Paul Hester 1959-2005
Not exactly cool for a British person of my age to admit to liking Crowded House, of course, but that's never stopped me before. One of the things that's always appealed to me about their later work is the undercurrent of sadness - even their most famous song, 'Weather With You' (which, admittedly, Hester didn't play on the hit version of AFAIK) uses its surface jollity to conceal a portrayal of crippling depression.
Today we learn that the man who in some ways summed up that whole side of the band - the clowning drummer who was driven to quit touring by the black dog - went for a walk in the park and never came home.
News.com.au pays him a nice tribute, as well as reminding us non-Australians what he'd been doing recently.
Terrible timing as well, not that there's ever a good time for this sort of thing, obviously. The Finn Brothers are back in the charts, and today they re-issue their album with a bonus DVD that includes a live version of 'Weather With You' featuring Hester.
Revolution in the Summertime?
Still difficult to know what's happening in Kyrgyzstan at the moment. Hard to tell even who's running the place now, or whether we'll get a positive outcome. Hard as it is not to enjoy the thought of Putin squirming, I always have reservations about violence of any kind. I've had a quick glance at the
BBC comments page and I have to confess a certian national pride that people from so far afield would even think to contact a British news organisation.
Of course, there's always one person (in this case, one Youri Lysogorov) who'll bleat that "The elections were as fair as it is possible in this part of the world. And I mean you cannot expect more democracy at the moment." I wonder whether he's the Yuri Lysogorov whom Google identifies as a member of the Kyrgyz government. Maybe it's a coincidence though; there seem to be enough people prepared to consider democracy as an optional extra for the former Soviet world.
Did I Really Hear That? II
It's always an odd experience waking up to the Today Programme, isn't it?
Yesterday I had to go onto the internet, because I couldn't quite believe that I'd heard them say the BBC were playing down reports about the Director General biting someone's arm. And yet, sure enough,
there it was. I suppose it would have been an even better story if he'd been bitten by the head of one of the departments that got shut down last week.
BTW, I suppose it's a sign of the times that Paula Abdul's motoring conviction is now listed as a "TV & Radio" story rather than a "Music" one.
New Random Single post
The Wild Things by Ben & Jason. The difficult part about writing these things is keeping my attention focussed and not listening to other stuff instead.
Radio Faynights
Ok, not exactly but we've set up an
online station at Launchcast. As far as possible, this is based on the music we actually own, not necessarily the stuff we recommend, though you may be pleased to know that they haven't got as many Shed Seven records as I. The bulk of it is in there, from the extremely cool records we never listen to right through to the deperately uncool ones I love. I've also attempted to take some account of both mine and Laura's opinions - although I haven't felt able to turn off any of the records we own, and even went so far as to get rid of a couple of them. Anybody want a vinyl copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road?
Unfortunately, if you're not a "premium user" (which we are; it's one of the things I do like about using BT as an ISP) then you'll have to sit through adverts which are every bit as good as offline radio ads, but with the added advantage that unless you live in the USA you couldn't buy most of the products even if you wanted to. The advantage of online radio is that there's a little time display, so you know exactly how long to switch your speakers off for.
It was an entertaining little exercise for me to rate all the tracks, and shut off all the people whose records we don't own, even if it was slightly painful to remind myself that there are so many frankly inexcusable gaps.
