To Be Frank

The Seventh of August Two Thousand and Eleven. Sunday. 

A couple of things came together in the last couple of days that made me think about somebody else no longer with us. I was in the shower this morning when the strains of Guess Who’s Been on Match of the Day came on the shuffle. This, along with finding among my vinyl LPs as I tidied up Cam’s room/the-room-with-all-the-unpacked-boxes-in-my-flat the superb double album 5:9:88 (among others)

  led me to recall with affection and admiration Mr Frank Sidebottom, the Bard of Timperley. With his giant papier maché head and nasal voice he was a cartoon character come to life.

 

Frank was more than just a novelty act. Brilliantly funny as his mangled cover versions of Anarchy in the UK and I Should Be So Lucky were (each inevitably ending with a variation on the phrase ‘You know it is, it really is. Thank you.’) there was a sharp musical sensibility behind all the nonsense that had been honed by Frank creator Chris Sievey’s time around the Manchester music scene – notably with The Freshies (anybody remember I’m in Love With a Girl from a Certain Manchester Megastore Checkout Desk?). One of Frank’s own songs, Airplay (currently available compilation CD E, F, G & H (itself a follow up to compilation A, B, C & D – both albums obviously forming my Fifth Music Recommendation) is a very witty and effective (as well as catchy) dissection of a formula pop song. There was a lot of understated genius in Frank’s work. 

No there wasn’t. He was bobbins. 

Shut up, Little Vin, no he wasn’t. Sorry, I made the mistake of leaving my Blogging Puppet, Little Vin, near the keyboard while I made a cuppa. 

Oo, it wasn’t a cuppa. You went and made a crisp butty even though you’ve only had your tea five minutes ago.

No I didn't, Little Vin! Anyway, you're not supposed to be typing on here!

Oh, why not?

Because, er, your hands are made of cardboard and I do all your bits.

Oh blimey!

Frank was often assisted on his records and shows by Little Frank and his puppet pals Little Denise (who had her head stolen, never to be replaced) and Little Buzz Aldrin the American space puppet. It was, as Frank proudly boasted, a ventriloquist act where nobody's lips moved. Other members of the puppet entourage included Breville Toaster Frank ('Sandwiches!') and Amoeba Frank, the one-celled ventriloquist puppet. Little Frank would constantly undermine his big counterpart and often a  huge argument would ensue ('You stupid, stupid puppet!). In live performances, sympathy would invariably go toward Little Frank at which point Big Frank would point out that he was the one doing his voice.

A good old google will tell you everything you need to know about Frank's World (from Radio Timperley on Piccadilly Radio to his Proper Telly Show in Black and White (with repeats in colour) on Manchester cable tv station Channel M). Caroline Aherne's Mrs Merton, Chris Evans, Mark Radcliffe and writer Jon Ronson were all associates of Frank at one time or another. Here's an article from 2006 by Ronson who was a member of the Oh Blimey Big Band. I saw them perform at the Ritz in Manchester and I'm not kidding, they rocked. Hit the North took the roof of the place.

Here's his comic strip in Oink.

My best memory of Frank is a personal one. Way back when, I was going out with my then girlfriend for a night at the (now demolished) Oakwood pub in Salford. There's been a power cut and so no-one was allowed to go in. To kill some time we went to the phone box around the corner. I had remembered that on Frank's Timperley EP he had done his own version of Pennsylvania 6-5000 entitled Timperley 969 1909 at the end of which Little Frank had berated him for giving out his phone number to the public.


'Nobody'll bother, they know it's showbiz,' assured Frank.

So I put me 10p in (that's how long ago it was!) and rang the number, thinking maybe there'd be an answerphone or the like at best.


'Hello!' came the nasal greeting on the other end of the line.


'Oh, hello, Frank,' I said. 'I didn't expect you to answer. I thought it was just a joke.'


'Oh no, boss,' Frank replied. 'It's serious. If me mum ever found out I was in showbiz she'd give me what-for.'


According to Yell.com that number is now for a business called Rhino Frames. I wonder if they still get pestered by Frank fans. I'm not going to ring to find out.


I thanked Frank and wished him well, slightly shell-shocked that I'd got to speak to the man himself. I wish I'd been as bold more recently. A few years ago Frank played Scarborough and I didn't bother going, not wanting to go on my own. I later found out a couple of friends from work had gone (one of them winning Little Denise's body in the raffle!) on spec and had been bemused by the whole affair. I'm really going to have to work on that shyness.

