Not Gonna Stop And I Won't Be Persuaded

Look, I'm old, I have no bloody idea who this guy is. He's written a song with a perfectly appropriate title, featuring the lines "I write songs that come from the heart / I don't give a fuck if they get into the chart," but when I look him up it turns out he's written one of the most Spotified songs of all time. Not that one, this one, which appears to be also the 29th most viewed video ever on YouTube. I feel like I might have heard it as background music in a Costa some time, but that's as far as I'm prepared to go. Does he actually ever breathe anything other than helium?

This is the level of cutting-edge cultural analysis that people have come to expect here since The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey first appeared on the internet 27 years ago today, on July 14th, 1998. Thanks to all of you who are still out there reading this nonsense. (And, at the same time, happy seventh birthday to this site's younger boozier offshoot, The Bermondsey Beer Mile.)

Let's hope that we're all still around for the 28 year celebration post: I feel like there might be a movie trailer currently doing the rounds that might do the job, but let's see if that's where I go with it.

BrewDogging #97: Bournemouth

One of my former Moderately Responsible Jobs In The Computer Industry was for a company that had a training centre in Bournemouth. I went there twice.

That there is the sum total of my knowledge concerning Bournemouth. Maybe it's about time I learned a bit more: especially since they've now got a BrewDog bar and a nearbyish winery, which corresponds quite nicely with our current interests.

Simian Substitute Site for July 2025: MNKY HSE

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR JUNE 2025

Books: I don't believe I've ever seen Matt Parker at the Edinburgh Fringe: in my head, he's one of those sort of people - specifically, a maths geek - who more regularly turns up at science-based events curated by Robin Ince. Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, that sort of thing. Well, it turns out that maths geekery also works well in book form - who knew? - and his 2019 one, Humble Pi, is currently our nighttime audiobook. Subtitled A Comedy Of Maths Errors, it was apparently the first mathematics-based book to top the Sunday Times bestseller list, and you can see why: it's a compendium of spectacular mistakes that people have made - a formula that's worked well since The Book Of Heroic Failures and possibly even earlier - but all of them involve the mishandling of numbers in one form or another. Parker's careful to make sure he explains these errors for a general audience: from the binary accident that means we may have another Y2K crisis in Y2K+38, to more mainstream grumbling about what happens when people treat Microsoft Excel as a database. He's determined to keep it light, which occasionally means that his jovial Australian tone remains unchanged whether he's discussing bodybuilders arguing about the number of days in the week or a bad exit door design leading to the deaths of 183 children, which can be a little alarming at times. But it's just the sort of lightweight listening you need at this time of year before you go to bed and fail to sleep because it's so bloody hot.

Music: Another Audio Lair playlist on Spotify (and YouTube links) for you all, and it's interesting that I'm finding it particularly easy this year to find ten new tracks a month that I'm enjoying. Okay, the more eagle-eared among you may have noticed that it's actually nine new tracks and one old one most months, but that's still a better hitrate than in previous years. Anyway, here they are: 

1. Peter Gabriel - taken from a small-scale live album that isn't afraid to delve into some of his deep cuts.
2. David Byrne - jolly enough, but you do wonder if Byrne is aware that Ylvis did a similar song several years ago called Everybody Farts.
3. Enkel - they're back, and they're providing English translations of their Finnish song titles, so world domination can't be too far away.
4. The The - nice though this is, I prefer the sheer joy of the harmonica in his original version, and hope this isn't his pitch for a John Lewis advert soundtrack at Christmas.
5. Bobby Conn - he's got a new record out, but I'm using that as an excuse to delve into his back catalogue and present one of the all-time great 'what the hell did I just watch?' videos.
6. Jerskin Fendrix - I only know the guy from his Poor Things soundtrack, so I'm keen to see what he can do when it comes to actual songs.
7. Half Man Half Biscuit - it's a song that may well have been reverse engineered from that one absolutely perfect line close to the end, but I don't see that as a problem.
8. Sheena Ringo - you know, even in Japan, when someone asks an established pop star to write a theme tune to a TV show, you don't expect something as magnificently all over the shop as this.
9. Tom Basden & Carey Mulligan - in a post-holiday catch-up binge, The BBG and I saw three movies over a single weekend, and The Ballad Of Wallis Island was the best. (The other two were Sinners and Tornado, if you're interested.)
10. Pulp - or Patchwork, as I guess we have to call them after Glasto. (See below.)

Telly: Once again, it's that time of year when I don't go to Glastonbury, and instead flick through all the BBC streams to watch any sets that particularly interest me. As usual, they only stay online for 30 days, so if you're reading this after the end of July 2025 the following links won't work any more. But anyway, these are the ones that I watched. I only saw two sets absolutely live: Self Esteem (easily the best staged thing I saw all weekend) and Pulp (who were listed on the bill as Patchwork, but everybody knew somehow). The rest were done as catchups after the fact, meaning we could time Ezra Collective for our Saturday night kitchen disco, and Cymande for our Sunday lunchtime chillout. I can also recommend Supergrass (still doing songs about getting into trouble with their mums in their fifties), CMAT (the weekend's best instance of an artist descending into the moshpit) and Doechii (frustratingly only available in audio, unless this eventually refreshes). Which just leaves Kneecap, because you know you want to. There's plenty of other acts that are probably worth a look while they're up on the iPlayer, although the rubbish navigation system makes you wish someone could come up with an alternative.

