ENGINE BLOOD: Spanish GP

* Zzzzzz......   Zzzzzz......  Ehwah?  A Grand Prix, you say?  Oh, the SPANISH Grand Prix.  Wake me up when we get somewhere exciting.

 

* I noticed when I was looking at this blog on my gigantic Motorola mobile phone (apparently powered by Spectrum BASIC, such is its lethargy) that thanks to our recurring series, "Where Is Paul Di Resta From This Week?", the site looks like a celebration of Scottish independence, as the Saltire is proudly displayed on every Engine Blood entry so far.  With this in mind, and given how dreadful the last race was, we'll be critiquing the flag of the nation we've just visited from now on.

 

First up: Spain.

 

 

A classic of design, this; a simple "sandwich" of uncomplicated colours makes this a joy to behold.  But what's this?  Ah, a heraldic doobrie, of some description!  How cromulent an addition to this flag of flags.  Truly, this a banner to be reckoned with.

 

* If YOU didn't like this week's entry, please detail all complaints to "Pirelli Tyres" with the subject heading "Dude. Seriously."  Or alternatively, talk to John Watson - he seems to have an opinion on everything these days.

"The Name Of The Doctor" - EXCLUSIVE SPOILERS!!!1!

It's "Taub".

A Godawful Small Affair: Twelve "Lodger"

"LODGER" (1979)

COVER SHOT: Legs.

For the final instalment of the Berlin trilogy, we come up against a slightly rum egg.  The three albums have driven the usual Bowie changes along at a wicked lick.  Whilst the glacial "Low" traced a lineage from previous offering "Station To Station", the project has sped away from that spirit of introspection and borderline self-flagellation, with "Heroes" acting as the riveting pivot to whirl us into... This.

Sounding reasonably carefree, even - dare I say it - camp in places, this is an album that showcases experimentation and play, but possibly topples onto the wrong side of the fence of pretention.  The fence itself has a soul patch and is reading Camus, whilst stroking its chin (what?  Fences have chins) as it notices the slightly dishevelled, Bowie-like figure that has toppled over it, and exhales a lungful of ghastly Camel smoke, shrugs and says: "c'est la vie".

But this isn't about the fence of pretention.  Looking back, if I'm entirely honest, it's never been about the fence of pretention.  It's never been about the fence of pretention at all.  What this is actually about is Eno and Bowie trying to push the boundaries of modern music even further, and oddly coming out with a perfectly serviceable pop album.

Everything has a lightness to it that has been absent for a few albums, like the gradual slackening of the creative strings over the trilogy has relaxed the players to the point where loose-limbed affairs like "Fantastic Voyage" can saunter along at their own merry pace, where a repurposed "Sister Midnight" has never sounded so relaxed (or, indeed, relaxed at all), where "Boys Keep Swinging" sees the musicians swap instruments, though given that they're highly sought after session musicians who were practically raised in studios, this may not be the huge ask some make it out to be.

"DJ" is about as paranoid as it gets, and that's not coming near the heights of angst scaled even a year  previously.  Just to put the tin hat on it, even "Look Back In Anger", a song that is ultimately about death, is played for lyrical laughs, as a bored reaper thumbs through his target's belongings whilst waiting for the gnashing and wailing to subside.  This happy ending to a tumultuous late seventies sees us wave goodbye to Eno, who's off to inflict U2 on us - but he'll be back with a vengeance.  There will be entrails and eyeliner and many recriminations, but before we get to that it's time for another decade entirely. 

Kajagoogoo!  The Sinclair C5!  Fatcher (the "TH" having been forever removed by establishment wet fart Ben Elton)!  These and many more things will be utterly ignored next time out, as A Godawful Small Affair gets its red braces out, watches a documentary about our impending utter thermonuclear destruction and cracks open a Citrus Spring and some Sizzlin' Bacon Monster Munch (this one's for you, Mr Worthington) as we hit....  THE EIGHTIES.

Join us next time for some clowning around.

A Godawful Small Affair: Eleven "Heroes"

""HEROES"" (1977)

COVER SHOT: "Don't write me off, Vulva.  I can be...  Conceptual."

