TV: Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall - Bewitching, brilliant - and that’s just what the continuity announcers said.

There’s been a lot of praise for the BBC series of Wolf Hall based on Hilary Mantel’s novels, and it’s been extremely popular - according to a recent Guardian article it is the most popular drama since the modern ratings system began.  So why didn’t I get it?

"But did I leave the gas on or not?"

I tried reading the book of Wolf Hall a couple of years ago to see what the fuss was about, and found it really hard to get into - so hard that I didn’t in fact get into it and got distracted by something else.  I found it quite dry and boring, (which surprised me because I’m interested in the Tudor era in history and liked learning about the story at school).  Although technically it was still on my ‘things to finish’ list, it was way down. 

But I had the same thing with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - a bestseller that I’d found hard to get into but saw the film, and saw the light.  Seeing the film made me go back and reread the books and recognise that there was something I’d missed.  So I settled down to the dramatisation of Wolf Hall bearing that in mind, and you know what?

Well - it was a bit dry and boring… wasn’t it?

I was disappointed all over again.  I was being told this was ‘the new I, Clavdivs’ in the papers and most friends and colleagues seemed to really be enjoying it. too  The ratings seem to prove I’m wrong.  Everyone says that Mark Rylance was brilliant whereas I thought it looked like he sleepwalked through it with one expression (a man having a long and quizzical senior moment) before finally coming alive in the sixth episode.  Damian Lewis was admittedly brilliant as a charming and menacing Henry VIII.  Jonathan Pryce and Anton Lesser were well cast as Wolsey and Thomas More respectively.  And it all looked very authentic (whatever that actually means) in that Beeb Costume Drama way.  But the story seemed surprisingly divorced from emotion somehow - it showed other people’s emotions being enacted on screen but failed to inspire any in me.  I guess I was hoping to see something along the same lines as a Tudor House of Cards or The Thick Of It, a behind the scenes view of an arch-manipulator at work.  But we didn’t see that much of Thomas Cromwell’s Machiavellian skills until the end.  Instead of seeing ‘under-the-hood’ of Tudor politics, each episode seemed like walking in on a  series half-way through despite having been watching them all - you know, in order and everything.

So then I tried to enjoy it as a drama about Thomas Cromwell - The Man.  But with Rylance looking either mournful or like he’d forgotten to feed the cat I didn’t care enough about him.  And he doesn’t have that exciting a private life anyway - apart from a sequence in the first episode where his wife and daughter are killed by a fever, and a few other scenes here and there (he nearly gets off with Anne Boleyn’s sister, for instance) there’s not much to it.  Or rather, his private life and his political life were completely entwined.  

I, Clavdivs worked by taking a fairly marginal character (until his unexpected crowning as Emperor) and allow us to see events and characters through his eyes (although when it was dramatised Derek Jacobi managed to imbue the TV Claudius with liveliness and charm).  But the balance was all wrong in Wolf Hall - it felt to me we were seeing Cromwell’s life at the expense of seeing events build.  It felt like there were scenes missing that had been replaced with trivialities.  And the I, Clavdivs historical drama model doesn’t fit Wolf Hall in the end because Cromwell wasn’t by any means marginal - he was pivotal to the politics of Henry VIII’s court during this period.  

Wolf Hall also an intensely humourless production, bursting with a sense of the emotionally arid and dull.  A story that by rights should be very varied had exactly the same story arc for an entire three individual episodes (The Fall of Cardinal Wolsey; The Fall of Thomas More; The Fall of Anne Boleyn).  The sixth episode came alive (by comparison to the previous five at any rate); we saw Rylance absolutely take command and finally show the audience why his character has a fearsome reputation. 

Mark Gatiss wasn't very good either

Apart from a few forgettable one-off scenes in previous episodes, menacing relatively minor characters, we’d not seen evidence of him actually doing Henry’s dirty work.  Well ‘show don’t tell’ is a cliche, but like all cliches there’s some truth in it, and having people tell us that Cromwell has a fearsome reputation but not showing us why (until so late in the game) made for drama lacking in drama.  

