Simian Substitute Site for January 2025: De Witte Aap

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR DECEMBER 2024

(produced under the traditional New Year’s Day limitations, i.e. the morning after spending New Year's Eve out on the town, and only having a limited amount of time to write this because we’re going out soon to see Nosferatu with the Pals)

Books: Struggling to find a new audiobook for the long winter nights, I eventually went for one that I’d already read in paper form a few decades ago. Richard Feynman was a minor god to me back when I was studying for a physics degree, and Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman? is a fun collection of stories from his life, albeit detached from the man himself at two levels - ghostwritten by Ralph Leighton, and read by Raymond Todd. Nevertheless, the voice that comes through sounds authentically Feynmanesque, a mix of hard science and goofy humour (though some of his pranks mean that the latter hasn't aged as well as the former). It's a book that now has additional interest thanks to its central section, which is effectively the plot of Oppenheimer retold by one of its minor characters.

Music: For the second year in a row, the reason for this post being short and poorly written is because we went to the Age Against The Machine New Year’s Eve party last night. Strange to think that in 2023, the idea of a club night that explicitly barred under 30s and played songs aimed at an older crowd seemed radical: twelve months on, and everyone's doing variations on the same theme. This year's track selection sounded a lot like last year's track selection in a different order, but when you've got a collection of bangers from Little Richard to the Spice Girls you can't really argue with it. AATM wasn't so much the climax of our twelve-discos-in-2024 project, more the lap of honour after the end of it: more details on that soon, but here's a taster for you right now.

Video: Also coming soon, as another part of the Wrapped series, I'll tell you how I know that yesterday afternoon I saw my 90th and final film of 2024. The Hop-Pickers was only on our radar because The BBG saw the Blu-ray in a shop and was intrigued by - among other things - its collection of bonus features documenting the history of beer production in Czechoslovakia. Made in 1964, the first ever Czech musical - oh, so now I have your attention, do I? - tells the story of a teenage hop-picking collective working together in perfect socialist harmony. All except for two of them, that is, who start displaying disturbing signs of individualism like reading Seneca or wearing inappropriately nice hats. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if they started dating... As sixties a musical as you could possibly hope for, with its wild visual styling, ridiculously groovy tunes and its beat combo Greek chorus: but what makes it really fascinating is that it keeps you guessing for a long time as to whose side it's on.

Simian Substitute Site for December 2024: The Monkey Business

MONTH 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.

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

MONTH 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.

Simian Substitute Site for October 2024: The Monkey Bread Tree Film Awards

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR SEPTEMBER 2024

Movies: Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is an absolute mess, obviously. But because it's made by a director who was responsible for four of the greatest movies of all time in the 1970s, you find yourself sticking with it like an abusive partner, thinking "I could fix them". How? I'd probably start by not letting 45 years elapse between coming up with the original concept and starting shooting. The basic idea is fair enough - a modern day depiction of the fall of Rome, as an analogue for the fall of America - but Coppola appears to have taken every single idea he's had in those 45 years and crammed it into his script, with no thought for relevance or quality control. At one point about halfway through, when I was just about getting on with it visually - though there's nothing here that really justifies an IMAX screen - I found myself wondering if Coppola could have left all the dialogue in unsubtitled Latin, to stop it distracting us from the images. But the images get more overloaded and less subtle - oh look, someone's carrying a Make New Rome Great Again placard - to the point where the ancient Roman artifact it most resembles is the movie of Caligula, which also thought that throwing More Stuff at the screen is a good enough substitute for Good Stuff (I don't mean the More Stuff that you're thinking of, obviously). Worst of all, there are enough ellipses in the story to suggest that he could still give us an extended cut if he lasts that long.

Music: As foretold in prophecy last month, we saw two more Proms at the start of September, and the recordings of them should still be on BBC Sounds for a few more days if you're quick - A French Fantasy and Handel's Messiah (the latter features the audience joining in for the Hallelujah Chorus, so The BBG and I are both audible in there somewhere). Meanwhile, here's another playlist of records I've been listening to this month, with YouTube videos also available for the cheapskates.