BrewDogging #96: Berlin Friedrichshain

Sunday April 20th
Happy Easter! Regular readers will know there are rules at this time of year. Wherever we are in the world, on Easter Sunday we watch a film that was either made or set in that place. And we're currently in Berlin - have been for the last couple of days, as discussed previously. The obvious slam-dunk choice for a Berlin film to watch today would be Wings Of Desire, but that seems just a smidge too obvious when there are so many others we could choose from (one of which we'll actually be seeing at the flicks tomorrow).

So before we've even had breakfast, we've fired up my new Lenovo tablet in bed and rented a copy of Good Bye Lenin! from YouTube to watch in bed. Somehow we never got around to seeing it on its original release in 2003, and I'm not quite sure why because it's absolutely delightful. And it's definitely a Berlin film, in which a young man's mother goes into a coma just before the fall of the Wall, and when she wakes up several months later he has to use every means possible to make her think that nothing's changed, in case the shock of the reunified Germany kills her. It's a wonderfully sustained idea, and escalated to another level by a tiny storytelling choice - just one shot, really - which gives the final scenes a deeper meaning.

Up until this point, we haven't really done anything on this trip that's engaged to any degree with Germany's divided past. It may or may not have been triggered by this film, but that's about to change.

Simian Substitute Site for June 2025: Hungry Monkey Catering

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR MAY 2025

Comedy: In a couple of months time we'll hit the tenth anniversary of Everybody In The House Of Love, the post in which I announced my departure from Walthamstow after living there for just over thirty years. Scroll down to picture number two on that page, and you'll see a charmingly faded photo of Walthamstow's cinema, the Granada. Read the paragraphs around that picture and you'll see a short history of the building, from cinema to dereliction, culminating in it being purchased in 2014. As I said back in 2015, "it's now in the hands of a bizarre alliance between Antic Pub Collective and Soho Theatre, with a lot of uncertainty about how they propose to manage the split between entertainment and drinking. That probably won't be settled for another couple of years yet." Well, it's 2025 now, and Soho Theatre Walthamstow finally opened this month. I only ever knew it as a slightly untidy triplexed cinema: they've ripped out the small screens to make it one big room again, and decorated it to the nines so that it looks, as I've said elsewhere, niiiiiiice. No disrespect to Red Imp Comedy Club down the road, but it's good that the area now has a comedy club that can put on full shows by big names off the telly, not just their tiny work-in-progress jobs. We were there for the last ever performance of  Ahir Shah: Ends, which we'd somehow missed during its two years of Edinburgh and touring. And yes, it's very much the sort of show that wins Edinburgh awards: carefully dripfeeding its more serious elements throughout the hour rather than relying on a crunching gear change at the forty minute mark, but still remembering to keep the jokes coming. More of this sort of thing here, please.

Music: Another Spotify playlist backed up with individual YouTube links, partly made up of returning favourites, partly made up of new people I've discovered through the 45 minutes of 6Music I listen to every morning. (Although it has to be said that two of those tracks - 1 and 6 - have no business being played on the radio at 7am.)

1. Maruja - filthy rock noise enhanced by even filthier saxophone noise.
2. Falle Nioke - it's that time of year when a bit of African-styled pop is always welcome.
3. Kate Miller-Heidke - one of this month's highlights was seeing her first London gig in over a decade. And yes, I know you've spotted this also turned up on the February 2017 playlist, and I don't care.
4. Emma-Jean Thackray - for an album that was apparently born out of depression and bereavement, it's surprisingly full of absolute bangers.
5. Rebecca Vasmant & Emilie Boyd - that thing I said last time about Vasmant making vibes rather than tunes still applies, but now we have a full album of them to enjoy.
6. Chuck D & Daddy-O - remember how utterly alien Public Enemy records sounded when they first came out? Well, they sound pretty conventional now: meanwhile, Chuck D is still making records that sound utterly alien now.
7. Nouvelle Vague - they've kept their one joke going for twenty years now, and somehow it still seems to be working for them. Quick sidebar: imagine how good it would have been if they'd given The Associates a Bond theme to write.
8. Saint Etienne - Boo! They're splitting up, just because they think 35 years is long enough for a band to have existed. Hooray! They appear to be going out in spectacular fashion.
9. David Bridie - thanks to this one-link-per-entry format I've carelessly built these playlists around, you'll have to do your own research to find out the astonishing story of the album this comes from, On Karen's Piano.
10. Self Esteem - if you only watch one video out of the ten, this is probably the one.

Theatre: I guess we should be getting irritated at the way people keep trying to convert movies into plays, lazily falling back on name recognition rather than writing interesting new stuff. Still, people like me keep on going to see those plays, like the adaptation of David Mamet's House Of Games that's playing at Hampstead Theatre until June 7th. Richard Bean's stage reworking isn't new - apparently it debuted fifteen years ago at the Almeida, where I somehow missed it. I remember thinking at the time that the film was a bit stagey, but seeing it actually being staged makes you appreciate how good a screenwriter Mamet is: it feels like it's all talk talk talk, but all the crucial inflection points of the story are visual. You need that closeup of the gun: you need to see the Western Union con being performed on someone we don't know, rather than being explained by people we do: you need the reaction shot to the line "a small price to pay." Doing all that verbally just feels a bit clunky. Bean's approach to the story is also somewhat lighter than Mamet's, with a few extra jokes and a couple of tweaks to the plot that may annoy fans of the film. But take it as a separate thing in its own right, and it's an entertaining enough night out.