I hated not liking Wolf Hall, because I was really looking forward to it.  Maybe I am missing out on what the biggest BBC2 audience of all time found in it, but I’m going to blame Wolf Hall and not myself for missing something this time round.

MUSIC: Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti Deluxe

Physical Graffiti was re-released last week on its 100^th birthday or something or other, and in a horrible cover (for all of these Led Zep releases they’ve seen fit to make the covers ‘negatives’ of the originals, which looks rubbish).  As someone who is a casual as opposed to rabid fan of Led Zeppelin, it is this album more than any of their others which I think is actually fantastic, and worth looking forward to a re-release of...

Physical Graffiti is a wired and weird album.  It’s a double album for a start, and all double albums are weird – they have enough room for quirks and diversions (and cock-ups) like ‘Revolution 9’ on The Beatles’ White Album or ‘Brand New Cadillac’ on London Calling.  But Physical Graffiti is also a compilation album of sorts – when Led Zeppelin realised that the new material they had wouldn’t fit all onto one disc they padded it out with songs held over from the previous three albums.  Which makes it a forerunner of our current ‘Bonus Disc’ culture as well…  Physical Graffiti is perhaps weird because it works when it shouldn’t. 

The 2 discs have different moods.  The first is the more rock with a capital Rawk.  It sounds like a fortress, or maybe like the massive tenement block on the artwork.  It seems like there’s an element of attack in some of the songs and its not unlikely that years of touring, alcohol, cocaine, etc, etc, led to a lot of paranoia when they recorded this – the twitchy, nervous energy of ‘Trampled Under Foot’, for instance, feels like it’s the soundtrack to the moment late into your party where everything goes wrong. 

The second disc is what you might tenuously call ‘pastoral’.  It’s where you find things like the acoustic instrumental ‘Bron-Yr-Aur’ and the playful ‘Black Country Woman’.  It’s less crotch-grabbing and therefore less immediately diverting but of the same high quality, and shows that as a band they really did have more tricks up their sleeves.

It’s my favourite Led Zeppelin album partly because of this variety; ‘Kashmir’ is a brilliant combination of their inclination towards experimenting with softer sounds and their gut instinct to rock.  This is the apex of the album and it is there exactly half-way through - a peak in every sense.  I also admire the album’s cheek in fulfilling Jimmy Page’s ambition to have a double album by bunging a load of cast-offs on, (not that you can tell a dip in quality).

Maybe explaining a love of Physical Graffiti as an album over their others comes down to the filler.  All of the Led Zep albums have filler, and this one at least twice as much because of its length.  The difference is that on Physical Graffiti the filler is brilliant. 

We mentioned Physical Graffiti pioneering bonus discs, and this is of course the latest of Jimmy Page’s remixed and ever-debatably improved versions of all of Led Zeppelin’s albums.  The literal bonus disc for Physical Graffiti is underwhelming, the tracks all falling into the ‘Only Slightly Different’ category for me.  This has been true of all of the bonus tracks on these Led Zeppelin re-releases – it was reported excitedly that Led Zeppelin IV would have an unheard version of ‘Stairway To Heaven’ on it which sounds identical to the original. (It’s an overrated song anyway, with only its solo redeeming an otherwise dull plod – like listening to a coke-baffled hippy explaining why he loves Lord Of The Rings to you slowly and at great length…).  To take an example at random, the bonus tracks on The Fall’s expanded edition albums are very often revelatory, but the ones here aren’t particularly and haven’t been on the other Zeppelin releases.  The remaster sounds good though, the drums and guitar especially sound striking and present.  Though perhaps because the remastering is overseen by Jimmy Page it isn’t surprising that it’s not Robert Plant’s voice at the forefront of the mix. 

 

This Is... Led Zeppelin. 

Led Zeppelin were never really critically rated in their era and still get kind of overlooked sometimes…  Amongst my generation The Beatles went from being really uncool to being cool all over again during Britpop.  Several other bands that were declared verboten by  Malcolm MacLaren and co have been more or less rehabilitated now – Pink Floyd is fine for instance.  I’m not sure if that transition’s completely happened with Led Zep – I’m not sure it will.  They still have something of Spinal Tap about them, that means they always seem slightly risible.  But they were always slightly aloof, declaring themselves answerable only to their fans (casual or rabid, I guess).  So, if you already own a version of Physical Graffiti that isn’t naff this re-release isn’t essential.  But if you are even the most casual of Led Zep fans and don’t own any version of Physical Graffiti then this is essential.  

MUSIC: Analogue Hipsters - Vinyl vs Digital

There was a really interesting and thoughtful article in The Guardian recently about the return of vinyl as a…  Well, what?  As a medium?  As a fetishistic object?  As another way of detecting hipster wankers and or hi-fi snobs?

One of the article’s most cringe-worthy sections is a description of vinyl groups where about 70 people get together and sit in silence whilst ‘appreciating’ the albums such as Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ in total silence whilst the record is turned over reverentially by some hipster record priest, like a parody of a Nathan Barley character.  

Call me judgemental but my immediate reaction to that on reading about it could be summed up as: ‘Twats’.  For all I know those events could be great fun and not at all like the pretentious snob fests described in the article.  But all it reminded me of was John Lydon’s ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ t-shirt, which was aimed not so much at the band themselves but at the type of smug and complacent audiophile listener they attracted. 

Anyway all of that is a matter of personal preference.  A more general observation made by the article specifically (and by a hell of a lot more generally) is that vinyl is back.  In some quarters it is claimed that this is the death of the digital format, something which is clearly nonsense.  New vinyl albums are ridiculously expensive, for a start.  A plus point often raised by vinyl-converts is that the artwork is so much better (ie, bigger); well this is true to a degree, but the artwork is only so big and detailed to disguise the cumbersome object within the packaging.

The thing is that yes, yes, vinyl is ‘coming back’ but hardly to the mainstream.  I mean it never went away for people such as DJs, or bona fide record collectors. It’s ‘coming back’ in the same way that clothes in fashion magazines come back to kind of people that care about that kind of thing.  It is perhaps not so much ‘coming back’ as it is ‘in’.  A comparison can be made with artisan bread and craft beers.  It is an obsolete format that holds a certain allure for people who like to feel superior.

Our family household when I was growing up were late to the advent of CDs, for the most part sticking with cassettes and my parents’ record player and reel-to-reel tapes.  When I first learned how to use the record player I can remember coming home from school and having the house to myself for a bit, and so would play records.  I did enjoy the process of putting a record on, swapping the side half-way through, watching the record spin whilst listening to the music.  I enjoyed that kind of ritual.  For about a month.  Then I found it irritating.  It was an obsolete format for the mainstream then, and it still is.  Looking at comment sections on that Guardian article and other Vinyl v Digital ones around the net, here’s some of the things people like about vinyl:

Having to swap the record halfway through.  People claim to enjoy having to swap the record over halfway through, but god knows why.  The claim that it forces you to listen to the album “as a whole, as the artist intended”, is nonsense because believe it or not it is possible to listen to an album as a whole on a CD too.  In fact, it’s possible to listen to an album as a whole on Spotify believe it or not, you just have to not skip forward a track and Bob’s your uncle.  I believe a lot of artists in the 70s would have loved it if you didn’t have to have a break through the album (indeed, I’m willing to bet Pink Floyd would have jumped at the chance of having ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ played as a continuous 40 minute suite the way we can listen to it now with our fancy binary codes).

Snap, Crackle and Pop Vinyl inevitably begin to have background pops and crackles when you play it back.  There’s even the faint swooshing noise of the needle against the record whilst it’s spinning.  Personally, I prefer listening to music without this – I can’t imagine this sound improving (using the first example to hand) the clean atmopspherics of Martin Hannet’s work on the Joy Division albumns.  The fact is that LPs degenerate at a far faster rate than CDs (or even cassette tapes) even when cared for really well.