1. Two Hearts - catching up on the back catalogue of my favourite act at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.
2. David & Romany Gilmour - the acceptable face of nepo babies.
3. Kneecap - if you haven't seen their film by now, what are you seeing at the cinema?
4. The The - he's still a miserable bugger, but it's good to have him back.
5. Anna Erhard - we've now got a full album of her complaining about petty grievances. Hooray!
6. The Cure - very much a throwback to Disintegration, i.e. 7 minutes long and Bob doesn't sing till 3.5 minutes in.
7. Anthony Szmierek - he's got that The Streets thing of creating a whole short story out of microscopic details.
8. OneDa - you don't get that many full-on Manc accents in rap, much less female ones.
9. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - still recovering from hearing the album the day before release at Pitchblack Playback.
10. Kid Carpet - based on a true story, he says. And if you don't believe him, at least it's only 79 seconds long.

Television: I still don't understand how this works. Guy Montgomery has taken a ridiculously basic idea - get some comedians together in a room and challenge them to spell words - and has so far managed to create eighteen solid hours of light entertainment television from it. He started off doing the show in his native New Zealand, but here we're going to focus on the recently-aired Australian version of Guy Montgomery's Guy-Mont Spelling Bee. It's almost identical to the NZ version - same music, same set, same overall format - but it has a not-so-secret weapon in the form of Aaron Chen as Montgomery's assistant. He's a lot more disruptive than his Kiwi counterpart Sanjay Patel, getting several costume changes per episode and threatening to crash the whole thing with his low-energy roleplaying and terrible jokes. It's the closest thing to pure joy on television right now, and the main problem is that it's only on Australian television. There are official playlists of clips you can watch courtesy of ABC iView's YouTube channel, but unless you live there there's no way you can legally see whole episodes of the thing. Sorry.

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.

Simian Substitute Site for August 2024: Monkey Sermon

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR JULY 2024

Edinburgh: We're currently at the tail end of preview season, with the Fringe itself officially opening on Friday. There are two shows I've already seen in London that should be recommended to anyone heading up there. Lauren Pattison: Big Girl Pants sees her just as anxious as she was in her whatevertheycallthePerriernow-nominated show two years ago, but determined to do something about it. She's still a fantastic storyteller, and it feels a little churlish to complain that her show has what I'll coyly refer to as That Edinburgh Shape, though at least she admits that herself. Her London preview was in the upstairs room of a pub in Camden, while Afrique en Cirque went for several nights in a row at the Queen Elizabeth Hall for their warmup. It's one of those big glossy international shows that just might be a little too slick for the Fringe, but it's done incredibly well, showcasing a set of wild circus skills within the structure of a day in the life of a small fishing village in Guinea. The ten minutes of visual mayhem that comes directly after they catch a big fish might be the most jaw-dropping thing you see in Edinburgh this year.

Music: Another playlist for you. Alternatively, watch this stash of videos linked to below. But why?

• Orbital, because I enjoyed their Glastonbury set this year and was reminded of an earlier one they did.
• Kiioto, because Lou Rhodes from Lamb is back with a new partner (Rohan Heath) and still sounding bracingly unusual.
• Self Esteem & Moonchild Sanelly, because it's cheeky in all the right ways.
• Arooj Aftab, because she was also pretty great at Glastonbury, and perfect for a scorching hot afternoon where you didn't want to move around too much.
• Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan, because it's a band Spotify recommended to me and I still haven't worked out yet if this is the algorithm calling me a wanker or not.
• Lankum, because Glastonbury again, and the opportunistic live album they released around the same time.
• Bright & Black, because under the hood it's Kristjan Järvi and his orchestra reworking one of my favourite tracks of 2022.
• Pink Opake, because I saw them do a really good live set that I haven't told you about just yet. (Hopefully soon.)
• Linda Thompson & The Unthanks, because the concept behind Thompson's collaboration album is nearly as delightful as its sleeve and title.
• Lucero, because I enjoy it when the end title song of a film basically recaps the entire plot for people who weren't paying attention.