Now here's something you don't hear everyday; a David Bowie seemingly completely at ease with the creative process.  More playful than "Low", more focused than "Lodger", with arguably the highest yield of chart-ready material and the genesis of a sound that will come to commercial fruition in a couple of albums' time, it even shows an evolution of the "side two is instrumentals" schtick from the previous album.  Bowie continuing something?  It seems wonders will never cease.

Let's get the title track out of the way.  One of pop's iconic moments, near-universally adored, free to cross the usual battle lines of genre demarcations, infinitely adoptable as an anthem for athletes, rescuers, pioneers and courageous souls of all shapes and sizes, it still sounds in some way different to almost anything else.  It also somehow survived an utterly pedestrian Oasis cover, which is usually enough to sink the most steadfast of tunes.

But what else lies inside, eh?  More of the same, and yet...  Not.  For we've finally broken out the positive vibes: for instance, "V-2 Schneider" and "Sense Of Doubt" are the pick of the instrumentals, which seem less chilly and more celebratory than those on "Low".  In fact the whole album seems as if a weight has been lifted from the protagonist's shoulders; as if the downward mood slide commenced on "Aladdin Sane" has finally, finally resolved itself into a grand ascent.

Witness the artist at play on the whimsical closer "The Secret Life Of Arabia", which is almost high camp in comparison to the offerings from the preceding few albums, the majestic "Sons Of The Silent Age", later immortalised on the Glass Spider Tour as the one where Peter Frampton sang the chorus while Bowie did some pretentious physical business with a lady on skis, or the just plain bonkers "Joe The Lion", which is just plain bonkers.  All great works, only slightly undermined by their proximity to the title track, which cast such a shadow it threatens to consume the overall impact of the album.

Moreover, this is an album which points towards the future more than most; we have shades of "Lodger" and "Scary Monsters" (er...  Spoilers, I guess?), and a basic sound that permeates some of his work right up to the present day.  Plus we'll be seeing that cover again, or most of it, anyway.  But we're not quite ready to leave Germany yet, so order some...  I dunno, sausages?  And one of those beers in a funny cup, and the trousers.  You know: German stuff.

Join us next time when we'll Keep Swinging Red Sails Back In Anger, D.J.!

A Godawful Small Affair: Extra Credit 2 "Lust For Life"

Iggy Pop: "LUST FOR LIFE" (1977)

COVER SHOT: "Would you like to see some puppies?"

Here's one you'll probably know; Iggy plants the seeds for his eventual canonisation in the nineties.  The film of Irvine Welsh's Scotch language junkie ode "Trainspotting" would eventually propel the title track of this album into the stratosphere, happily coinciding with Britpop to bring him kicking and screaming up to date.  Plus, it's got "The Passenger" on it.  But what else is there?

The first thing to mention is that this is much more of a conventional rock album than "The Idiot".  There's nothing as alien as "Mass Production" or "Dum Dum Boys", nothing so sonically unsettling, but the lyrics bring all the unease one might expect, forming a loose arc or at least a series of peaks of troughs, going from celebratory to despairing to threatening at a rate of knots.  Also of note is our first visit from the rhythm section that is the Sales brothers, Hunt and Tony.  I wonder if we'll be hearing from them again on our journey, hmmmmmm?  Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?  Hm.

Speaking of things we may be hearing from later, the album pivots on central track "Tonight", which starts with Iggy howling at the bedside of a dying acquaintance ("SHE WAS TURNING BLUE!!!"), before resolving itself into a delightfully cheesy little number which marks the album's sleeper highlight and sparks off its strongest sequence of songs.  And speaking of cheese, next up:

Here comes "Success!"  (Here comes "Success!")
Call and respond!  (Call and respond!)
Is all it does!  (Is all it does!)
You'd think it'd grate!  (You'd think it'd grate!)
But it never starts to grate...
(But it never starts to grate...)
Well done, "Success"!  (Well done, "Success"!)

Ahem.

