Is desert ‘sound installation’ a step Toto far?

Sorry, just checking... where are we meant to be blessing the rain again..?

What was the most streamed song in 2017? Something by Ed Sheeran, maybe? Or Adele?

Nope. It wasn’t even a song from that year. It was quadruple platinum, soft-rock, 1982 epic “Africa” by Toto. Yes, the vintage track saw off all the newcomers a couple of years ago, continuing it’s relentless march through a rhyming desert landscape of baffling lyrics and impassioned vocal pleas. And repeated blessings of the rain.

Definitely in the ‘Marmite’ category (you either love it or hate it), the classic continues to make the headlines, and there’s nothing a hundred men or more could ever do to stop it.

Just two months ago, a DJ in Bristol went for the “ultimate guilty pleasure” track as his choice for a same-record-all-night charity gig. After five hours on loop, I bet the drums really were echoing that night.

Even the band’s Steve Lukather suggested in a Tweet that the Africa marathon “could be worse than waterboarding”, before pointing out to anyone who thinks they’ve heard the tune too many times, “You think YOU are sick of it?”

But that’s nothing compared to the song’s latest adventure – it’s going to be playing for the rest of eternity in a desert in (you’ve guessed it) Africa. The song with the catchy line “as sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti” will be on loop in a sound installation, somewhere in the Namib desert.

Fancy popping by for a listen when you’re passing? Good luck with that – the Namibian artist who has created the aural installation isn’t letting on where it is, and the Namib is 81,000 sq km of the sandy stuff, so don’t expect to stumble across it whilst out for a stroll.

With an MP3 player on loop built in, and powered by solar panels and rechargeable batteries, the timeless track is set to become just that... presuming it doesn’t get buried by wandering dunes. Should it manage to play for as long as the desert has existed, then you’ve got just 55 million years to track it down. Long forgotten words and ancient melodies, indeed.

So if you’re seeking to cure what’s deep inside and fancy trying to find the art installation and it’s eternal tune, catch the 12.30 flight, stop an old man along the way but hurry boy – it’s waiting there for you.

This post first appeared as my 'A wry look at the week' column, in The Mail, on Friday the 18th of January 2019. The version used on their website (yes, it reappeared online this week!) used the same title, and contained a fetching picture of the band.

I've been enjoying a bit of an 80s reminiscences thing recently, haven't I? The Die Hard column over Christmas, this, and I picked up a copy of the Tiger Annual from 1980 yesterday - my comic of choice as a kid, and featuring fictional F1 ace, Skid Solo. Hell, why not eh? This current point in time sucks, and getting older is rubbish...

(Tape Time this week: Cassette 23 - a heady mix of stuff from (surprise!) the early 80s recorded off Radio 210 and Radio 1, plus some 7" singles... including all 3 Star Sound outings, and ELO's "Twilight". Lovely. And terrible quality.)

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog