You know, I didn’t like Sir Ian Blair until he started locking up Tories. Shame to see him going now, really…
A political row erupted last night after counter-terrorism police arrested the shadow Home Office minister, Damian Green, after he published leaked documents allegedly sent to the Tories by a government whistleblower.
An angry David Cameron condemned the arrest as “Stalinesque”, after Green was taken into custody at about 1.50pm in his Ashford constituency and escorted to a central London police station.
A Tory source said: “David Cameron is angry.”
I’d love to see that. I bet his silly little voice gets all squeaky and his chubby little cheeks go all pink. Does plasticine melt when it gets hot…?
George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, told the BBC: “To hide information from the public is wrong.”
Quite right, that man: you should never try to hide embarrassing stuff.
Now Gideon Osborne (for that is George’s real name - he just hides the fact) is, of course, a former member of the Bullingdon Club, the “exclusive” drinking club comprised of wealthy Oxford undergraduates who go around kicking in (other people’s) chairs and knocking down (other people’s) tables for laughs.
That’s the same Bullingdon Club of which his chums Posh Boy Dave Cameron and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson were also members.
(Oh, and that Nat Rothschild chap: he’s the one with the fantastically popular yacht.)
The same Bullingdon Club that somehow persuaded the photographers Gillman & Soame (the copyright holder) to withdraw permission for the reproduction of the group photograph of 1986 Bullingdon members showing Posh Boy Dave and Boris in full Buller costume.
In March 2007, the photographers’ line was that it had taken a “policy decision” not to allow any school photographs they own to be published.
Of course, if Gillman & Soame had copyright issues in March 2007, you have to wonder how this…
The upshot is that, while Damian Green’s arrest was ridiculous, I’ll take lessons in freedom of information from this particular morally bereft bunch of Tories when the Leader of the Opposition is prepared to allow the electorate to see photographs of precisely what he got up to when he was 19 years old.
And tells the world when he last did blow…
PBD and Gideon interact with some proles, yesterday
So here we are - two years older and absolutely none the wiser.
Two years ago today a little post emerged blinking into the light, creating what has become the globe-bestriding multimedia behemoth that is The Ministry.
From nought to 20.8 daily visitors in just 732 days: British design at its best. It’s like the Millennium Dome, only losing slightly less money. (Mind you, if I’d been organised enough to keep track of what I’d spent on this site over the past 24 months I’m sure it would run to £300. That could have bought some really nice bottles of single malt…)
The number of gratuitous expletives used in posts is too large to count, but “titwank”, “fuckwittedness”, “prick” (twice), “shite” (twice), “bollocks”, “shit”, “arsehole”, “cunt” and ”fuck/fucking/fucked” (a remarkable eight times) all feature entirely gratuituously in post titles. (Sometimes swearing is both big and clever…)
Nicky Fucking Campbell has been the person insulted most by the Minister during the past two years, closely followed by Mr. Tony Bliar. (An honorable mention for a late challenge for this title goes to Sarah Palin.)
There has, I regret, been some repetition.
We’ve had two posts entitled “And still there never seems to be a single penny left for me…“, in January 2007 and a year later. We’ve had three “Blue Monday“s (December 2007, January 2008 and September 2008). Early doors we had two “Crash, bang, wallop“s, in January and March 2007. There were posts called “Reality Bites” in both August and December 2007.
I was a little careless in September and October 2008 when I created two posts both entitled “Never Miss A Beat“. I quoted “The public gets what the public wants” from Going Underground in both January and May 2007.
The Ministry has had two hosts, moving from DesignRWeb to AN Hosting over Christmas 2007.
The Ministry has sported four different themes over the past 24 months, though dark.cash - the current theme and also the launch theme - has prevailed for 21 of those months after a few theme-related disasters…
And on that point, there was supposed to be a new, bespoke theme to the Ministry to mark this date.
And all was going remarkably well. I’d pre-planned things and left myself plenty of time; I’d designed the way I wanted the Ministry to look; I’d found a freelance developer; we’d agreed terms; I’d paid the project funds into escrow; and the developer was happily coding away.
So unfortunately we’ve lost contact due to the general lack of things like electricity and a functioning telecommunications infrastructure in Jaffna at the moment.
I’d like my new theme, of course, but I’m kind of just hoping that our boy is OK and I’m not selfish enough to hand the job to someone else just because we’ve missed this artificial deadline.
So while the Minister is in rude health and fine spirits on this anniversary, the gardens of some of his associates are a little less rosy: Bagerathan - I hope you’re back online soon.
I’m surprised I’ve stuck at this for so long but I’ve really rather enjoyed it all told, so here’s to at least two years more.
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’s a mystery gi-i-i-i-rl!
[4:05-4:15]
For Ministers of a certain age, Roy Orbison was one of many childhood musical figures of fun.
Through the mid to late Seventies, the same old faces would do the rounds of awful light entertainment shows, miming to one of two or three prehistoric hits to pay the mortgage.
If it was Gene Pitney, it meant we were about to hear Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa or Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart. Lonnie Donegan’s dad was a dustman or had something to do with a gap in Cumberland. Tom Jones didn’t exist outside the narrow confines of What’s New, Pussycat?, It’s Not Unusual or The Green, Green Grass Of Home. And Shirley Bassey would send me running from the room before she could bellow the second syllable of Goldfinger or Big Spender.
The final column around which British variety TV shows were built in 1970s Britain was Roy Orbison. Every few months he’d turn up, standing motionless, dressed head to toe in black, eyes and any emotion hidden behind sunglasses, miming the bizarre and alien cadences of Only The Lonely, Crying or Oh, Pretty Woman (”Mercy!”) before silently sloping away once more. For some reason, there did not seem to be a more disconsolate human being on the planet.
Contrary to the Minister’s recollection,
Roy Orbison did sometimes wear
something other than black in the Seventies
I’m sure I even recall Orbison turning up on more than one edition of The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, which might as well have been filmed at the Working Men’s Club at the top of my street (a glass of shandy and a packet of salt and vinegar on a Saturday afternoon while my grandfather watched the ITV Seven) and was mainly noted for Bernard Manning crooning pre-war ballads most weeks. (Yes, really.)
Like Diana Dors’ predictable chat show innuendo these singers seemed principally to exist, without discernible contemporary achievement, to remind adults of a bygone time when they had to make their own entertainment by candlelight. Nothing more, nothing less - the routine never changed and these people had nothing original or relevant to offer me. The BBC strike in late 1978 and the four-month-long ITV strike of 1979 at least meant we had to find something else to watch for a while…
WIth the benefit of hindsight and maturity - though I still have nothing good to say about Shirley Bassey - I’ve come to realise that Pitney and Orbison were great songwriters, that Donegan is the bridge between rock’n'roll and The Beatles, that Jones was a brilliant entertainer and - above everything else - that Roy Orbison possessed one of the two best white male voices in pop music.
Roy Orbison, smiling
(almost certainly pre-1966)
If you look up the adjective ‘tragic’ in a dictionary of popular culture, the definition is replaced by a picture of Roy Orbison: if he looked disconsolate and sounded desolate, it was because he had every right to be. When Orbison sang that he was crying or that it was over, he knew what every word of it meant: his wife died in a motorcycle accident in 1966 and less than two years later his house burnt to the ground, killing two of his three sons.
Writing in the wonderful The Heart Of Rock And Soul, Dave Marsh says of Orbison:
If Phil Spector is pop music’s truest romantic and John Fogarty its greatest fatalist, Roy Orbison stands as its ultimate stoic. Maybe he wore those shades all the time to disguise the fact that he never blinked no matter what you threw at him… Orbison was different than any other rock star of his period. He was relatively middle-class, college-educated and on easier terms with more kinds of music - opera and Mexican ballad singing, for instance - than any of his peers. His songs possess a psychological complexity that is commonly believed not to have existed in pop music until Dylan and the Beatles… No other singer with this much range displays anything like Orbison’s complete emotional commitment - when Roy sings ‘from this moment I’ll be crying,’ there’s no reason to believe that the tears will ever stop.
According to Dylan, writing in the sleeve notes to the posthumous compilation The Very Best Of Roy Orbison:
Orbison… transcended all the genres. With Roy, you didn’t know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes… [He sang] his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal… His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, ‘Man, I don’t believe it’. His songs had songs within songs. Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn’t anything else on the radio like him.
Bolero, chanson, opera, mariachi, symphony - not words ordinarily associated with rock and roll, but all of which can be applied to Orbison’s oeuvre. No wonder it confused the young Minister.
Orbison placed nine singles within the Billboard Top Ten in the five years from 1960, with even greater chart success in Europe and Australia, but for twenty years after that Orbison floundered, consigned to the clubs and variety shows.
One of the unlikeliest musical career revivals ever began in 1986 when In Dreams featured in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet; a year later, another movie song - a re-recording of Crying with k.d. lang - would earn Orbison a Grammy Award; in 1988 Orbison would join Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne in The Travelling Wilburys and record Mystery Girl, his first album of new solo material in over a decade.
Orbison in 1988
After performing this new material in concert just a handful of times, Roy Orbison would die - literally of a broken heart - on 6 December 1988, at the age of just 52.
Mystery Girl was released two months later to levels of critical acclaim and commercial success that had eluded Orbison for two decades: The Travelling Wilburys Vol. 1 and Mystery Girl would simultaneously reside in the top five of the Billboard album chart in early 1989. A few months later, filming began on a Richard Gere-Julia Roberts movie that would introduce Orbison to a whole new generation, with Oh, Pretty Woman earning him the 1991 Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.
In 1989, Orbison was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall Of Fame and in 1998 he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. A year later, Only The Lonely and Oh, Pretty Woman were inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame; Crying joined them in 2002. In 2004, those three songs and In Dreams made Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time.
Mystery Girl is a splendidly fulfilling album, recalling Orbison’s heyday without sounding like self-pastiche. His voice soars as high and strong as ever within well constructed and sympathetically arranged songs. The most successful single from the album - You Got It - revives the timpani of It’s Over and the twanging guitar of Oh, Pretty Woman - and its co-author and producer Jeff Lynne for once resists the temptation to make his subject sound like the Electric Fucking Light Orchestra.
She’s A Mystery To Me (CD single)
The album’s crown jewel, though, is She’s A Mystery To Me, penned for Orbison by U2’s Messrs. Hewson and Evans. At the end of the Eighties, Bono and Edge had a penchant for penning persistent ballads, initially driven by gentle percussion and noodling guitars that build inexorably to a dramatic and climactic crescendo: She’s A Mystery To Me comes from the same place as The Joshua Tree’s With Or Without You (1987) and Rattle And Hum’s All I Want Is You (1988). It stands apart from its siblings, though, in that it swoops and soars across a wider span of octaves than Bono could ever manage himself, taking full advantage of Orbison’s magnificent range.
Like most of Bono’s output, the lyrics deserve barely a moment’s consideration; like a lot of Evans’ music of that period, it would drone tediously without a hearty vocal performance to propel it upwards.
It’s not until after the first verse that Orbison first begins to cut loose [1:00-1:10], but that’s only a tease. There is no chorus as such - merely the repetition of the line “She’s a mystery girl,” in a higher range - and first time around Orbison rocks even more gently than Val Doonican. Producer Bono allows the song to fall back to the verse and Orbison’s voice falls two full octaves for the next 40 seconds. From 1:55 to 2:15, we’re back at the ‘chorus’: his voice of necessity emboldened to rise above the rising waves of cymbals, guitar and piano, Orbison now takes the line out for four walks around the block and his power up to 50%.
Still we’re not where we need to be. We need to summon all our strength for the final push over the top, and a gently tinkling piano line atop Edge’s guitar motif gives us time to draw breath [2:17-2:22]. During the final verse, Bono introduces a string section [from 2:25] to swell the ranks further for the last battle; from 2:44 a snare drum signals the final stage of an introduction that takes three minutes and six seconds to take the listener to the Promised Land, the place where Roy draws in a lungful of air and lets rip. One final crash of cymbals [3:06] and our boy’s away.
Power, passion, vibrato and falsetto - from 3:07 Orbison gives it the ghostly, full-throated works for almost a minute. There is no question about this girl’s mystery when Roy seemingly lets the matter rest at 3:59.
But after a few seconds of the band playing on, the musicians almost audibly astonished by the singer’s efforts [3:59-4:05], The Big O hits the very highest note one last time - for two bars, across five full seconds [from 4:05] - and the hairs on the back of the neck stand up to applaud.
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’s a mystery gi-i-i-i-rl!