Lack Of Versatility Personally I like listening to albums all the way through.  But it’s nice to have the option to skip on forward, or selecting one individual track to listen to.  On digital formats this is literally done at the touch of a button, and even cassettes found a way of fast forwarding to the next track without too much hassle.  Trying to do it with a record  is a faff.  Being no DJ, and quite cack-handed, standing over a record trying to drop the needle into the ‘blank’ groove inbetween tracks is more trouble than it’s worth.

Warmth One claim that is made for vinyl is that it has a ‘warmer’ sound (which is a crap description but the most common).  This is all in the ears of the beholder, and probably only in the ears of a beholder with expensive equipment.  And what does that supposed ‘warmth’ add?  Authenticity?  Does it make a bad song and make it better?  Is it the ‘warmth’ a nu-Luddite needs to keep warm from being way cooler than me?  This warmth is technically the “introduction of distortion” anyway, as this Pitchfork article makes clear and so makes the music a less authentic reproduction of the artist’s music. 

I think a lot of the hipster fad of vinyl has less to do with appreciation of sound and more to do with playing with expensive toys.  You could argue it’s a reverse-snobbery backlash against iPods and MP3 Players which used to be terribly chic but unfortunately everyone’s got one nowadays (except presumably the people in the factories that produce them – that’s another rant).  I don’t think there’s any question that digital mediums can capture sound quality at least as well if not much better than analogue sources and that claiming otherwise is posing of the smuggest order.  And you certainly won’t find me having to stand up halfway through an album simply to carry on listening to it.  I don’t own a record player for a start…

TV: Doctor Who - Last Christmas

Doctor Who often works by having The Doctor turn up in other peoples’ stories and own them.  So it was quite amusing seeing a Doctor Who story briefly invaded by Father Christmas in ‘Last Christmas’.

The last Christmas in Doctor Who terms was ‘The Time Of The Doctor’ and was a horrible mess.  (I first watched it recovering from a seizure, but further watches didn’t improve matters)  What was going on in it was anyone’s guess – it included the worst of Steven Moffat’s writing (the self-referential continuity, kitchen-sink plot) and I for one only kept watching to get a glimpse of Peter Capaldi as the Doctor – by then, all that Trenzalore stuff I just didn’t care about at all, and that’s speaking as a fan.  It being a Christmas episode we were sat around watching telly as a family I was expected to translate this into comprehensible drama terms for my parents and then fiancé.  Perhaps that has coloured my opinion of it as an episode, but I remember it as being something of a nadir.

Well it’s been a year – since that brief glimpse of Capaldi we’ve seen him in his successful first series and now in this, his first Christmas Special.  As with the episodes in this year’s series the plot in ‘Last Christmas’ is much more focused.  The story is set in a scientific research centre at the North Pole, but takes place in dreams, that turn out to be dreams within other dreams. There are aliens where you have to avoid even thinking about them (which gives ‘Blink’ and ‘Listen’ a run for their money in terms of Moffat's list of abstract threats) and there is Father Christmas.

I was deeply sceptical of Father Christmas being in Doctor Who like the Mr Grinch McScrooge I am, and if he had been in last year’s end-of-year pantomime any scepticism probably wqould have been justified as being a cheap gag.  However, in this episode Father Christmas meant something and I liked it.  Father Christmas represented dreams, and in this story dreams weren’t stable or safe – dreams were mercurial and potentially lethal.  To put it bluntly, if you were dreaming in ‘Last Christmas’, the chances were you had a face-hugging monster eating your brain.  Father Christmas strolled into a normal(ish) Doctor Who story to completely disrupt things the way the Doctor normally would.

 

"And a Merry Christmas to all of you at home!"

Doctor Who often works best when it’s in unchartered waters like this and has successfully messed around with dreaming and the unconscious from ‘The Mind Robber’ to the Dream Lord in ‘Amy’s Choice’.  ‘Last Christmas’ succeeded by setting up the audience for that most predictable and generic of Doctor Who stories, the base-under-seige, and then successfully throwing something as bizarre into the mix as Father Christmas and still getting away with it.