Theatre: This one wasn't seen at Edinburgh and it's not going to Edinburgh, but it feels like it could fit right in there. Besse: The Beer Opera is notable for so far only ever being performed in active breweries: we caught it at Signature Brew on the Blackhorse Beer Mile. The work of composer Daniel Blanco Albert and librettist Roxanne Korda (who also plays the title role), it tells the story of a brewster (or female brewer) working at a time in the 14th century where men are starting to grab the entire trade for themselves. It feels like it's the sort of idea that could drive a light musical, but this is a proper opera in terms of both music (lots of complex tunes, and you won't come out humming any of them) and drama (the proposed solution to the central dilemma turns out to be 'poison the men'). It's a thoroughly engaging night out, and if they did want to take it up to Edinburgh in the future, I can think of at least two possible locations (notwithstanding the hellish complications of setting up and taking down a stage set at either side of the brewery's working day).

Simian Substitute Site for July 2024: Summer Of The Monkeys

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR JUNE 2024

Music: Late last year The Belated Birthday Girl announced her (and, by implication, our) project for 2024: we were going to go to 12 DJ nights despite our advanced ages. Shortly after that, we began to feel slightly targeted, as more and more clubs started putting on dance parties where young people (typically under-30s) were banned, the music was aimed at an older demographic, and everything was wrapped up by early evening so we could all get a decent night's sleep. The biggest of these - or at least, the most-hyped - is Vicky McClure and Jonny Owen's Day Fever, which runs a number of events around the UK, including what's become a monthly residency at ludicrously-named London venue HERE at Outernet. It's spooky to realise just how precisely it's aimed at our particular age bracket, not only because of the music - solid cheese from the seventies to the nineties - but also the video backdrop of adverts and TV title sequences from our childhood. But there's no denying the sheer fun of it all, especially when at one point DJ Jon McClure calls a halt to the dancing so we can all YELL along to Total Eclipse Of The Heart. You wouldn't want to make a habit of this, but it's an enjoyable afternoon out.

Music (again): Glastonbury's all done and dusted for another year. Obviously we weren't there, and just vegged out in front of the BBC coverage at home. My big discovery this year wasn't a band, it was a nifty hack involving the live streams they run every day from each of the major stages. It's possible to actually wind backwards within the stream, so you can time travel through the day hopping between stages and catching stuff you missed. The bit I didn't realise until it was too late was that those streams are cleared off the BBC servers at the end of each day. Not every set gets saved for posterity, but a lot of them do, and here are ten that I'm linking to partly for my benefit and partly for yours. Some of these are things I watched over the weekend, others are ones I'm saving links to so I can catch them before they vanish at the end of July. Sugababes; PJ Harvey; Little Simz; The Streets; Janelle Monae; Yard Act; Otoboke Beaver; Orbital; Lankum; Arooj Aftab. Other sets are available here: remember, they'll all be gone by the end of July.

Ah, sod it, one more time, Music: You know how it is: I've been away for a chunk of this month, so I haven't spent much time doing things that won't be covered in a future travel piece. So here's one of those Spotify playlists I throw in when I'm short on content, with ten tracks that have some sort of recent significance for me. YouTube links also supplied for Spotisceptics.

1. Mdou Moctar - a glorious bit of Tuareg-tinged rock, passed on to me by the Spotify algorithm. Ta!
2. Noep - two London gigs this year and a couple of banging singles, he's obviously got plans.
3. Johnny Dowd - a late reaction to the legend's London show on St Patrick's Day this year.
4. Knower - included for the lovely reveal halfway through the somewhat crowded video.
5. Richard Hawley - still as soppy as ever when he wants to be.
6. Anna Erhard - the ability to rhyme 'hammam', 'mum' and 'bum' has piqued my interest for her next album.
7. Shabaka and Saul Williams - one for the Bible scholars, as Saul Williams will be followed on track 9 by...
8. Yannis & The Yaw - Afrorock enlived by the presence of the excellent but four-years-dead drummer Tony Allen.
9. Paul Williams - frustratingly had an excellent album launch gig in London recently, but can't say when the album's coming out.
10. Kamasi Washington - a track that's pretty confidently booked its place on POTY halfway through the year.

