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...

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.')
6. 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.)
7. Pulp, despite the AI video, regardless of their satirical intentions.
8. 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.
9. Little Simz, because of her relentless commitment to a line structure in the final minute.
10. 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.

Simian Substitute Site for April 2025: Monkey Bar

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR MARCH 2025

Books: How long ago was it that we listened to Stanley Tucci's first audiobook? [goes away to check] Nearly three and a half years! Doesn't time fly when, etc. Anyway, he’s written another one. What I Ate In One Year does pretty much what it says on the hamper: it’s a diary of one calendar year, during which the key focus is on the meals he had, with a side order of any other events he feels might be of interest. Unfortunately, the year in question is 2023, so the actors' strike means he doesn’t get to do that much acting, apart from his time filming Conclave during the first month or two. So much of this book is just listing what Tucci’s shovelling into his gob, it starts to feel disturbingly obsessive: one chapter, where he spends several minutes listing the ludicrous mountain of food he brought to a family weekend away, is only bearable because you can tell from his voice he knows it’s ludicrous. He also seems far too keen to develop a Grumpy Old Man persona, at one point going off on a rant about airport security because one of his daft kids tried to take a water bottle onto a plane. This is enjoyable enough as winding-down listening before bedtime, but his earlier book Taste had more of a reason to exist.

Food and Drink: The number of beer-related events in our diary seems to be dropping ever year. The Great British Beer Festival has given up on London, while BrewDog seems to have given up on quite a few things, including their annual Collabfest. They should be taking a leaf out of the book of Siren Craft Brew, who've just celebrated their twelfth birthday with a party at their brewery in Finchampstead. It's not our first visit there: they were mentioned here in passing when we went along to their fifth, and we've been back for most of the birthdays since, including the online-only eighth one. Their celebrations are always delightfully fun, and generally free of the sort of lairy drunk lads you get at these events. That's particularly the case for a talk called Maiden Through The Years, whose audience appeared to be made up of people who'd all at least considered joining CAMRA at some point in their lives. Maiden is the barrel-aged barley wine that Siren make around this time every year, and this tasting session went through several different editions of the beer, culminating in a 2021 brew that had been in enough old barrels that it had traces of the original 2013 version in it. Overall this do's an infinitely more relaxed affair than, say, the BrewDog AGMs, with a less hectic schedule of entertainment and a much slower rate of consumption of what, these days, is much better beer. There, I said it.

Music: Another Audio Lair of new tunes for you, with YouTube links for people who don't believe in that sort of thing.

1. Noep -- presenting another one of his regular collaborations where he takes traditional Estonian folk and puts a massive donk on it.
2. Little Simz - not sure whether this is here specifically for Simbi’s lead vocal, or Moonchild Sanelly’s infectious background burbling.
3. Rebecca Vasmant - as is usually the case with her records, it’s more of a vibe than a tune, but it’s a lovely vibe.
4. Doechii - she’s going to be ridiculously, world-conqueringly, everybody-knows-her-name-ly enormous soon, isn’t she? Or maybe I'm wrong about that.
5. Mae Martin - yeah, that one off the late 2010s comedy circuit and the early 2020s Taskmaster, who now appears to be a fine singer/songwriter as well.
6. Abel Selaocoe - back for all your Afro-classical cello-based needs.
7. Ezra Collective - I feel like I should have picked up on these guys a lot sooner, given that they sound like several of my favourite bands glued together.
8. Kae Tempest - a track that draws a definite dividing line between what they used to be and what they are now.
9. Bryan Ferry & Amelia Barratt - from an album where she reads her poems over some rejected demos that he recorded in the seventies. Re-Make/Re-Model, eh, Bri?
10. Ylvis - a song they recorded for the Skiing World Cup about the friendly inter-country rivalries you get there. The chorus translates as ‘Swedish bastard, shut up and go home.’

BrewDogging #93: Kijkduin

[Previously: Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam]

We're going to The Hague! Not like that, obviously: our war crimes remain as yet undetected. But it's pretty close to where we are in Rotterdam at the tail end of our Christmas 2024 holiday, it's a city that The BBG has fond memories of from working there many years ago, and there's a third reason that you've probably worked out by now from the page title. So on our final full day in the Netherlands, we're taking a train there for a day trip.

It's only as we're going into Rotterdam Central station for a pre-trip breakfast that we realise going by train isn't the only option: Den Haag is also a stop at the far end of line E on the Rotterdam subway. It's a cheaper journey, but slower, so we're happy to carry on with our train plans: it just takes a little shine off the day to realise that in urban rail terms, this is like getting excited about travelling out from London to Watford Junction.

BrewDogging #91/#92: Rotterdam Outpost/Rotterdam Witte de Withstraat

[previously: Amsterdam, Utrecht]

Bip! That's the sound of a credit card tapping in at Utrecht station. Bip! That's the sound of the same credit card tapping out at Rotterdam station. I could get used to this as a national railway payment system. (Apart from the convenience, there’s also the simple pleasure of having a reasonably priced rail fare that doesn’t go up or down wildly depending on when you pay for it.)

By now it’s Boxing Day 2024 – well, at least it is back home. Here in Rotterdam, it’s pretty much back to normal again after the Christmas break. It’s a fairly unfamiliar city to us: I think that we’ve changed trains there a couple of times, but unlike Utrecht we’ve never felt the need to leave the station. This time round, it’ll be different. Among other things, we’ve got two – count ‘em, two – BrewDog bars to report on, plus all manner of other foody and arty stuff.

Chasing The Kerstman 2024: Christmas In Utrecht

[previously: Amsterdam]

It's a long story as to why we're in Utrecht, but it's not like that's stopped me in the past. The last time we spent Christmas in the Netherlands was in 2013. That trip was partly a rehearsal for a subsequent tour of Italy in 2015: in both cases, our transport between England and Europe was the Stena Line ferry between Harwich and the Hook. That worked out just fine both times, but the interesting bit was the train journey back to the Hook at the end of each holiday, which required us to change trains in Utrecht.

On that first occasion, I suspect it was The BBG who insisted we should leave Utrecht station to have a proper meal break, rather than a railway broodje. So we wandered around the city and ended up at Firma Pickles Burgers & Wines, where both the burgers and wines were excellent. To the extent that eighteen months later, on the way home from our two week tour of Italy, we got off the train at Utrecht and did it all over again.

It seems a bit much to have a favourite restaurant in a city where all you’ve ever done is change trains. Happily, when we paid a third visit to Firma Pickles at Christmas 2024, this time we stayed a bit longer.