Nick Frost’s Santa was judged perfectly right – it was actually about as understated a performance you could ask for when the performance in question is Santa.  Peter Capaldi didn’t make any concessions to sentimentality just because it’s Christmastime, oh no – but he did show signs of his Doctor slowly thawing out as time goes on (oh, and grinned and whooped whilst driving Santa’s sleigh).  Clara was excellent as ever, although the weakest scenes seemed to be based around her, for instance the first dream sequence reuniting her with Danny seemed to just be going on for the sake of it; and the scene where the Doctor went back to save her but she had aged…  But then it turned out it was all a dream and she hadn’t!  Yep, it was a story about dreams but that was one little dream too far.

Those are very uncharitable quibbles though from a fan who was left happy.  This was a good episode of Doctor Who which didn’t patronise its audience (regardless of age or level of fan-knowledge), was scary, clever and funny – oh yes, this year Steven Moffat showed that guy who wrote last year’s show how it’s really done.  (Ho, ho, ho…  Oh please yourselves.)

It also showed that this supposed 'dark' direction that the show has taken is just as capable of lightness as earlier eras, but that lightness comes in chinks and comes with sadness - perhaps ironic that the Doctor Who Christmas Special with the least fairytale-like plot in some time should also be the one that gets to have Father Christmas.

RADIO: 'Raw Meat Radio' - Chris Morris Documentary, BBC Radio 4 Extra

Chris Morris is known chiefly for his epithets – “Godlike Genius”; enfant terrible”; “Media Assassin/Terrorist”, and so on.

After his reputation he is known chiefly for his TV work of the 90s, especially The Day Today and even more especially Brass Eye.  And even even more especially the Brass Eye Special.  These news spoofs are indeed absolute classics (although not as flawless as hype would have you believe).  Because the targets of The Day Today and Brass Eye are news presentation they haven’t dated as much as you might fairly expect for programmes made before New Labour came to power.  Probably the most influentuial comedian of the 90s Morris was unique in having no roots in stand-up; he instead came to prominence through radio.

Raw Meat Radio was a documentary concentrating solely on this sometimes neglected aspect of his career, bypassing almost entirely the more familiar TV stuff.  For someone of Morris’ reputation there haven’t been that many insights into his work, and Raw Meat Radio was happy to do some oblige with some talking head material and stories about his career.  Its 3 hours were roughly divided into 3 sections – On The Hour, the Radio One Music Shows and Blue Jam.  

Looking back at On The Hour you find yourself unconsciously

comparing it to its TV incarnation, The Day Today, in a completely unfair way.  On The Hour hasn’t really held up as well as The Day Today has, or certainly not based on the episode included as part of the documentary.  It sounds too bitty, and some sections drag. On The Hour was a game-changer in Radio 4 comedy, brought a new generation of comics to the forefront of the media (especially Steve Coogan), and so on.  But the bits that work the best are mainly bits that sound somehow incomplete because these were perfected on TV.  The best section for me of the episode here was the clip of On The Hour from the 1950s, complete with received pronunciation newscasters and jazz music...

It’s the Radio One Music Show clips that sound the freshest out of all the material in the documentary, partly because it’s the least familiar but also because it sounds so much like Morris letting his hair down and having a laugh.  If you can track down the complete shows on the internet (and you definitely can) you can listen to a great blend of Britpop and Hip Hop from the mid 90s as well as some good old insanity.  (I came across the description ‘chummy psychosis’ somewhere on the internet and that’s as good as any)  Prank calls/interviews and surreal sketches with Peter Baynham about opening tortoises and the dead body of Johnny Walker are the highlights.  Sketches where Morris tells Paul Garner to humiliate himself in public are less interesting, although because of their unpredictability can still be funny.  Garner repeatedly refusing to go back into a shop to ask whether the owner has “been to hell” while Morris and Baynham scream at him is actually funnier than it would have been had he obeyed his orders.  In these sequences it seems pretty clear that Paul Garner is Morris’ dupe, the person we are really laughing at.  I’m not sure Paul Garner always realised this (as he says in the documentary – he could have easily stood in a corner quietly saying that he was obeying his crazy orders without any of the hassle).  It’s certainly the Music Shows where Morris’ skill for persuasion is at its most obvious.

