vox

There are worse places in the world

After a comfortable but protracted journey I've arrived in Belize. And the place I've rented turned out to actually exist and not be some sort of elaborate scam so, you know, win. Plus it's awesome and even bigger than it looked in the photos. Then Brad turned up about half an hour after I got round to reading the mail he sent telling me he was coming.

Breakfast at the beach

Brad hacks at breakfast

And finally, some advice for us all

Solve the world's problems

90s Music Monday

Fine, I'll stick with Brit Pop if that's what you really want. What's that you say? You couldn't give two shits either way? Well, fine. I'll do it just to spite you instead then.

The ludicrous thing is that many of the bands - Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Radiohead, Lush, Suede, Powder, Ocean Colour Scene  - that were lumped into the Brit Pop were so completely disparate in musical style that grouping them together them was clearly an exercise in comparing apples to pineapples. I mean look at the list of bands mentioned on Wikipedia; it's probably the only ontological list in the world to classify Dodgy and The Divine Comedy together. Hell - many bands (Radiohead being perhaps the prime example here) changed their sounds so much between albums that even comparing themselves to earlier incarnations was meaningless. 

You might as well just have called the scene "Not American Grunge Bands" and been done with it.

I have nothing really particularly witty to say about Pulp or Jarvis Cocker unfortunately other than the rather obvious joke that Mr Cocker, certainly in the early days, seemed to be entirely constructed out of elbows. Oh, and that he did this rather marvelous thing in protest of Michael Jackson's rather ludicrous messianical performance at The Brit Awards

Jarvis Cocker Interrupts Michael Jackson's Earth Song 1996

So you'll just have to watch "Common People" instead 

Pulp -- Common People

I went to a party with a bunch of people from St Martin's College once. They were all twats. All of them. I'm not saying that everyone who goes to St Martin's is a twat. Just everyone I've ever met from there. 

Note that the video contains Sadie "I used to be married to Jude Law" Frost. That crowd (now called The Primose Hill Set or similar by the British media) used to drink at a pub called The Tup on Liverpool Road, just down from where my first job was and were regularly in there at the same time as us (not hard since, partly due to the fact that we used it as a meeting room, I was in there approximately 90% of my waking hours). They're all shorter in real life than you'd expect. And much less good looking. The same is true of Madonna to be fair. She has weird, old lady hands. Tru Fax!

Keep Being Awesome

90s Music Monday

So, last week I did Oasis which, as part of the natural order of things, basically forces me to do Blur this week.

The putative rivalry between the two bands reached its peak in 1995 when the media whipped up a frenzy when Blur's "Country House" and Oasis' "Roll With It" were released on the same day despite the fact that really the two bands weren't at all similar in style. But you know, anything for a good story. 

Blur won the battle, for what it's worth partly because their video had page 3 "stunna" Jo Guest and models Vanessa Upton and Sara Stockbridge in it as well as popular comedians Keith "My daughter's more famous than me now" Allen and Matt Lucas.

Anyway, I'm not going to talk about that - nor their oddly menacing breakout video for "There's no other way" which thrilled teenagers since it featured the actor who played Arthur Fowler from EastEnders and the actress who played Mrs Mclusky from Grange Hill. Which, for thems that don't know, are British TV programs concerned with unglamorous people which, as I understand it, are a totally alien concept in the US. 

Of course, I use the word "thrilled" here when what I mean is really "not thrilled in any way". More that odd frisson that one gets from seeing actors from beloved institutions in unusual roles. 

Anyway ... neither am I going to talk about the video for the single that really made them megastars (well, in the UK anyway) - "Park Life" which featured Phil Daniels from Quadrophenia. Nor am I going to talk about the disturbingly catchy "Girls and Boys" which announced their move away from their Madchester / baggy / shoegazing sound to a more  daring, disco tinged sound.

I'm going to talk about "Song 2".

I have to admit that I'm somewhat conflicted by this since, for a start, it's too obvious. Especially in the US it's the song that everybody knows is by Blur. It's used as the kind of odd pump up music for trailers and sporting events that sits at odds with Blur's image. Hell, the US military allegedly wanted to use it when unveiling the B2 Stealth Bomber. 

