Skip to main content

Jeff who?

Image
By
For those of a certain age (better know as middle-aged and grumpy), the name Jeff Lynne conjours up certain, youthful memories of catchy tunes, brilliant pop sensibilities, a white bloke with an afro, sunglasses and some high-quality use of strings in a rock band (as opposed to modern acts palling up with a symphony orchestra and poncing about being pretensious on stage).

Ring a bell? No?

He was in The Idle Race. And The Move. He pretty much WAS The Electric Light Orchestra (who incidently are, in a movable event based around my mood swings, often my favourite band). He has produced records by The Beatles (yes, The Beatles!), Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, Regina Spektor, Dave Edmunds and a whole bunch of other folks and is soon to return with a new ELO album (bearing in mind he isn't exactly speedy at that process. Soon could be next decade.)

Oh, and he was a member of 80's supergroup The Travelling Wilburys. Except, according to some dingbat in The Westmorland Gazette, he wasn't. In reviewing a Tom Petty live collection, said dingbat (and I am being restrained here) decribed Petty as one quarter of the Travelling Wilburys, with Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Roy Orbison. Make that one fifth, you rampant idiot.

Why are people who clearly have ABSOLUTELY NO UNDERSTANDING OF MUSIC HISTORY AND CAN'T BE ARSED TO DO EVEN THE SLIGHTEST BIT OF RUDIMENTARY RESEARCH even allowed to have a job with a newspaper, let alone write about music itself?

Gah! I despair.

Jeff Lynne is a genius. Newspaper reviewers are ?*&£"&&*S

(By weird coincidence, this rant was composed to the tune of Orchestral Manouvres In The Dark's "Stand Above Me". Golly.)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Schaf Shuffle

By
The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...
Post a Comment
Read more

Making an exhibition of yourself

By
Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...
Post a Comment
Read more

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

By
We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...
Post a Comment
Read more