Singer and band spiritually and physically spent, that last word - extended to five distinct syllables [4:12-4:14] - masks their exhaustion. In those two seconds the percussion, guitar, piano and bass all fall silent. When Roy lets go the last sound he has, just a solitary violin string fading into the background [4:15-4:16] brings matters to a conclusion.
Neither Roy Orbison nor U2’s best song, She’s A Mystery To Me nevertheless archives two talents at the height of their games.
Immense, beautiful and haunting - there has been no other sound in pop music like Roy Orbison.
Conscious that I keep banging on about wanting to write about music more than I do here, this is my entry in Upstart Blogger’s Inner Circle competition in the popular music culture section.
I really don’t like Robert Peston. It’s not yet pathological, like it is with Campbell, but the sheer crap this man spouts takes some beating. Take his latest treatise:
Although Woolworth had been one of the UK’s weaker retailers for years - propped up by a decade of benign, debt-fuelled trading conditions which we now know to have been unsustainable - it was done in by a sudden deterioration both in the real economy and in financial markets that took hold four weeks ago.
“…debt-fuelled trading conditions which we now know to have been unsustainable…”
“…which we nowknow to have been unsustainable…”
“…we now know…”
Do you see what I’m getting at?
Here’s a man who is employed because of his supposed expertise in business affairs.
And he is seemingly admitting that, until four weeks ago, he didn’t know that living on tick was no way to run a chip shop, let alone the global economy.
And for this stunning lack of insight, he must be trousering at least £75,000 a year in taxpayers’ money for his day job and supplementing that significantly with books and public speaking events.
Come to think of it, maybe he does know a thing or two about business after all…
Cock it. If ever a radio station lost its way, it’s BBC Radio Five Barely Alive:
BBC Radio 5 Live will make changes to its morning schedule from the New Year, it was announced today.
The new schedule includes a changed role for Nicky Campbell who will once again take calls from listeners in an extended 5 Live Breakfast.
Campbell, who hosted the 5 Live phone-in between 1997 and 2003, will take an hour of calls from listeners on the big news story of the day between 9.00 and 10.00am in a reshaped breakfast programme.
5 Live Breakfast is extended, from 6.00 to 10.00am weekdays, with current co-host Shelagh Fogarty opening the programme at 6.00am, and Nicky Campbell joining her at 7.00am.
Victoria Derbyshire’s programme (weekdays, 10.00am-1.00pm) will focus on original journalism – much of it coming direct from 5 Live listeners.
Midday News on 5 Live is now taken out of the schedule but Aasmah Mir will continue to be an important part of 5 Live’s team of presenters, hosting a range of programmes on the station over the coming months.
Nicky Campbell said: “It’s great to be taking calls from listeners and hosting debate which I love doing, and still to be able to work with Shelagh is a double bonus.”
Still, it’s less time for him to spend on his writing career, I suppose.
A vanity Google search last night revealed that, on 22 September, my (real) name appeared on a Wikipedia entry for an organisation with which I was involved some time back.
The problem is that the entry is factually erroneous and I don’t know whether or not to correct it.
It’s not a big or significant error but it is nevertheless inaccurate - whoever made the entry has taken two separate details and conflated them. (The BBC got into trouble for that just the other day.)
It’s not malicious and it’s the sort of mistake one could easily make nearly two decades after the fact, but - despite having embraced the digital revolution - I was still brought up to believe that an encyclopedia entry should be accurate.
Now, the Minister has not spawned: if I fall under a bus tomorrow, this could be my legacy. And it’s wrong. Which troubles me.
Perhaps I should just have another cup of tea and do some work.
Excluding the freak results from The Day Of The Wikileak and visits from search engine robots, the Ministry is somehow attracting an average of 20.8 visitors each day - 603 in 29 days.
76% of these visitors come from the United Kingdom, with the United States of Yankee Doodle the next most frequent visitors (accounting for 11% of traffic). However, the Ministry has stamped visas from residents of Canada, Iceland, Australia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, Singapore, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland and Poland.
Three-quarters of visitors spend 0-5 minutes wandering the corridors, but 6% stay here for more than 20 minutes. (Why? Even I don’t find it that interesting…)
59% of visitors are running Windows XP as their operating system, 18% run Windows Vista, 17% are Mac converts and 4% use various flavours of Linux.
