My Rubber Ring

There’s a club if you’d like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you. So you go, but the music’s great, and the dancing’s great, and you go home and you smile and you go to bed.

In oxford there is 1 such club, and every other wednesday there’s an 80s night. This night is called Burning Down The House, and I love it. I love it so much, that the girls and guys who run it noticed. I love it SO MUCH, that they’ve asked me to help run it next year when some of them are graduating or taking a year abroad. They all share the various duties (as will I) including DJ-ing, Promoting, and collecting cash on the door. There’s 5 people running it now, it takes 1 person to do either of the jobs on the night, leaving 3 to dance about or chat when they’re not on duty. In other words, for one wednesday night every 2 weeks, they’re living the dream. And next year, thanks solely to my undying enthusiasm for 80s music, I too get to live the dream. I’m over the moon.

I’ll leave you with the first track I requested from BDTH, a request that they obliged, and have played every time without fail since. Yay.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMY4W0l4peY

I’m sat here, in total darkness (save for the light from my phone as I type), listening to Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me in its entirety, and I’m having a lovely Monday night in. I love The Cure.

I am a huge fan of cover versions. Whether or not they’re better than the original, and they rarely are, I really enjoy that the band or artist in question is acknowledging their influences with the sincerest form of flattery. For a long time now I’ve said that you can always judge a band by their covers (see what I did there?).

There are a few instances in which this is so true, that far and away my favourite track from an artist is a cover. A good example of this is The Slits’ version of I Heard it Through The Grapevine. The album on which it appears, Cut which was released in 1979, is full of excellent trackss. Instant Hit, Love und Romance (not to mention Liebe and Romanze, the slow version) and the slightly more famous track Typical Girls. While I do love these tracks and the others on the album, Grapevine is just so great. Just a little faster the original, the baseline really lends itself to jungly dub aesthetic of The Slits, and Ari Up (The coolest woman ever to have lived) really gives the sense that she just fucking loves the song.

Sometimes a cover seems so removed in Genre from the band performing it that you get to hear a side of the band you’d never have thought of. Nirvana’s covers of Vaselines tracks Molly’s Lips & Jesus Don’t Want Me For A Sunbeam (a rereleased pastiche of a children’s hymn Jesus Wants For A Sunbeam) would probably seem, to someone who’d only heard their hits, to be totally removed from their overall aesthetic. Despite this, these little quirky tracks are often absolute gems.

Covers are great, I love covers.

Covers.

Tonight I was bored. To remedy this I decided to buy 2 bottles of wine. I drank them in about 45 minutes, sat down in front of my computer and hit record on iMovie (with a view to uploading it here). What I recorded was 2 minutes of me dancing bizarrely, sat down, listening to The Smiths, and about an hour of me fast asleep in my chair. I’m now hungry, headachey, and drunk. Don’t try this at home kids.

is the coolest lady