Right that's the end of programmes for tonight. I'll hand over to the testcard.

There will be more soonliest, actually.


You know there will. There really will.


Thank you.

Tin Anniversary

The Thirtieth of June Two Thousand and Eleven. Thursday.

Ten years ago I got married. It was a perfect day. We wed in a registry office to the sound of Colin Vearncombe (aka Black, my Fourth Music Recommendation (actually, Colin gave one of the best gigs I've ever been to in Stockton some years back, but that's another story...)), we ate at the Ivanhoe pub, our friends and I walked down to the beach and spent the afternoon by the sea and we all ended the day with chippy chips. It was magical.

I mentioned about our strange wedding night in the Windmill Hotel here.

Today the relationship status part of my Facebook profile - the only true indicator of where one is at in these uncertain times - reads 'single'. Although we are still married, I suspect this will be our last anniversary. We have lived apart for nearly 2 years - when we have that will be sufficient grounds for divorce.


I'm not going to go into the many and sordid reasons we broke up. Suffice to say it wasn't a decision taken lightly, as it shouldn't be when children are involved. But we are both committed to providing the best for our family and we are both still friends so we've tried to navigate these choppy waters as best we can.

But the thoughts still remain: was the marriage a mistake? Were the problems always there? Could it have been saved? Who's the villain?

Well, I suspect the answer to that last one is me. Consequently, I feel as though I have to put things right somehow. That there's still some way to 'fix' this. On my worst days it's crushing to realise that any opportunity to steer things back on course has passed. So you do the adult thing - you take the best of what the situation has to offer and you move on. Taking me a little while to do that, but I'm getting there.

A mistake? It might have been less hurtful in the end if we weren't married, but there was more than enough good stuff before that to make up for it. Could those good times ever come again? That's the tragedy - the acceptance of the fact that the future is more likely to be full of the worse parts again, not the better. So it's better to let go. But to never have tried? Surely love thrives on the hope that it's worth it all. And if you don't try then that hope never sees light of day. It's cruel when it's dashed, but while that hope is there anything's possible - that belief at the beginning is priceless. How can there be anything wrong in giving hope its due.

So I'll let me express my feelings through the medium of the theramin. There are things I might have done differently but no, I regret nothing.

More soonliest.

A Circle in a Spiral, A Wheel Within a Wheel

The Twelfth of June Two Thousand and Eleven. Sunday.

It occurs to me that now might be a good time to explain the title of this blog.

I'm always fascinated by the echoes and patterns that turn up in people's lives. I don't believe in Fate, but it's strange how there's something like it in the way we group our experiences together and try to make something out of it. We latch on to an idea and soon we see it reiterated in other parts of our life.

And that's why I like windmills.

I couldn't tell you the first time they figured in my life, but they seem to be all over the place.

Since I share my name with Meneer Van Gogh the noted artist I thought I might find inspiration for my blog in his paintings. I wondered if he'd used a windmill for a subject and was pleased to find that he had painted several during his time in Paris. Both Vincent and the windmills lived in Montmartre, and the Blute Fin (the name comes from the French verb Bluter - to sift, the flour that was ground there) is still there today. Here's its Facebook page.

One of these paintings made the news in Feb 2010 when it was finally attributed to Van Gogh some 35 years after it was claimed as his work.

In fact if you put the name of this blog into Google it'll try and give you one of the other Vincent's pages instead of mine. The cheek.

Windmills have turned up elsewhere in my life too. I used to meet my ex-girlfriend for lunch in the Windmill pub in Swinton. I wonder if it's still there...

(Apparently it was in 2008)

I'm a big fan of They Might Be Giants (oh, they're probably going to figure here a few times on this blog and rightly so. Going to see them next month so let's make one of their fab new tracks Can't Keep Johnny Down the Third Music Recommendation). They took their name from a 1971 film starring George C Scott and Joanne Woodward, where he thinks he's Sherlock Holmes and she's his psychiatrist named Dr Watson. The film takes its name from Don Quixote tilting at (you've guessed it) windmills because he thought they might be, well, giants. I've got Don Quixote resting on my bookshelf unread, but I'm down with the whole 'impossible dream' thang. I can dig that.