Next up, the genuinely distressing "Turn Blue" (is anything not turning blue on this disk?) finds Iggy in "Word On A Wing"-mode, confessing his largely drug-related woes; it seems all the success, praying and pleading GTOs, Government loans and whatnot just doesn't fit in with his character, as he becomes the boogeyman again, stalking the squares of respectable suburbia as the "Neighbourhood Threat".  The story has come full circle: the half-feral real wild child - wait, I'm getting ahead of myself - from The Stooges has broken back through, to flail around stages for decades to come.  Long may he continue to do so.

Well, we've had some fun diversifying from our main topic, and now it's time to turn back to our original focus.  But remember what we've heard here; some of these songs will be returning in different forms later on.  Some will be welcome...  Others, really not.

Join us next time for a return to our usual schedule.

Engine Blood: Bahrain GP

* --- URGENT PAUL DI RESTA UPDATE ---

Fourth place (albeit due to Ferrari's miserable race and Mercedes' tyre shredding)!  FOURTH PLACE (albeit due to Ferrari's miserable race and Mercedes' tyre shredding)!!!!  Well surely that's got to be enough for the BBC and the UK press to bring Boring Paul in from the cold.  So let's see what the indicator says - I can barely contain my excitement!

Paul DiResta is...  STILL SCOTTISH?  Damn, what's he got to do?

 

* Ask and you shall receive: McLaren asked Sergio Perez essentially to man up after some wimpy capitulations in the first three races.  I'm pretty sure that colliding with his teammate was not what they had in mind, but you can't blame the guy for trying, nor for wondering why he's had the misfortune to wander into McLaren when they've got a dog of a car all of a sudden.  Roll on the Honda engines - with Mercedes going all in with their own concern, and Force India becoming their B squad, McLaren can't get out of this one fast enough.

 

* We neglected to mention last week that Caterham have shame-facedly crawled back to Heikki Kovalainen, who was cast aside in favour of solidly lacklustre pay driver Giedo van der Garde before the start of the year, to appoint him as third driver.  The immediate result is that they've broken the cycle of being beaten by Bianchi's Marussia; Charles Pic was the leader of the untouchables this week.  We know money's tight, but any team with two deadweights might want to have a look at that, with Glock, Kobayashi and even Kubica and Trulli out there, and see if it's worth calling in a consult.

 

* Oh, and Vettel won by a mile.  Yay!  Rumours abound that his team "mate", the Canberra Milk Kid, will be off to Porsche mid-season, taking with him his ball, later to be dropped at his home.  Stranger things have happened, but we'd be surprised if he went that easily; we can't see any sportscar endurance contract paying as much as a year at the Formula One Constructors' Champions.  Still, never say never in this wacky, wacky sport.

 

And that's all the blood that's fit to drain!

 



A Godawful Small Affair: Extra Credit 1 "The Idiot"

Iggy Pop - "THE IDIOT" (1977)

COVER SHOT: Does what it says on the tin.

(Hello, chums!  While I was doing this Bowie listen-through, I hosted a couple of friends at my palatial mansion, who luckily just missed "Young Americans".  They suggested that I throw in the other albums DB worked on during the Berlin years - and now, I'm a tell y'all about them.  Word.)

It wasn't just Bowie's career that was getting a shot in the arm (pun...  Erm...  We'll go with "not intended", for legal reasons) in Berlin, but also his friend Iggy Pop, who had already had some previous with Bowie, so why don't we ramble on about that for a bit, as if any of it needed repeating at all?  This is the problem with treading such a well-worn path: you run out of original things to say, then have to stuff the whole thing with knob gags to make it readable.  And I'm not even doing THAT well, because that's the first time I've used the word "knob" in this blog.  Damn it all.

The Stooges were a vaguely psychedelic proto-punk group from Michigan, who along with their peers The MC5 were freaking out squares from the very late sixties onwards before imploding, leaving only three excellent albums that are really quite different to each other.  Long story short, lead singer Iggy was more famous for his wild and woolly onstage antics, including fighting, hurling objects and frequent displays of his knob (YES!  Here we go!), than he was for his music and was looking for some career rehab.  Also: some actual rehab.