Secondly - it's not really representative of Blur's oeuvre in any way sense or form. 

However it is an awesome 2 minute pop song. If I was drunk and feeling ebullient I would say that it's almost the perfect slice of addictively catchy energetic rock and, under certain circumstances I might even go as far as to say that it was better in that regard than "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Maybe. 

Blur - Song 2

It's funny - I personally really love this video, mostly because being slammed against a carpetted wall like that looks like all kinds of fun but I have the feeling it could easily have ended up as being being a bit rubbish. It does look an awful lot like the video for "Popscene" though.

Stuck in the middle (with you)

I mentioned that I made a stuffed chicken dish last night and someone asked for the recipe. And I haven't Voxed about cooking for a while - mostly because I don't really seem to have done any.

This is a moderately time consuming dish - the actual steps aren't that long or complicated but there's cooking and resting times to consider so I think it took about an hour and a half in total (although I wasn't really hustling, more watching old episodes of the West Wing).

First off, I blitzed about a handful of shelled pistachios in the blender until they were coarsely chopped. I have wondered what they'd be like whole or halved - I think the texture contrast would  be really interesting. But this worked just fine and the texture was good so I'm not complaining. Then I mixed them in with about half a pound of sausage meat (mild italian for the Americans following along at home) and some finely chopped flat leaf parsley and let it all rest (since mixing up the sausage meat slightly cooks the fat and tissue in the sausage meat).

Meanwhile I got 4 sheets of baking foil and drizzled some olive oil on and then seasoned them fairly generously. Then I laid down 4 slices of prosciutto (parma ham or streaky bacon would work just as well) on each so that they were overlapping (tip: try and make the pieces lie the same way with the uneven edge of the next slice overlapping the solid edge of the previous slice) and set the sheets aside.

Then I took 4 large chicken breasts and cut them almost all the way through horizontally but length ways like a baguette and then took a cigar of the sausage and pistachio mix and laid it down the middle before folding the whole thing back up and laying it down - cut side facing the prosciutto. Then I rolled the foil up into a tube, making sure the ham was overlapping, and twisted the ends in opposite directions until it was a nice, tight wrap.

I poached the 4 parcels for about 20-25 minutes (it's quite forgiving) then removed them from the water and chilled them in the fridge (beware: putting hot things in the fridge raises the ambient temperature in there) for another 20-30 minutes.

Then I took each one, carefully unwrapped it and seared it off in a hot pan - rotating frequently until the ham was crispy and there was some nice colour on everything.

After that, I let them rest for 5 minutes and then sliced them thickly at an angle and they came out looking like this

Chicken stuffed with Sausage and Pistachio

 
The picture doesn't quite do it justice  - the stuffing had a really nice vibrant green to it.

I deglazed the pan with some port (marsala or sherry would probably also work), reduce it, added some of the poaching water and reduced again (chicken stock would probably have worked better).

This is the first time I've ever done it and it came out really well - the chicken was moist (although I think it could have benefited from maybe 5 minutes less poaching time - I missed the buzzer going by accident) and the stuffing and ham complemented the flavours perfectly. I'd like to play around with some variations - maybe throw in some finely diced dried apricots or try a version with walnut and celery stuffing and wrapped in turkey bacon for my Kosher friends. Feta and toasted pine nuts would probably work as well.

A single breast easily fed one hungry person - in fact with a more substantial side dish such as buttered noodles or mashed potato or polenta (I served them on a bed of sauteed mushrooms with spring green and avocado salad) one breast could do 2 people.

We washed it down with some excellent Piper Heidsiecke which I am delighted to report goes excellently. With anything, really.

Sage Wisdom For Life

"The main thing that keeps the gun away from your head is thirteen hundred bottles of whisky, eight hundred bottles of vodka. three hundred bottles of gin, two thousand bottles of rum, six cups of everclear and four hundred and twenty-two bottles of southern comfort during the course of a lifetime; but any more than that and you'll be considered an alcoholic."