And of course I courted my first wife with the promise of finding a disused windmill on a housing estate in Kidsgrove. Ah there it is. Although you might be able to see it better from here.

We even spent our wedding night at the Windmill Hotel in Scarborough

Our key wouldn't work in the door so we had to spend an hour in the Toy Museum they used to have downstairs drinking tea while they called out an emergency locksmith. Nice breakfast, though.

So I have something of an affinity for windmills.

I also like octopuses, but any mollusc-related thoughts must wait until another day.

More soonliest

Reasons to Stay Indoors

The Seventh of June Two Thousand and Eleven. Tuesday.

I don't like this day quite as much as I used to.

Where's my spy camera? Where's my spy camera? Where's my SPY CAMERA!?

Always seems like a bit of a risk ordering something from Amazon Marketplace rather than the main site. Yes, you can read the reviews and what have you but when they don't say they're going to post immediately it can be a bit worrying. And all to save a couple of quid. Was it worth it?

The item in question is a CD and DVD combo of a-ha's farewell concert in Oslo entitled Ending on a High Note. I went to see the Manchester leg of the same tour. A bittersweet experience. It's always a shame when a band you admire decides to call it a day. You can take some solace in their solo work, but it never seems quite the same. Think about it - George Michael was never much cop after Andrew Ridgeley packed up his goodies and surfed off into the sunset.

The top Norwegian songsters split for the first time back in the early 90s. Not long after Morten Harket brought out a solo album called Wild Seed. There are some good songs on there, and you've got MH's extraordinary voice (there you go. I bet you didn't know that the MH in Vin MH stood for 'Morten Harket', did you? Neither did I...) but it's missing something.

Mostly what it's missing is the song writing skills of Paul and Magne. Especially Paul. He went on to found the group Savoy along with his wife, Lauren. There's a real sense on their albums of him cutting loose with the stuff he really wants to do and has been unable to in a-ha. But the fact remains, as good as Paul's voice is it's not as striking as Morten's.

(Nevertheless, I think Savoy are the most satisfying of the a-ha spinoffs so my Second Music Recommendation is their 'best of' collection Savoy Songbook Vol1)

I saw that Queen documentary that was on over the Bank Holiday the other day. It was the same there too. There's something about the tension in these groups that helps produce their best work when they're recording together. The solo stuff is a bonus but it never seems to completely cut it.

A couple of compare and contrasts to finish off with.

The original Savoy version of Velvet from 1996 and a-ha's 2000 cover version.

Magne's song The Longest Night with a chorus added by Paul to make Foot of the Mountain.

More soonliest

Of Paper-Thin Walls and Loneliness

The Second of June  Two Thousand and Eleven. Thursday.

I don't live in Japan (one of the many places around the world I don't live) but I sympathise with the plight of some of their citizens. Sympathetic Resonance you might say as I am referring to the vibrations many Japanese have to endure what with there being all those earthquakes and that. My own bad vibrations (if you will (if you won't as well, really (what's that song by The Zutons called? You know, the one that goes 'you may, you might; your chest gets tight; you say you love day but you come out at night.' (checks iTunes) Oh. It is actually called You Will You Won't. Should've guessed that really (and I quite like the Zutons (and as I've said in an earlier blog I like A to Zs, so I've just been inspired to make a list called Autons to Zutons. Brilliant. That's tomorrow night's blog sorted out) but not enough to make them my First Music Recommendation. That will have to wait.)))) are due to the washing machine that lives upstairs entering its spin cycle ('and a tricycle has one more cycle than the washing machine'. Didn't have to wait long. Ladies and Gents, the First Music Recommendation is They Might Be Giants' kids album Here Come the 123s)

I think the washing machine lives alone. Certainly the post for the upstairs flat only ever says 'Mr W Machine' - there doesn't appear to be a Mrs Machine or anybody else at that address. But my other neighbours seem to have someone with which to share their life. This I know as their acts of congress have on occasion caused plates to rattle in my cupboards and windows to jiggle in their frames. It's all a bit like that scene in Delicatessen - which you might know better as my Fourth Film Recommendation.

I guess what I'm trying to say, what with all this talk of sympathy and what-have-you, is: don't worry. Everybody feels as lonely as a washing machine sometimes.

More soonliest.