Simian Substitute Site for December 2024: The Monkey Business

The Monkey BusinessMONTH END PROCESSING FOR NOVEMBER 2024

[This is going to be an odd one. Usually, we go flat out over the twelve days of the London Film Festival in October, and then spend most of November taking it easy before the Christmas rush. Thanks to a huge logjam of interesting events taking place this particular November, we ended up not taking it easy in the slightest. As a result, expect a lot of very sketchy reviews rather than a few big ones...]

Movies: Quite a sizeable proportion of our moviegoing in November was down to the BFI's excellent season Art Of Action, a huge collection of classic action movies. Thanks to that, we rewatched old favourites like Red Cliff 1 & 2 (the full five hour two-part version, finally), Point Break (yay for the Prince Charles' 35mm print, boo for it being a print with all the old BBFC cuts in it) and The Stunt Man (pretty much carried by Peter O'Toole running at full throttle), as well as being introduced to Burt Lancaster going full antifa in The Train (plus a really good introduction to that introduction). As a bonus we also got The Art of Action Trailers, an illustrated lecture by Dick Fiddy on how action movies from Gunga Din to Ballerina have tried to lure people in to see them. Godzilla Minus One Minus Colour wasn't part of the season, but it would have fitted right in. The odd film out this month was Gift, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's reworking of Evil Does Not Exist into a silent movie as a showcase for Eiko Ishibashi's live score. But does that come under Movies or Music, particularly when quite a bit of the 'live' score is just copied and pasted in from the other film's soundtrack? After a while you stop worrying about that, because the overall experience is more important, and that's the key thing.

Music (live): The support act to the screening/performance of Gift definitely comes under the heading of music: Klara Lewis may have freaked out some of the audience with her box of filthy-sounding electronic tricks, but The BBG and I lapped it up. We also saw several more traditionally structured gigs, and a ridiculously diverse collection they were too, including a couple more excellent supports. Genesis tribute act The Watch making a decent fist of playing the whole of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway: Arooj Aftab generating the perfect late-night vibe even though she was playing at nine thirty in the evening (with support from Keeley Forsyth): Ed Harcourt climaxing a lovely set by standing in the middle of the audience and busking El Magnifico (with support from Tom Bright): and They Might Be Giants pumping out two hours of solid joy.

Music (recorded): But that's not all: our clubbing project for 2024 will get a full report later this year, but for now be aware that we managed to take in three in this month alone, all targeted in one way or another at the older dancer. 30 Years of Bugged Out (held at Drumsheds, the megavenue that used to be the Edmonton branch of Ikea) had an all star cast of DJs to celebrate three decades of the clubnight: the Chemical Brothers were the obvious highlight, although 2 Many DJs' almost parodic reliance on high-pass-filter-driven drops made The BBG wonder if they'd been taking lessons from Limmy. Annie Mac's Before Midnight was a genuinely all-ages affair, reminiscent of Dave Haslam at his crowd-pleasing best, despite the best efforts of the Brixton Academy staff to destroy any good vibes with a 45 minute long queue to get in and an almost equally long one for the cloakroom. I've never seen so many people before dancing in, or carrying, overcoats in one indoor venue. Finally, Jarvis Cocker & Alexis Taylor going B2B at Dingwalls was always going to be a slightly unusual affair. The pre-show music was Paddy Macaloon's I Trawl The Megahertz, and the main show started with twenty minutes of ambient noodling, but within a couple of hours it had ramped up to the level of Love Is In The Air. Jarvis opened the set by complaining about all the afternoon DJ sets that are happening at the moment, which makes it all the more ironic that we had to leave two hours before the end because it was a school night. Between those and the live gigs, we've probably got enough music to justify one of these.


Theatre: As The BBG herself pointed out, late November is perhaps a little too early to get the full benefit of a Christmas show. Still, there we were at A Christmas Carol (ish). Written by and starring Nick Mohammed as his Mr Swallow character, it's a retelling of Dickens with all the names changed to avoid having to pay royalties, meaning that it's become the story of Santa choosing to cancel Christmas and being shown the error of his ways by two, three or four ghosts, depending on how you count them. It's packed with daft jokes aimed at the sort of people who pretend they're too cool for panto, is energetically performed by the cast of four, and climaxes with what might be the most extraordinary thing you'll see in a theatre this year. (For the record, our performance was halted for ten minutes or so in the middle of act two because of technical difficulties: it turns out that it could have been much worse.) Meanwhile, up in Manchester, the Royal Exchange is celebrating the festive season with Spend Spend Spend, the revival of a 1990s musical about the life of spendthrift pools winner Viv Nicholson. It seems that modern audiences have to not only have Nicholson explained to them, but also the concept of the pools.  Presented as a tribute to its late composer Steve Brown, the tunes aren't really things you come away humming, apart from the title song. But his melodies give the story an ingenious structure, as every song Viv sings on her way up to fame and fortune is mirrored by a sadder reprise of the same song on her way down. It's not what you'd necessarily think of as a Christmas show, but it does the job very nicely.