Enter David, stage left.  Him twiddling the knobs (I'm on fire here) hadn't worked out too well with the anaemic first mix of "Raw Power", which was only righted by a Bruce Dickinson remix - yes, he of Iron Maiden/commercial piloting fame - but given that he'd lent Ig a chunk of his backing band it would have been rude to say no, and when the whole party decamped to Berlin, Iggy was firmly along for the ride, and more than punched his weight in the musical stakes, as "The Idiot" confirms.

Sounding the absolute opposite of the crazy, uncontrollable ruckus of latter-day Stooges, The Idiot features a measured, largely electronic backing that showcases Mr Pop's surprisingly wide vocal range whilst covering styles he had not at that point tried - and, indeed, moods and emotions he had not at that point tried, with regret, boredom and paranoia shot through the album.

Obvious highlights include "Nightclubbing" and "Funtime", but dig a little deeper and we have the shattered pop of "Baby", like a snarling Gary Numan, a take of "China Girl" that is likely to confuse and unnerve those more used to the later and far more sanitary Bowie version, and the sax-drenched after hours lament of "Tiny Girls".  By the time you've lived through the inhuman closing epic, "Mass Production", you're left in no doubt that Iggy's a lot more than a one trick pony.  But there was more where that came from, and no mistake...

Join us next time for a million in prizes.

Engine Blood: Chinese GP

* Saturday was all "tyres this, tyres that", as we again had to question the safety implications of making what are essentially deliberately poorly-constructive tyres, but it was largely business as usual come race day, to the extent that I can't really remember what happened.  So I'll just pretend it was the 1983 South African Grand Prix and say it's nice to see Riccardo Patrese back on the top step of the podium.

* WHERE IS PAUL DI RESTA FROM THIS WEEK?

Hard to say; his lower-echelon points finish didn't propel him far enough up the order in the BBC's race report to give him a description beyond "Force India's Paul Di Resta".  Therefore we default to there being no change, aaaaaand...

 

Paul Di Resta is still SCOTTISH.

* Mark Webber's year went from bad to about-usual-for-Mark-Webber as he suffered a comedy wheel failure soon after spearing a Toro Rosso, which got the usual conspiracy twerps a-tweeting again.  Nobody bats an eyelid when Massa and Rosberg get the thin end of the wedge...  Compounding his problem was Daniel Ricciardo's job interview of a drive in the sole remaining (non-speared) Toro Rosso.  Looks like we could be crowning a new Canberra Milk Kid when the season is over.

* But will there ever be a female Canberra Milk Kid?  Not if nought-times World Champion and head of the Lewis Hamilton Fan Club Sir Lord Stirling Moss MBE has anything to do with it.  The creaking anachronism went on record with some very Patrick Moore-ish comments about lady racers, which can simply be deflected by Googling Danica Patrick's career achievements.  Oddly, this marks the second time in quick succession that Engine Blood has found itself arguing this particular case - another week of this and we'll be in a feminist webring...

And that's all the blood that's fit to drain!

A Godawful Small Affair: Ten "Low"

"LOW" (1977)

COVER SHOT: The Man Who F - oh.  Done that one.

In the more recent history of retro, if such a time-bending concept can be credited with existence in the first place, there seems to have been a shift of sorts in what bit of Bowie's output the majority thinks is the coolest.  No longer is the Ziggy Era the one-stop shop for hip happenings; a number of listeners now opt for the appropriately-monikered Berlin Era.

This may in part be for the romantic images it conjures up, with Bowie and Iggy Pop decamping to Berlin to frolic in the shadow of the then-actually-a-wall Berlin Wall, before David Hasselhoff had to come and bring peace to a desegregated Germany, sadly not in a talking Trans-Am.  Nights on the town, days in the studio - a fruitful and artistic time in a cultural scene unlike any other before or since.

But let's not let all that guff spoil our appreciation of a real turning point in the man's career - though admittedly, it's not like turning points are hard to come by in that collection - where a full embracing of electronic noisemakers and the influence of one Brian Eno, (relatively) fresh out of Roxy Music but not quite at the point of artistic suicide with U2, produced a glacially cold but utterly compelling album of two halves, and one that can almost be considered the first David Bowie album unfettered by a dominating character; perhaps this was another hat he was donning, but those of these songs that are favoured with lyrics include some of the most starkly personal confessions to date.

