#211: Cool World

You want to know something? I don’t want your frigging ketchup. I don’t want your bloody catsup either – sounds like cat spew to me. I want chips, not fries. And by chips I mean proper chips, big chunks of spud, not poe-tay-toe, but bloody spuds, peeled by some fat old bird, chucked into a bucket of water, left there for a few hours, then deep fried into greasy goodness and wrapped in butchers paper from a proper woggo chip shop. Limp, warm fries in a little cardboard container? I think not. I want chips that scald the mouth when you think of them drowning in vinegar and dancing with more salt than the Atlantic. Chips that withstand a good soaking from a bottle of sauce, not a plastic squeeze thing, but a glass bottle that you have to stick a knife into to clear the dried residue from the previous times and that you have pound on the bottom of like it owes you $20 and has turned up drunk at a party.

I’m sick and tired of the gradual taking over of my condiments by rampant seppos, aided by utter morons like Dick Wilkins who now insists on calling mothers ‘moms’. Yep, to Dick, and let’s be blunt here, he is a New Zealander so we can forgive him nothing, his mum isn’t his mum anymore, his mum is his mom. The bloody wanker. Whoops, sorry Dick, this you might understand, you’re a freaking jerk off. And no Dick, you’re not an asshole, you’re an arsehole. Look that word up.

The Invasion Of The Brand Names has come with a subtle take over. No Hun blitzkrieg here with a pack of beret wearing surrender monkeys rolling over like a cat wanting as belly rub, this is more like a nation slowly buying everything up and re-branding everything so that they don’t have to pay to over-dub shitty television commercials. Slowly but surely conquering the nation by stealth. I used to love Lemon Spread, now it’s called Lemon Butter. Peanut Paste? No longer. It’s Peanut Butter. I overheard some idiot the other day telling another equally as brain dead moron talking about how they love jelly with their peanut butter.

Jelly? JELLY?? It’s fucking JAM you tool! Jelly is what comes out of a little rectangle Cottee’s box, lovely to eat even in its raw, granulated form. Jelly goes well with cream, diced fruit, kinky sex and ice cream, not peanut paste. I can’t think of anything more horrid than mixing an orange jelly with peanut paste. What’s next? Vegemite and custard? Jam is what the little old lady next door used to make with the apricots that she’d steal from our tree back in the 1800s.

I’m now waiting for delis to be re-branded ‘drug stores’. Still, back where I grew up, in the bowels of Mordor, the local deli was something of a drug store as you could score anything this side of speed, and even that only had a three hour waiting time and a meeting that was usually arranged behind the bald headed barber’s store. And he had no bloody cigar holding wooden Indian out the front either. Jaysus.

I had a discussion the other day, via email, with an American pal of mine who asked why Huey Lewis had to cancel his tour here. I mentioned that there was a definite lack of ticket sales, but, interestingly enough, Tears For Fears and Spandau Ballet had sold out and Duran Duran were always a good seller. He wondered why we never took to the American side of things in the early ‘80s and instead went with the English New Romantic movement. I didn’t have the heart to say the simple thing – which is take a listen to something like Girls On Film or Gold or Pale Shelter and then listen to anything by Huey Lewis. If you need me to tell you the difference then you’ve already got cloth ears. And I like ole Huey, after all his band Clover played on the first Elvis Costello album. If only they’d remained in the UK.

Fuck me, even Bucks Fizz were better than most of the American stuff of the same time. Can you compare The Land Of Make Believe with Tired of Toeing The Line by Rocky Burnette? Well you can, but you’re a clown if you do. Here are five words for those who think that the best early ‘80s music came from America: Blue Rondo A La Turk. Americans had Bon Jovi, Winger, Warrant, Ratt, utter shit bands that played pop through amplifiers with meaningful lyrics like “You give love a band name”. We had Cold Chisel, Rose Tattoo and The Angels. They had pretenders, we had the real deal. They had Offspring and Green Day. We had Nick Cave and Tex Perkins. You’d not see Rob Younger or even Johnny Kannis singing something as vapid as that shithouse Green Day song – what is it? The Time Of Our Lives? Rob would have slashed his own throat two seconds before Klondike Masuak and Pip Hoyle beat him to death just for suggesting it. And those arseholes are considered to be punk? I know a poodle named George that’s more punk than any of Green Day or Offspring combined. Chrissie Amphlet could have easily beaten the shit out of anyone in the band Cinderella. If you want to compare differences then listen to We Are The World and Do They Know It’s Christmas. Even worse, try sitting through the utterly horrid Stars by Hear ‘N’ Aid and see how long it takes you to either scream in agony, realise that you’ve just wasted seven minutes of your life or discover that your ears are bleeding – what has been heard cannot be unheard. You got nothing I want, you got nothing I need.

So shove your fucking ketchup and catsup where the sun doesn’t shine. I want to smother my burnt chops and snags at a bbq with pure tomato sauce. Thicker than soup sauce. And possibly some Wostershire sauce, or hot sauce as we called it because I couldn’t pronounce Wostershire, let alone spell it. I want football, not gridiron. I want cricket, not baseball. And bash your basketball clean up your chute. Stick your rap music and the bullshit expressions that come with it. No, ‘Yo, mah nigga,’ for me, it’s more ‘Are we believing, black man Ray?’ Cram your cow tipping, junior college, Glee clubs, freshman and sophomore years, I want the Bureau and Only For Sheep. Put your Checker Cabs up your chocolate starfish, I want Taxi Mary. And the next person that walks up to me and says, “Yo, ‘sup dude?” is going to get a size 11 boot smack dab in the nuts. Not in the ‘cup’, but fair square in the ‘carrot and onions’. You understand that? Good.

Yes, yes, I could be wrong, why, why should I pretend? God only knows in the end.



Was there ever a better band?