90s Music Monday

Circa 1994 a magazine called Loaded ushered in a whole new era in British culture known, for want of a better word, as New Laddism.

Subtitled "For men who should know better" Loaded represented the antithesis of the Sensitive New Age Guy stereotype that was a dominant social attitude in the media at the time - it celebrated infamous rogues such as Oliver Reed, football, drinking and a general "having fun with your mates" air - a sort of GQ-esque lifestyle magazine for those without a 6 figure salary.

The first issue featured Gary Oldman on the cover

Loaded_#1

and in the first few issues featured genuinely excellent articles and interviews with the likes of Hunter S Thompson and a pre-megafame Tiger Woods although soon the covers began to almost exclusively feature under dressed starlets and low level female celebrities (when I last looked a few years back it had descended even further into a barely concealed soft-core porn mag but you'll have to trust me on the earlier years).

It was into this environment - and the post Cobain-suicide declining grunge musical landscape of the same time - that Oasis released "Definitely Maybe" - a swaggering, under-polished, unapologetic anthemic balls out rock album. They sounded like the best pub band you'd ever heard. Hell they looked like it too - I mean, sure Liam had a undeniable charisma but his brother sported a unibrow, badly fitting shirts and looked, to be honest, like he was holding a guitar he didn't know how to play.

For me, the video for "Supersonic" contains all the elements - starting with Liam's madchester swagger at the start with its distinctive outward turned toes, taking in the sheep skin coats, Noel's untucked Ben Sherman, Bonehead's receding hairline and the general sense that the entire band picked up their instruments about 3 weeks back and still find them slightly awkward to hold.

Oasis - Supersonic

But despite the fact, or maybe because of it, that its only got 3 chords, the simplest of progressions and nonsensical lyrics it's the kind of song you want to drink to and shout along with your mates. There's no pretensions, no side - it's all honesty and attitude.

Written, by all accounts, to fill a gap in a recording schedule:

"It was written and recorded in one night in Liverpool. We went into do a demo on "Bring It On Down" for McGee and a we couldn´t get it right.. and we had to have something, and i went into that room and wrote "Supersonic" in about half hour. It was never re-mixed either."  

the alka-seltzer loving Elsa is not about a girl fond of the old Bolivian Marching Powder, as one would suspect from the lyric "she sniffs it through a cane" but instead about a 9 stone flatulent Rottweiler in the studio at the time. And, if you believe Popbitch (and let's face it, who doesn't?) then the line "Can I ride with you in your BMW" refers to Smith's guitarist Johnny Marr giving Noel a lift in his car.

...

Oh dear, I think I may have just scraped the bottom of my pop trivia barrel.

But yes, the whole album was good and lo, scenes like this did happen all over middle-class surburban homes the land over

Kevin & Perry - Manchester

90s Music Monday

The "Help! Album" released in 1995 for The War Child foundation was a particularly stunning album. Not only was it recorded in one day (Monday 4th of September), mixed the next day and was in shops by the Saturday but it helped raise more than £1.25 million for the charity which, at the time, was dealing with 2 million families displaced by the fighting in Sarajevo.

Produced by Brian Eno, the track listing was a veritable who's who of prominent British (-ish, technically Neneh Cherry is Swedish) artists including the first recording by the Manic Street Preachers since the disappearance of Richey Edwards, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty - better known as the KLF - recording as One World Orchestra and a hauntingly spare version of "Ode To Billy Joe" by Sinead O'Connor.

Many of the tracks actually benefited from the short turn around time. As Eno put it

"You know what sounds so great about these tracks? They're all so fresh. I really hope it sets a precedent - that people will stop messing about in the studio for months on end, emerging with the sort of over-processed nonsense often presided over by the likes of me."

Not least of these was Suede's cover of Elvis Costello's "Shipbuilding"

Suede - Shipbuilding

which was itself originally written during the Falklands War in 1982 in response to the seeming contradiction that whilst the war bought prosperity back to the traditional shipbuilding areas like Merseyside, Tyneside and Belfast it was also these areas that traditionally provided many young men to join the military.

Anyway, great album if you can get hold of it and the official account of how it happened is also well worth a read.