Simian Substitute Site for June 2024: Kai's Monkey Business

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR MAY 2024

Books: We're only a short way into the audiobook Your Face Belongs To Us, written and read by New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill, but it's already turning out to be quite the rollercoaster ride. Its subtitle - A Secretive Startup Quest To End Privacy As We Know It – hints that it’s going to be another one of those True Tech Crime books that we’ve enjoyed before (see also: Fancy Bear Goes Phishing). It begins with Hill discovering the existence of Clearview AI, a spookily accurate face detection program. Alarmed by the possibility of being able to identify anyone from a single snapshot, she tries to investigate it further, but is shut down every time she gets close. From there, we flash back to the story of a pair of right wing tech bros who, somewhat predictably, are the people behind its development. And just as we think we’ve got a handle on the timeline, Hill throws up a 350 BC caption on screen like we’re in an episode of Doctor Who or something, and goes deep into the history of dumb people assuming you can judge human character from facial structure, from Aristotle onwards. It’s a book that covers a huge number of contemporary hot button topics, but does it with the lightest of touches. At least, that’s how it feels three chapters in, and I hope it stays that way.

Music: "Did you know that Sexy Sadie was originally about the Maharishi?" asks The BBG. Well, actually, yes I did, though it turns out it was news to her. She discovered this towards the end of the Liverpool multimedia exhibition The Beatles Story, which we were visiting as part of a Christmas present from my sister (ta!). But that made me realise that the Beatles didn’t really have a story: they had hundreds of stories that intersected in various ways. And even an exhibition the size of a city block could never hope to cover all those stories to everyone’s satisfaction. This exhibition partly acknowledges that by putting all the important stuff in front of you, and relegating much of the other material to the audio guide, so you can choose to listen to it or not. For example, I don’t think there’s anything in the exhibition proper about the existence of Hey Jude. Still, the large number of stories we get make for an enjoyable couple of hours, enhanced by the substantial afternoon tea that was part of our package. Inevitably, the gift shop at the end is mostly full of Beatles-branded tat, but at least I was able to pick up that remastered copy of Revolver I’ve been promising myself for a while now.

Travel: And a few more highlights from our recent flying visit to Liverpool, with apologies to Eddie and Lee for not managing to touch base with them while we were in town. Aside from The Beatles Story, we did a couple more music related things. Over at the Jacaranda pub (which itself played its part in the Fab Four's early days), they're regularly running a fascinating event in their upstairs record shop called the Vinyl Listening Bar, where they play vinyl albums while pairing them with specially designed cocktails. The cocktails are excellent, but the noise leakage from downstairs stops you particularly enjoying the albums. Basically, I’d like someone in London to steal this idea and do it better. A slightly more successful musical event was the gloriously named Shit Indie Disco at Electrik Warehouse, although this being Liverpool they tried to persuade us at one point that Twist And Shout was an indie classic. In terms of pure touristy stuff, the tour to the top of the Royal Liver Building is worth the trek, and not just for the views. Finally, of the various beer joints we ended up in, we can recommend copying our crawl around the Baltic Triangle, taking in Baltic Fleet, Black Lodge Brewing, Love Lane Brewery and the one-of-a-kind Hobo Kiosk.

