Original post on Discline / Dial-a-Disc here
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Clock DVA - a name one associates with industrial music. Well, they were actually on Industrial Records , weren't they? Put out a cas...
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Okay, let's see how things had shifted, in terms of the canon, slightly more than a decade after the 1974 appraisal by the critics of t... -
Onto the third installment of this series - the NME 's list of the Greatest Albums of All Time, published on October 2 1993. Here, it... -
I have written before about the Drops Away Syndrome... that thing where artists seem supremely relevant and core-canonic at a particular mo...
I didn't realise Robert Smith was in Haircut 100. And Shakin' Stevens seems to be shakin' with rage. What song do you think triggered his ire?
ReplyDeleteEvery single song on that list is repugnant, with perhaps Paul Young the only bearable one.
DeleteHe's probably furious because there's no rockabilly among the options.
I have a perhaps perverse fondness for the Flying Pickets' take on Only You. The video to it shows that they were ardently serious about their performance (and their clothes in it are rather glam). And they were devoted to their socialism and trade unionism, a stance you rarely get in novelty songs. But according to Wikipedia, Thatcher avowed a fondness for their Only You.
DeleteI like the idea of Paul Young far more than the songs of Paul Young. I genuinely hope he's content with his life.
Wasn’t this the original intended business model for the telephone? People would be able to listen to concerts and plays being performed long distances away. It didn’t seem likely that people would just want to chat to each other.
ReplyDeleteIt’s funny that 140 years on, younger people - by which I mean anyone under about 40 - have rediscovered that early scepticism about using a phone to talk to people.
That's a bit like how Edison conceived the phonograph - a way for people to preserve the voice of loved ones after their death. Like a photograph album, for voices. Then it ends up being used for all these other things like music, speeches, poems, plays, comedy routines.
DeleteI expect the 'concerts down the phone' thing foundered on the very poor bandwidth and sound reproduction of the phone then.
History of technology is full of this blind alleys and schemes that never took off. Like the cassette magazines of the 1980s. I seem to remember someone trying to create a magazine you could access by a recorded phone line. And my publisher in Italy, Minimum Fax, I believe they actually started at the very beginning doing a magazine that would be sent to you via fax.
Wasn't British Telecom replete with such services in the early 80s, phone numbers for a joke of the day or the latest cricket scores? And wasn't this the period where British Telecom was considered a national joke, one of the worst examples of a poorly run nationalised industry? Discline seems evidence of both.
DeleteI don't know but Discline does seem like a hilariously misconceived service. Presumably anyone daft enough to use it regularly would quite quickly spend more than the cost of a single in phone charges.
DeleteIt is startling to think how lumbering telecommunications were in living memory in the UK. My mum was telling me that in the 1960s you often couldn't get a phone line put in, they didn't have enough bandwidth to support demand. You also had this thing, the party line, shared with other homes, so sometimes you'd pick it up and there'd be other people talking on it.
DeleteA lot of people relied on public phones. There's a charming period touch in that marvelous Steve McQueen film Lover's Rock - the girl and boy who met at a blues dance, they agree to go on a date, but to fix up the where and the when they agree for one of them to be at a particular public phone booth at a particular time. You had to make appointments to be there to receive a phone call - and of course, it's quite likely someone else will be in the phone box already, you might have to queue.
Then you had the whole thing of charges being different at different times of day. I remember from student days I had to phone my girlfriend back in my hometown after 6pm otherwise the machine would eat up all my coins very quickly. A lot of calls you would wait until the evening. I think they had three bands of charges and the morning was the most expensive.