about, when we had nothing to worry about.

Rare and protected: The Speculoos

As regular readers will know, I'm one of the world's foremost international biscuit photographers. I've just completed an assignment in Toulouse, France's fourth largest city. I managed to stalk this elusive biscuit and corner it on a table at the jardin des plantes (trans: garden of plants). The client was delighted with the image and told me to go ahead and eat the biscuit if I wanted. Needless to say, I won't be taking any more assignments from them.

That Would Be No -- Episode 357

Great Moments in Cinema: No. 1

George C Scott in The Hospital (1971)

Great British Landmarks: The Four Angels of the City

Leadenhall Market, London

Open: every day

Admission: free 

These charming medieval sculptures depict the traditional "four angels" of the City of London: Pestilence, Fraternity, Pavarotti and Libor. 

Notice also the battered representation of an olde-worlde speaker phone behind the two figures on the left. Legend has it that the angels received instructions via this device from the slightly sleazy pagan god "Charlie".