Saturday 5 November 2011

Belated Musical Justice Corner #1: World of Science

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In news that’ll surely turn out to be terrible for our bank account, we’ve discovered the majesty of Soma.fm’s radio station Poptron. It’s a donation-funded internet radio station that plays nothing but “electropop and indie dance rock with sparkle and pop”. Speaking as the kind of infuriating hipster twots who can’t get enough of bands like Cut Copy, Datarock, MGMT, Hot Chip, Metric, Chromeo, Passion Pit, LCD Soundsystem, Royksopp, Yacht, Crystal Castles, Fischerspooner, New Young Pony Club, Au Revoir Simone and lots of other similar bands we could mention here in order to try and incrementally nudge up our Google search rankings for such terms, it’s proved to be a bit of an aural honey pot for our collective ears.

So, upon hearing it play a wonderful song by a band going by the excellent moniker of World of Science earlier this evening, we nimbly scampered over to the office PC to see if the song could be purchased without having to give any money to bloody sodding Apple. Luckily, it turns out that we could, but the story doesn’t end there (otherwise it’d be a really rubbish story) (Actually, it probably still will be.) (Remember when we used to be any good? Ages ago, wasn’t it?).

We discovered that by going to World of Science’s own website, anyone can currently buy an MP3 download of their debut (and sadly since the website hasn’t been updated since 2008, presumably only) album Makeout Songs for just FOUR DOLLARS AMERICAN. That’s just £2.49 of your actual Queen’s British Pounds. Go click on the ‘merch’ link of their website if you’d like to do so.

It’s so cheap you probably won’t even mind that the person making the songs available couldn’t be frigging well bothered ID3 tagging them remotely properly, or embedding album artwork in them so you’ll chuffing well have to re-tag them all yourself and then manually add the album artwork to them all from the image we helpfully paste just below! (Feel free to use that as a review quote if you’re reading this, guys.)

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Reader’s Voice; "But BrokenTV, much as we’re sure you’re correct in ordering us to do so, what with you being best at liking music and everything, is there any real reason we should be doing so?

As well you may ask, gentle viewer. Well, first up: our research suggests that World of Science are a hugely excellent band who quite staggeringly only have a meagre total of 760 listeners on Last.fm right now. This in a universe where Justin bloodycocking Bieber has around eleventy squillion followers on Twitter. Clearly, there is no God, but there is almost definitely a Satan.

Secondly, well… here’s a YouTube video of the marvellous album opener “You’re So Handsome”. Even though we had to just flippin’ well upload it ourselves to YouTube, as it wasn’t there already.

MUST WE BE RELIED ON TO FIX THE INTERNET EVERY TIME?

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Tuesday 1 November 2011

Whoever Said “You Don’t Always Get What You Want” Was Full Of SO Much Crap. Yes, We Mean You, Jagger. (Chris Serle and Windmill)

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Funny the things, eh?

Earlier this evening, in order to keep our hungry minds busy while cooking our dinner, we clicked on a Twitter link containing a ranked listing of every Simpsons Treehouse Of Horror Segment In The History Of Ever. From there, via a chance comment from Sweeping The Nation’s S Tyers, and us being followed back on Twitter by the co-writer and co-star of Adult Swim’s Fat Guy Stuck in Internet and NTSF:SD:SUV, we got thinking about just where we discovered a lot of our favourite classic British comedy programmes.Too young to remember the likes of Dave Allen At Large, Monty Python’s Flying Circus or It’s Marty when they first went out, we must have got into them from somewhere, right? But… from where? And there we remembered. It’s all down to the work of one man.

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Okay, not actually Griff Rhys Jones, but rather the person he’s parodying in the above clip from Alas Smith & Jones. Step forward former member of Esther’s nancies on That’s Life, sometime stooge of Dave Allen and (slightly surprisingly) the fleetingly glimpsed warmup for one of Paul Merton’s BBC Four documentaries on silent comedy, Mr Chris Serle. Back in the mid-to-late-1980s, Serle hosted a modest little show going out on BBC2 during Sunday lunchtimes, which was called Windmill. It might seem a little strange now, but in those days the concept of TV nostalgia was a pretty alien concept, with Windmill (the name taken from the location of the BBC-tv archive - Windmill Road, Brentford) offering one of the first delves into Auntie Beeb’s Big Box Of History the British public would ever get to see.

With the wealth of whatever-hadn’t-been-taped-over-yet to pick from, along with the “here’s a budget, now bugger off and make sixty minutes of whatever” ethos still present in Television Centre at the time, it made for a dizzying mix of enlightenment for a youthful television blog such as we. This was an innocent age where we’d been fooled into believing Copy Cats or The Grumbleweeds on early evening Granada was the pinnacle of light entertainment, so when we were confronted with the likes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, It’s Marty, Dave Allen At Large, Not Only But Also or Ripping Yarns, our tiny minds were literally blown away (not literally).

Sadly, it seemed the ephemeral nature of such a show would mean it no longer existed in any form. Surely? Hey, the clips themselves are now readily available in the form of the original broadcasts, why bother keeping footage of a guy in a jumper talking about them? NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF TELEVISION GEEKERY. Wikipedia contains a wonderfully concise episode guide of Windmill, and better yet, several segments of the show seem to have surfaced on YouTube. Such as: this lovely chat between host Chris Serle and Michael Palin taking place on the then-new Docklands Light Railway in east London. Splendid.

And to think, we got around to all that, just because we decided to busy ourselves with an article on The Simpsons while our dinner was OH BLOODY BOLLOCKING HECK.

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