The Music Shows were a bit of a headache for Morris’ boss Matthew Bannister who explains on the documentary that he had okayed a sketch about Michael Heseltine’s obiturary tapes as long as it was made clear Michael Heseltine wasn’t dead.  When Morris opened the show with the decidedly ambiguous “If we hear any news on the death of Michael Heseltine we’ll let you know” led to the show being pre-recorded not very long into its run.  This is probably the most notorious stunt from the Music shows, and at least 5 minutes is spent talking about it.  It’s interesting that Peter Baynham doesn’t hold it as a crowning glory of what they did on the show.  
The documentary moves on to Blue Jam, a project that Matthew Bannister helped bring to Radio 1  was a completely new direction for Morris –

it was a ‘dark’ sketch-show interlinked with monged-chilled records, and didn’t have anything to do with the news.  Listening to the sketches out of context of their show makes them seem unbearably slow-paced – the Unconcerned Parents (who show a shocking lack of interest in the disappearance and murder of their 6 year old son) seems to drag on and on.  Similarly, the Rothko the Dog monologue (“he’s not a very good dog, but he’s an even worse lawyer”) didn’t seem as funny.  I suspect that this is because the bright and breezy approach of the documentary sets completely the wrong mood for enjoying that sort of thing.  It’s funniest when you’re on the verge of falling asleep, not bookended by some reminiscing by the writer.  Even so, one of Blue Jam’s selling points was in fact its power to shock, and it sounded tamer than I remembered.  

3 hours is a long time to listen to a documentary about any subject, but if you’re interested in 90s comedy in general Raw Meat Radio should raise some interest.  It was planned for an old unheard Chris Morris sketch to be exhumed on 6Music the following Saturday, but this was cancelled at the 11th hour – the official line is for reasons of quality control than for any last minute censorship.  But maybe also for reasons of lack of interest.  Chris Morris has finished with radio but he is a genius at it – he is uniquely talented at using his voice to force people to enter his world, without them necessarily realising it.  Not only the unwitting members of the public but the listeners themselves are taken to strange places before they have time to realise what’s going on.    


Listen to Raw Meat Radio here

MUSIC: Pixies - Doolittle 25

One thing that seemed to be impressive about the 25^th anniversary of Doolittle was that the Pixies seemed to be more interested in releasing new material instead.

Well that turned out to be wrong didn’t it?  Here it is – just in time for Christmas – Doolittle 25, a re-release of the album with B-Sides, Demos and Peel Sessions.

If you’re the kind of person who’s interested in B-Sides, Demos and Peel Sessions (and believe me, I am), you’d think this would be the mother of all packages.  It’s not even very expensive.  What makes it much less impressive is that the Pixies have already released a complete B-Sides and Peel Sessions separately roughly 15 years ago, meaning that a significant amount of the songs on Doolittle 25 are almost certainly on the shelves of the people most likely to buy Doolittle 25.

Then...

Another point of minor contention is that the album hasn’t been remastered, which is so much expected of deluxe editions it feels like it should be pointed out in big letters when something hasn’t been tinkered with.  On the whole I think most remasters are pretty good – I certainly haven’t come across a remastering which has made something sound worse.  In this respect I think I am relatively easily pleased – just look at the one-star reviews of Nevermind on Amazon to read some audiophiles kicking off about something called the Loudness War and a lot of uses of the word ‘dynamic’ in a way I don’t really understand.  Some things definitely need remastering (the Beatles remasters were necessary), sometimes it can seem like pouring old wine into new bottles.   Really though if you are going to buy an album for the second time it’d be nice to know they’ve done something to improve it.  Even by just a little bit.  It’d be better to be lied to in a way.

