TAARABT'S TOO GOOD FOR YOU - QPR PROMOTION SONG

This was made by the staff at Balcony Shirts, who downed their t-shirt making tools to produce a tribute to QPR’s promotion to the Premier League. Football songs are almost exclusively rubbish, especially if not for your favoured team, but not many sound like The Band and Teenage Fanclub huddled around a barbecue on Shepherd’s Bush Green. I promise this’ll be the last football related post for a very long time, so kindly allow this indulgence. Any involvement by the Raison family is entirely coincidental.

MONKEY PICKS DELIVERY SERVICE

Been suffering from laptop trauma this week, hence the lack of posts but I've now added a box on the left hand side of this page where readers can type their email address and receive all new posts directly to their inbox.

So, if you're desperate to know when a barman who served Jack Kerouac publishes his memoirs; it's the birthday of one of The Temptations; or that I've found a 1991 YouTube clip of Birdland at the Windsor Old Trout - sign up now.

THE DAMNED - "LOVE SONG" (1979)

It's 1979 and The Damned are let loose on German TV with their new guitarist "Idiot Arsehole". It can only go one way...

QUEEN'S PARK RANGERS - CHAMPIONS

With a game to spare, Queen's Park Rangers this afternoon won the Championship. The last time I witnessed this was in 1983 so I am very excited but not quite as excited as Patrick Agyemang (centre) appears in this photo by taken by defender Peter Ramage.

LOOKING FOR A FOX

The issue of rampaging urban foxes causing death and destruction around here in Hackney was big news last year after nine month old twins were attacked in their cots. The media couldn’t get enough of the story with folk like Ali Bradwell, a victim of a fox attack, stepping forward to dramatically declare "Today rather like hoodies they hang around in groups of four to six on street corners." Smoking crack. Pleas for Londoners not to feed the foxes appear to have fallen on deaf ears judging by this monster I spotted on Waterloo Bridge yesterday.

Click here for Clarence Carter's 1968 thumper for Atlantic Records, “Looking For A Fox”.

THE FLIPSIDE PRESENT: DUFFER (1971)

I’d religiously bought all the BFI/Flipside series of weird and wonderful British films from the 60s and early 70s but stopped with the all-too-familiar Bronco Bullfrog and Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush, which also altered the packaging and screwed the symmetry of the DVD shelf. All that is now forgiven thanks to Duffer, number 15 in the series and one of the best. Wonderful wouldn’t be the right word but weird most certainly is.

The title character (played by young Martin Freeman lookalike Kit Gleave) is a sensitive youth who divides his time between the dominating Louis Jack, who in his grubby hovel tortures him, buggers him, stars him in dodgy home made films, sticks worms over him and even attempts to get him pregnant; and a cuddly prostitute, Your Gracie, who offers him candlelit bangers and mash and warm protection in her flouncy sheets and jelly breasts. The parent-less Duffer narrates the film throughout and the relationship with his older companions is, as he says, “one for you with your psychology books”. Of Your Gracie he unconvincing offers “My mother and I never had sex together, it never entered our heads” and whilst Louis Jack performs one disturbing routine after another on Duffer he doesn't leave him. “He needed me. I knew it was important to have human sympathy for other people. I had to let him do what he liked to me because it gave him so much pleasure. Who was I to deny him his little pleasures?”

Duffer knows he can’t be pregnant yet his stomach swells (possibly down to being force fed endless jars of apricots). When the “birth” turns out to be a phantom pregnancy, events spiral out of control as a disturbed and confused Duffer struggles to separate fact from fiction, seeking refuge by Hammersmith Bridge where “Louis Jack was a dream, not a reality at all”.

Duffer was made by directors Joseph Despins and William Dumaresq for only £2,500 and shot to a Galt MacDermot (Hair) piano accompaniment in grainy black and white throughout crumbling West London streets inhabited by shady stalking characters and feuding couples. It’s not comfortable viewing but totally absorbing and unlike anything else I’ve seen. Many period details stick out: the deliberate placing of a box of Omo washing powder in Louis Jack’s flat gave me a childish titter; as did the billboard poster “Talk Him In To A New Gas Cooker”; whilst I’d completely forgotten about open air urinals at the side of roads.

The set includes another Despins/Dumaresq film, The Moon Over The Alley (1975), which far from being a tacked on “extra” is worthy of its own billing. Centered around the lives of the multicultural residents in a Notting Hill boarding house it looks and feels like a kitchen sink drama from ten years earlier, albeit one where the characters occasionally sing their stories. That sounds like a terrible concept but mercifully doesn’t detract too much from a warm yet ultimately depressing tale.

Duffer/The Moon Over The Alley is released as a combined DVD/Blu-Ray set by BFI/Flipside.

APRIL PLAYLIST

1. Carl Perkins – “Put Your Cat Clothes On” (1957)
Cos yer gonna need something to go with those blue suede shoes.

2. Jerry Butler – “Giving Up On Love” (1964)
When The Iceman jumped from The Impressions he created a wonderful two-for-the-price-of-one deal with both acts lavishing us with treasures. This stunning ballad will stop you in your tracks, especially when Jerry delivers the line “I’m giving up on love, before love gives up on me”. Listen out also for the “My Lovely Horse” sax solo.

3. The Granville Williams Orchestra – “Honky Tonk Ska” (1965)
The title only tells half the story. Jazz and soul tell the other half. Works though.

4. Manfred Mann – “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” (1965)
Years before anyone got to hear Dylan’s original the Manfreds slayed it with this high speed version.

5. Nina Simone – “Don’t You Pay Them No Mind” (1967)
From her modestly titled High Priestess of Soul LP. It sacrilege in some circles but her warbling style often grates with me, but I’ll give her this one.

6. Swamp Dogg – “Total Destruction To Your Mind” (1970)
Jerry Williams is best known in northern soul circles for his crusty 1966 classic “If You Ask Me” yet when he reinvented himself in 1970 as a giant rat riding Swamp Dogg he came up with something altogether more interesting. Swamp’s first LP runs through seriously good southern soul which belies his nutty persona, and lowdown psychedelic funk like this title track.

7. Link Wray – “Fire and Brimstone” (1971)
Sanctified country soul isn’t what Wray is best known for, but it’s what he delivers throughout his terrific eponymous ’71 album recorded in a chicken shack on his farm. If you ever end up round Bobby Gillespie’s gaff after a night on the razz, I’ll bet you’ll find him sticking this on and doing his demented pterodactyl dance.

8. Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers – “Born To Lose” (1977)
Remember Vaughan Toulouse from Department S? Try listening to this without singing “Vaughan Toulouse, Baby I’m Vaughan Toulouse” on the chorus.

9. Senseless Things – “Too Much Kissing” (1989)
During the great indie long-sleeved t-shirt wars of the late 80s/early 90s the Senseless Things’ own Pop Kid creation - a star shaped mod target – was, relatively speaking, a design classic. They were at their best as a full throttle bash-bash-bash live act but had a few memorable tunes as “Too Much Kissing” shows.

10. Cat’s Eyes – “I Knew It Was Over” (2011)
Mesmerizing.
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