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O’zapft is!

You know how it works around here. We like beer, and we like festivals: so beer festivals would seem like an obvious thing. I've written about some of my favourites in various Simian Substitute posts over the years, as well as that odd pandemic-era arrangement when we had a few of them held online. However, this year has been a bad one for them. The Great British Beer Festival took a year off in 2024 while all the building works in Olympia are being completed (and it's avoiding London altogether in 2025). Meanwhile, BrewDog's annual Collabfest has possibly finished for good, as it turned out to be uneconomic to ship 100 beers around every bar in the country.

But there's one beer festival we hadn't got around to trying yet: possibly the ultimate beer festival in the world. So a couple of months ago, we went to Munich to see what the first three days of Oktoberfest are like.

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Simian Substitute Site for November 2024: Michaël Borremans: The Monkey

Michaël Borremans: The MonkeyMONTH END PROCESSING FOR OCTOBER 2024

Books: An update on our audiobook progress. We finished off the Rick Wakeman book I was telling you about two months ago, and it was enjoyable enough, apart from a couple of passages that were very much Of Their Time. ("Oh, Rick's talking about visiting Japan. Don't do the voice DON'T DO THE VOICE yeah, he's doing the voice.") And we're sticking with music now, thanks to A History Of Heavy Metal by Andrew O'Neill - read, inevitably, by the author, who brings a stand-up comedian's informality and timing to the job. If you've been paying attention, you'll know that O'Neill started off doing this a decade ago as an hour-long solo show, which mutated into a ninety-minute performance complete with backing band. This material was then expanded dramatically into a book that takes O'Neill nearly eight and a half hours to read aloud. You don't need to already be a metalhead to enjoy it, though: O'Neill's careful enough to give you enough background for it to work as a genuine history of the genre ("Chapter One: Roots, Bloody Roots [c. 40,000 BCE - 1969]"), while still managing to get in plenty of in-jokes for the fans ("SIT DOWN, LARS!"). It's the sort of music book that makes you wish the author had put together an accompanying playlist, and thankfully they have. It's informative, it's funny as hell, and it looks like it's got a sequel in development.

LFF: Obviously the main thing occupying our minds this month has been the London Film Festival, and our final thoughts on the 2024 fest will be turning up here shortly. But while you're waiting for that, here's a bonus: there was enough interesting music in the films we saw this year to justify a Spank's Audio Lair playlist in its own right. Well, almost enough. Ideally, Audio Lair playlists should have ten tracks on them, and I'm a little disappointed that one of them here has to be the ultra-manipulative score from the Christopher Reeve documentary to make up the numbers. Ideally, I'd replace it with some of the music from Ellis Park, but that hasn't been released yet, so I've had to go for the one cue on Super/Man that doesn't have the subtext Start Crying Now. Anyway, these ten tracks are taken from the soundtracks of Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story, Emilia Pérez, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, Watership Down, One To One: John & Yoko, When The Light Breaks, Maria, The Room Next Door, Architecton and Piece By Piece respectively, complete with YouTube links for those of you who don't believe in Spotify. (If you don't believe in YouTube, then I'm afraid you'll just have to go to the record shop and spend around a hundred quid.)


Music: Awkwardly, this is the point where I have to not recommend an album to you, which disappoints me greatly. I can't remember exactly where I first encountered Australian funnyman Tom Cardy, just that it was a link to the audio of a song of his called Business Man. Have a listen. Fun, isn't it? It's typical of what Cardy does, telling stories with wild twists and regularly inappropriate language. Digging around a little more, I found a whole pile of videos he'd made, almost all in the same style: formatted for social media in 9:16 aspect ratio, rapidly cutting between him playing all the instruments in what appears to be his living room, and with all the lyrics on screen for you. So when he got around to releasing an album, I was all ears. However, ears aren't enough for The Dancefloor At The End Of The Universe: the songs are so overloaded with instrumentation and vocal effects, it's virtually impossible to hear the lyrics, which are kind of the main reason why the songs exist in the first place. It feels like this is a recent development, when compared with the clarity of Business Man - as if the video versions of the songs are now the main focus because they have the words on screen, and the audio version is more of an afterthought. Ah well, at least the videos still work: as we've just come out from the other side of Halloween, maybe Red Flags is a good example to show here.

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