It comes down to this: realistically it’s going to be a majority of existing Pixies fans that  buy Doolittle 25, and Pixies fans will very definitely own Doolittle already, probably the B-Sides and BBC discs as well. So that leaves the demos.  And, Demos usually being the weakest sibling in the Bonus Track family, that’s where Doolittle 25 really hung for me – they effectively rereleased a bunch of stuff we all had already and the only real new content was some demos.  And that would have been really bad; only the demos actually turn out to be really, really good.

...and Now!

I normally skip over demos on deluxe rereleases and I suspect the majority of people do.  With the benefit of hindsight they’re often little more than really awful sounding versions of songs you like.  It’s possible in some cases to make a case for it being interesting to see ‘the creative process in action.’  But just because it’s interesting from a historical point of view it doesn’t necessarily make it fun to listen to.  I mean, who listens to the Beatles Anthology series now?  Who listened to it then?  Even hardcore Beatles fans don’t actually listen to the Anthology series.  The reason for this is that seeing the creative process at work is like knowing how the magic trick is done.  You think you want to know, but really you don’t.  Recent examples include Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions… and Fear Of A Black Planet and Led Zep’s back catalogue – all the bonus tracks are either throwaway or virtually identical to the original.  The alternative 'Stairway To Heaven' is a musical spot the difference but no more.

However, there are exceptions that prove the rule, and the demos on Doolittle 25 are an exception.  As I said in a previous post, although I like all the Pixies’ albums for me Surfer Rosa captures a raw energy whereas Doolittle is just a bit too polished and clean and frankly less fucked up.  Well the demos on Doolittle 25 can give you a glimpse into a world where Doolittle was made in a similar way to Surfer Rosa, or even Come On Pilgrim. The demos are even all laid out helpfully in the same order as the original album. When it comes to the Pixies I believe they were not served as well by ‘polished’ production, or at least they were made less exciting by it.  That doesn’t mean I think they only worked as a raw grungy outfit, more that there are parts of Doolittle where it feels like the production is filling in some gaps that would have been left more intriguing let alone.  That works great for something quite bombastic like ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’, but not always.  ‘Tame’ is a great example of the production of Doolittle doing the song a disservice.  Listening to the demo of it, the heavy breathing from Frank Black is bestial and creepy.  On the album it sounds merely percussive.  And that’s fine – it is after all a matter of taste – but I find with a band as seminally weird as the Pixies I’d rather hear them being bestial and creepy than merely percussive.  I mean, the second half of Doolittle has some tracks that I’ve always thought of as filler pretty much, but the demos of 'No 13 Baby' and 'Hey' feel more like a brush with insanity and therefore more alive than the album versions. 

Admittedly, this is quite a specialist vindication of Doolittle 25.  It’s basically great news for Pixies fans who thought they got a bit tame after Surfer Rosa and wondered what it would have been like if they hadn’t.  The world is not full to the brim of people (especially in 2014) wondering that.  Doolittle 25 shows what a transitional album Doolittle was - it was apparently during the making of this album that Deal and Black learned to really loathe each other for instance (which is such a given now you tend to forget that they probably managed to be in the same room as each other for whole hours at a time).  So even though there’s a something a bit suspect about another reselling of a much-repackaged and resold (and tiny) back catalogue, I’ve chosen to forgive Doolittle 25 that.  I've chosen not to get up on my high horse and instead enjoy it for making an album I’ve always felt was slightly overrated make complete sense to me.

EPILEPSY: Epilepsy, Language and Political Correctness

Everyone seems to know the rules when it comes to other forms of disability but what could cause offence to an epileptic?

Well, for a start calling someone an epileptic is not the done thing anymore – that’s sufferer of epilepsy to you.  But I don’t blame you if you didn’t know, I didn’t until researching this post.  But I don’t think it is offensive in the same way that calling (for instance) someone a cripple could be.  And generally speaking I don’t think epilepsy has such a clear cut equivalent.