46% use Firefox to browse the Ministry, 39% inexplicably favour Internet Explorer, 11% opt for Safari and 2% use Google’s new Chrome browser. Sadly just 0.5% of visitors use Opera, which is arguably the best of the lot.
61% of visitors find the Ministry because of search engines (with Google accounting for very nearly all of that traffic), while 30% of the site’s visitors arrive here directly, suggesting more than 20 people have the site bookmarked (assuming they visit 2-3 times a week). 5% come here following links on Facebook, of which I am not a member.
Very few searches come up more than once, but one that regularly appears is for variations of the name Renee Fladen-Kamm. Amazingly, the most popular page of the Ministry - apart from the home page - is that containing SMIP #8, the story of Walk Away Renee: this page accounts for a full 12% of the site’s traffic. Billy Bragg’s never been so popular.
Among the more unlikely Google searches that have led here in the past month have been “sue grabbit run”, “thesauretical”, “alec baldwin 30 rock meat locker” and “mouthofthemersey”.
And to complete the stat attack, I’ve been intrigued to learn about my visitors’ screen resolutions. The most popular screen resolution for visitors is 1024 pixels x 768 pixels (24%), followed by 1280×1024 (18%), 1280×800 (15%), 1440×900 (12%), 1152×864 (10%) and 1680×1050 (5%). I’m not sure what this means but for some reason I find it mildly piques my interest.
As I said the other day, the thing I find most amazing is that the Ministry pulls in any visitors at all other than the ten or so people to whom I have given the URL, at least one of whom - and I’m looking at you, Minister’s Wife, even if you’re not looking at this - has forgotten it.
I do not advertise or promote the Ministry and never have done, apart from having had three t-shirts printed for myself, one for Domdeplume and one for julesallen. (Bearded_baby is owed one, too, but has still not told me his t-shirt size: this may be because that information is increasingly embarrassing to him…) I have left one trackback link on Popdose but otherwise this site is invisible, which is just how I like it.
Nevertheless it’s gratifying that anyone finds the site intriguing enough to read it at all, let alone to return regularly, and I’m grateful that you would spend your time here.
So hello, thanks for stopping by and do please feel free to contribute: everyone is welcome - we’re an equal opportunity Ministry. Unless you’re Nicky Fucking Campbell.
Robert Peston - with his bizarrely pompous (some deliciously call it “ragged and querulous”) delivery manner and risible dyed hair - is Britain’s hack du jour.
If there’s a financial story to be broken he’ll break it, despite apparently having the economic gravitas of Derek Trotter.
So it’s amusing to note that, last Friday afternoon, this prediction appeared on Peston’s blog:
So which taxes will rise?
Well my prediction is VAT… [A] deferred increase from 17.5% to 22.5% in the VAT rate would raise around £20bn.
This list, mes braves, is why I love the now-on-hiatus Popdose.
(Even if at least 78 of the 100 are wrong.)
How wonderful to see this particular gem finally recognised, too:
17. Nick Lowe, “Cruel to Be Kind”
Nick Lowe has become known for many things in his time: writing “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” one of Elvis Costello’s signature songs (see #88 below); earning a cool million in royalties when Curtis Stigers covered it for the soundtrack toThe Bodyguard in 1992; having his single “Heart of the City” be the first ever released on Stiff Records; producing the first British punk album ever released (the Damned’s Damned Damned Damned); being Johnny Cash’s son-in-law; and rhyming “Rick Astley” with “ghastly.” For the members of the general populace who aren’t card-carrying music geeks, however, Nick Lowe is just the guy who sings “Cruel to Be Kind,” but, really, that’s a pretty decent credit to have on your resumé in and of itself. Backed by fellow former Rockpile members Dave Edmunds, Billy Bremner, and Terry Williams, “Cruel” — which he cowrote with another Brinsley-Schwarz alumni, Ian Gomm — possesses a hook that has been stuck in people’s heads since they first heard in 1978, but it also has lyrics that sneak up on you with their profundity about the cyclical nature of a love-hate relationship. “You say your love is bona fide, but that don’t coincide with the things that you do,” sings Lowe. “And when I ask you to be nice, you say you’ve gotta be cruel to be kind in the right measure.” Although this is ostensibly “a very, very, very good sign,” our hero continues to pick himself back off the ground, only be knocked back down again and again until the song fades to a close. So does that make us romantic sadists for wanting to sing along? –Will Harris
