Simian Substitute Site for September 2024: Dee Monkey Autumn

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR AUGUST 2024

Books: It’s been three months since I told you that we'd just started the audiobook of Your Face Belongs To Us by Kashmir Hill. We finally finished it last week. Part of the delay is down to the fact that we tend to skip the bedtime audiobook ritual when we're away on holiday somewhere, like say Nice or Edinburgh. But there were other nights where we just gave it a pass because, frankly, it's dispiriting to be reminded night after night that all the major advances in current technology are in the hands of alt-right arseholes. We decided that our next audiobook had to be something uncomplicatedly light. So we went back to 2008, and Rick Wakeman's Grumpy Old Rock Star And Other Wondrous Stories. Wakeman's been in his anecdotage for several years now - The BBG caught him in Edinburgh in 2013 doing a spoken word show based around a similar collection of unlikely tales from his rock star past. It has to be said that in this reading he's being just a little bit too arch, and The BBG suggests that he'd become a lot more conversational by the time of the show she saw. But the stories themselves are great, starting with a glorious one from a trip to Moscow where he suddenly found himself in possession of an illegal KGB uniform. We're relying on you to keep us amused, Wakeman of 2008, please don't let us down...

Movies: Considering that it’s really just a cinema vehicle for an up-and-coming band, Kneecap has no right to be as wildly ambitious as it is. Yes, it's the (heavily fictionalised) story of how Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara and DJ Provaí got together to become Belfast's leading Irish language hip-hop group, with all three members playing themselves (and like everyone else is saying, DJ Provaí is such a natural actor it's hard to believe this is his debut). But it's also a thoughtful study about how the destruction of a language is the first stage in the destruction of a country. And it's a thriller about the sectarian chaos that still exists even in post-Good Friday Agreement Belfast. And, at the same time, it's a laddish comedy about two drug dealers with lots of helpful life lessons for any young people watching, such as 'don't put your speed and your ket in adjacent pockets'. Edited at a wild lick and enhanced with some smart animation (particularly for the subtitles some of us need to follow the Gaelic raps), it's got the sense of a bunch of artists 'printing the legend' and doing it quickly before anyone realises that it's just a legend. Best of all, if you enjoy the rawness of the music they were making in those early years, be prepared to discover that the album they released this year has shown a huge leap forward in their musical ambition. 

Music: It’s Proms season again. The BBG and I try to catch an unspecified number of concerts each year, which are easy to write about here because I can post links to the BBC recordings and you can hear them for yourselves (though be warned these particular recordings will be gone by the end of September). This year, our token late night Prom was Tinariwen, the group from Mali who specialise in what they call 'desert blues'. I wasn't expecting their music to have such a solid groove to it, but I guess that's the sort of thing that puts a concert into the late night slot - it's fantastically enjoyable, anyway. That show was fairly packed but not quite sold out, unlike the Saturday afternoon concert Beethoven For Three. But when those three are Emanuel Ax on piano, Leonidas Kavakos on violin and Yo‐Yo Ma on cello, you can see why people were fighting for tickets. It possibly also explains why the trio felt capable of ripping up the published programme (originally all Beethoven, including an arrangement of his first symphony - see entry here for August 31st) a few days before, and replacing it with a pair of piano trios (one Beethoven, one Brahms) and assuming they'd get away with it - everyone's here for the players, not the music. I decided to be mean about it, and assume that they tried to play the original programme but found it a bit hard. They pull off the replacement pieces, though, and if listening back to the recording isn't enough you can see them as well. More Proms action to come this time next month, hopefully.

In the meantime, your Simian Substitute Site for September 2024 is the listing on Salar Flies for Dee Monkey Autumn. As you’re probably aware, the Dee Monkey fly was created earlier this century by Danish angler Jimmi Lauridsen, specifically for fishing for salmon on the river Dee. (The ‘monkey’ part comes from the fly originally being tied with monkey hair, although goat will do just fine.) This particular variant has an autumnal colour to it which seems fitting for the time of year.

As for this time of year on the website, September's going to be taken up with tying up a couple of loose ends, finishing off some unfinished pieces before the next big festival binge in October. Yeah, you know what it is. In the meantime, comments are open below for any old nonsense you want to talk to me about.