My epilepsy sometimes worries people when I mention I have it.  Because it is not something that people know a great deal about it tends to put people outside of their comfort zone.  Sometimes I see panic creep into someone’s face if it comes up in conversation and they realise they don’t know what to say about it.  Quite often the urban myths and misinformation that are more famous than facts rush to the surface, and common comments tend to be of the “Ah, so you have to be careful around flashing lights then do you?” variety.  But there aren’t many words that someone would say in conversation that would have me intervening to say “Excuse me, I suffer from epilepsy and find that offensive.” 

Brainstorm - Bad?

Thought-shower - Good?

The closest there is to an offensive word connected with epilepsy in common usage is ‘brainstorm’.  Brainstorm originally meant – according to Wikipedia – “a state of temporary insanity”, which is presumably why it is deemed offensive.  Offensive, that is, if it’s used to describe a seizure.  But I have never heard this usage before, and I suspect most people haven’t.  It was, apparently, quite common in the 19th century, but hasn’t been in this context for a very long time.  Brainstorm now ‘means’ throwing ideas around and I’m willing to bet most people aren’t aware of this other usage.  Sporadically, overcautious but well-meaning organisations will suggest replacing the term brainstorm with ‘thought-shower’ in their meetings.  I am all for political correctness - I really am, I think on the whole political correctness is an attempt to make sure language is inclusive.  But trying to replace ‘brainstorm’ as a term is just tilting at windmills.  It’s also overwhelmingly considered non-offensive by people with epilepsy in studies.  In fact it causes offensive in its own way because it suggests that epileptics (or, sufferers of epilepsy) have skins as thick as a sheet of paper. 

This leads into a larger issue – people are less likely to be offended by specific words than they are by the way that they are spoken to or treated.  As someone memorably tweeted me, “I don't get annoyed by jokes and such. What irks me are those that think I've the IQ of a turnip because I'm epileptic.”  Exactly.  Words and jokes without any malicious intent are absolutely fine by me – something much more likely to really annoy or upset is, for instance, someone talking about me as if I’m not there when I’m coming round from a seizure.  There isn’t really that much in terms of language which is specifically and of itself offensive to people with epilepsy, the thing that will cause offense is ignorance and and ignorant behaviour, which is not unique to epilepsy or even to any disability but which is something that anyone in any minority group has to deal with at some point in their lives.  Actions speak louder than words, and I’d rather be treated respectfully and sympathetically and hear myself described as ‘being epileptic’ or ‘having a brainstorm’ than be spoken down to or ignored.

Oddly in a way, the terms which have been deemed as being most potentially offensive regarding epilepsy are the names given to seizures within the medical community until relatively recently – Grand Mal and Petit Mal.  These terms translate roughly from French as ‘Great Evil’ and ‘Small Evil’ which is certainly outdated and unsophisticated.  Grand Mal seizure were how seizures involving convulsions were described, and Petit Mal referred to seizures where people ‘zone out’ etc.  But it strikes me that these terms were phased out more because they were completely inadequate to keep up with the advances in epilepsy research over the last 50 years or so.  Over 20 different types of seizure have been identified to date, some relatively common and some much more obscure, but clearly an upgrade in language would have been necessary regardless of any potential inappropriateness of meanings. 

Of course, my cultural perspective is as someone living in a Western, first world country.  In some countries, the idea of epilepsy being to do with the literal seizure of someone’s mind by demons persists. I suppose in such cultures the descriptions of the condition as involving Great Evils or Small Evils might seem a sophisticated way of describing it, as in some countries there is no word for it.  The UK generally speaking might be ill-informed when it comes to epilepsy, but it is also aware of it as a mental health condition and not a spiritual malady.  Which is definitely a good start.

To end, a Medieval description of epilepsy before the word epilepsy was coined was ‘The Falling Sickness’.  I rather like the idea of having ‘The Falling Sickness’ – it sounds quite quaint and makes it sound as if my main problem is tripping over my feet all the time, like a cross between having a neurological disorder and being Norman Wisdom…

With thanks to @themockedturtle for their tweet.  For more information about epilepsy, please visit the Epilepsy Society and Epilepsy Action websites.