Simian Substitute Site for May 2025: Them Kinda Monkeys Can't Swing
MONTH END PROCESSING FOR APRIL 2025
Books: It was always going to be a hard one to sell to The Belated Birthday Girl. How do you fancy listening to an audiobook by a Viz writer about arranging council funerals for lonely people? To be fair, Ashes To Admin is much more than the sum of its one-line summary. Its author Evie King (the pen name of letter writer turned feature contributor Christina Martin) was working for an anonymised council when she had an unexpected bit of work added to her caseload: look into the details of an old person who'd died alone, find out if there was a relative or friend who could take on the task of sorting out their funeral, and if not arrange it herself. It turns out that this is a job she's surprisingly good at, thanks to a combination of empathy for her clients and a dogged determination to make their exit as humane as possible. King's got a good eye for the small humorous details as cases like this turn into her full-time job, and she gets them across in her writing and the wry delivery of her reading, without plummeting into black farce. At the same time, it's a book whose relative lack of sentimentality makes you think seriously about what sort of mess you'd leave behind if you suddenly passed, and what you could do to help the people who'd have to tidy up after you.
Movies: The release of Pink Floyd At Pompeii MCMLXXII - just on its way out of cinemas, but hitting every possible form of home media on May 2nd - means there are now four different versions of the bloody thing in existence. Back in 1972 when it was just called Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii, it was a mere 60 or so minutes long (there wasn't much music on telly back then, so people didn't mind), and was just the concert footage of the Floyd playing in the empty arena in Pompeii. Two years later, after they'd gone stellar thanks to Dark Side Of The Moon, the film came out again with an extra 30 minutes or so of fly-on-the-wall material shot at Abbey Road, where the unspoken implication is that we're watching that album being recorded, and should try not to think too hard about how the timeline of that could work. That's the version I'm most familiar with, thanks to a VHS copy I've had for decades. I jumped at the chance to upgrade the film to DVD when it got its first digital release in 2003, only to discover that what I'd bought was a Director's Cut which replaced chunks of the beautiful Pompeii footage with generic terrible CGI space vistas. But now the film's back without the word Live in the title, in what's effectively the 1974 cut digitally restored to IMAX resolution, and with a Dolby Atmos remix of the soundtrack. The latter goes a little too nuts for my liking with having the instruments flying all around the room, but other than that it's a glorious theatrical experience if you can catch it on the big screen, and should still look tasty when watched at home.
Music: And as if by magic, one of the tracks from the above is part of this month's Spotify playlist with backup YouTube videos...
- Orbital and Tilda Swinton, because that whole 'consider a fish' section has had me giggling ever since they did it at last year's Glastonbury.
- Shriekback, because I wanted to pay my respects to Dave Allen: no, not that one, but their recently passed bass player who was also in Gang of Four.
- The Waterboys & Fiona Apple, because Mike Scott's 25-track concept album about the life of Dennis Hopper is even crazier than that synopsis makes it sound.
- Anthony Szmierek, because he's another madman who's released a concept album in 2025, though I haven't quite listened to it enough yet to appreciate it as a unit.
- The Divine Comedy, because it's good to see Neil Hannon back out doing promotional interviews. Favourite one so far: Huw Stephens on 6 Music bringing up Timothee Chalamet singing Hannon's songs in Wonka, and asking 'did you write the songs for his Bob Dylan film as well?' (Answer: 'Yes. All of them.')
- Pink Floyd, because we can now see Nick Mason drop a drumstick and recover flawlessly in 4K resolution. (It's at 4:54 in the video.)
- Pulp, despite the AI video, regardless of their satirical intentions.
- See video for band name, because I heard this playing in BrewDog Brussels and felt I had to ask Shazam 'who are these people doing a surf guitar cover of Toxic?', and laughed out loud when I saw the answer.
- Little Simz, because of her relentless commitment to a line structure in the final minute.
- Ash, because if we can't hear what The Ramones covering Harry Belafonte would sound like, we'll have to make do with the next best thing.
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