As I have been alluding to, there's a proportion of instrumentals on this album that seems unsettlingly high.  In fact, now I think about it, I'm not sure Bowie had released any instrumentals before this.  (That seems like the kind of thing I could easily research...  Nah, it's late.  I'll plough on.  They'll never notice.)  So of eleven tracks, we get the five brutally short, be-lyriced pop songs the dominate side one and six electronic instrumentals that comprise the whole of side two and more.

And it's all great.  Highlights from the traditional platters include "Sound And Vision", which despite my words in my earlier "Station To Station" piece may actually be the real end of the Plastic Soul experiment, sounding as it does like "Golden Years" shot into space and deprived of human contact for a great many years, "Always Crashing In The Same Car", a smoothly futuristic celebration of a failed vehicular suicide attempt, and "Be My Wife", a simple but extremely effective declaration of love and need with a very underrated closing guitar solo.

The instrumental offerings have been described as dour, but "A New Career In A New Town" and "Speed Of Life" are actually really jaunty 'n' joyous numbers, and "Art Decade" is the sound of the future we expected to come.  It's difficult to envisage in a world where all genres of music can be instantly accessed and experienced, but this album played a significant part in bringing synthesizer music to the masses, like The Beatles in their psych phase or Nirvana's resurrection of the bands they grew up on, so whilst side two can be a challenging experience it's one that's well worth it from a cultural point of view if nothing else.

Looks like we'll be sticking around in Berlin for a wee bit then - and there's plenty to see and hear, so why don't we extend our stay a little?

Join us next time when it's all aboard for Funtime...

Engine Blood: 05/04/2013

* Has John Watson got a book coming out or something?  The former McLaren man, who was third in the 1982 World Championship, has been weighing in on everyone and everything in the past couple of weeks, saying that Vettel should be suspended for passing Webber on track in Malaysia and that Perez is a poor fit for McLaren.

 

We're not going to rip on Watson, who effectively retired from Formula One when apparently Ron Dennis realised a tiny Frenchman called Alain Prost actually wanted LESS money to drive for him in 1984 (whoops!), but simply say this on both subjects:

 

1) Vettel is a three-time world champion, more likely to win the World Championship a fourth time than Webber is to get a first.  Red Bull have seen the Australian psychologically collapse at the end of a season before and would look pretty stupid if Vettel, who won his last title by a hair's breadth from a Ferrari driver, lost by the same margin this time, and even MORE stupid if the two went round line astern at a snail's pace, only for Mercedes to release Rosberg to trouble them.

 

2) Perez hasn't really had a chance in McLaren thus far, with two races in a car that the team admit is not exactly their prime achievement of the last few years.  The amount of pressure the young Mexican has been under is quite something; let's not Kovalainen this fellow just yet, eh?  He might surprise us all.  And yes - that's us defending a McLaren driver.  It does happen, y'know.

 

* Should have mentioned this last time out, but remember how we didn't know why Slugger Sutil had a seat again this year, especially in context of Jules Bianchi's impressive outings for Marussia thus far?  Well, Force India just announced a contract extension with Mercedes, for supply of engines in 2014.  Since all the engine rules are changing it's a good idea to at least have a continuity of relationship, so now all of this makes a bit more sense.  Marussia-Ferraris next year then?  Well, if they keep afloat anyway...

 

* In back office news, Frank Williams has announced that his daughter (Claire, we think) is taking over the team when he steps down.  This ties in nicely with an article in The Independent about the possibility of a female F1 driver, the intimation being that perhaps only a female team boss would have the ovaries to employ a female driver.  Hey, don't Williams have Susie Wolff as a test driver?  And isn't just about anyone better than Maldonado?  Just a thought. 

 

In all seriousness, it is about time we had a female driver in Formula One, and we'd salute anyone deserving enough for a seat - let's face it, we've got at least six pay drivers in at the moment, so some actual talent would be fantastic regardless of gender.

 

And that's all the blood that's fit to drain!