Simian Substitute Site for May 2024: Maypole Monkey Gnome Ceramic Ornament

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR APRIL 2024

Books: Evelyn Waugh penned these words: ‘Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.’ It is daunting to consider the sudden wave of disillusionment that must have swept over such a brilliant man and caused him to write such balls. Sorry, Jane Austen, but the award for Best Opening Lines Of Any Book Ever has to be passed on to David Niven, for the beginning of his 1971 memoir The Moon’s A Balloon. I'm a bit late to this one, I admit, but I was on a train looking for something to read and it was on offer for a quid on Google Play. It feels like the template for what we expect from celebrity autobiographies these days, a combination of gossipy chattiness and surprising frankness. There's no denying that Niven is great at anecdotes, and it feels churlish to complain that they're all about people - I was hoping for a bit more about the films he was in. I ploughed through the lengthy section on his wartime experiences, looking forward to a discussion of his first post-war job, the magnificent A Matter Of Life And Death: a film he literally dismisses in a single paragraph. It's possible his followup, Bring On The Empty Horses, may have more about the movies: let's see if Google Play knock that one down to a quid as well.

Food and Drink: Obviously you should never kick a gift horse in the bollocks, but I'm going to grumble about Virgin Experience Days in general and one in particular. Having been given a couple of these over the past year, I've started to feel sorry for the people who buy them as gifts, who are given limited information about what they're buying - it's only when the recipient has to redeem the vouchers that the catches become apparent. Let's take a look at, say, Countryside Break with Vineyard Tour and Wine Tasting at Chapel Down for Two: a voucher covering a combination of a night in a country hotel, followed by a morning's worth of fun stuff at one of Britain's best vineyards. And then you try to book the bugger. How busy is the hotel? It's frequently booked out for fancy weddings, so there are only limited weekends when they can take you. Is the hotel near the vineyard? No, it's about four miles away. Can you get a bus? They're massively infrequent and slow. Can you get a taxi? The number of cabs in the village appears to be in single figures, and you need to book them a week or more in advance. Can you drive there? Even if we could, let me point you at the words Wine Tasting in the event title. Quite a few of Virgin's offerings seem to involve getting two unconnected things, packaging them together, and leaving it to the recipient to sort out the nearly impossible logistics of co-ordinating the pair. Having said that, the Chapel Down tour is absolutely delightful and worth doing on its own, but maybe make your own arrangements for getting there.

Music: Probably time for another one of these. YouTube links included for the non-Spotifiers among you.
1. Whenever Ringo Shiina has a new album on the way, you can always count on its first single to be something that stops you dead in your tracks. No denying that she's done that again.
2. I'm liking Lucy Rose's singles when they turn up on the radio, but find a whole album of what she does a bit too much. Those singles, though...
3. It’d be unfair to describe Norman Pain's contribution to the Sindhu Sesh series as a suicide note you can dance to, because you can’t really dance to it.
4. Not really familiar with Anna Erhard before now, but her satirical takedown of Arseholes On TripAdvisor has a jolly Wet Leggish energy to it. Hey, remember them?
5. "Hi, I'm Shabaka Hutchings, and I've decided to give up the saxophone I'm world famous for and just play Japanese flutes now." That's a hell of a career move.
6. Tom Cardy's track is the only one on this playlist that wasn't released this year, but I've always been a sucker for a song that tells a story.
7. For Caroline Polachek, see Lucy Rose above.
8. I've only really known Chilly Gonzales before for his piano work, so I'm very much enjoying his Shabaka-like pivot to classical music criticism.
9. This Ed Harcourt song's been knocking around for years: a live version of it ended up on Pick Of The Year 2018. Now he's finally got around to recording it in a studio (and naming his new album after it).
10. And finally, Yard Act with the song that was my inevitable earworm during our visit to Chapel Down.

Simian Substitute Site for April 2024: Makake

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR MARCH 2024

Books: Back in the day I used to enjoy the Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley podcast Rule Of Three, in which they talked to guests about their favourite funny things and why they were funny. Morris’ new book, Be Funny Or Die: How Comedy Works And Why It Matters, scratches a similar itch – and doubly so if you listen to him reading the audiobook version. It’s a comprehensive study of the science, psychology and ethics of humour, and is smart enough to know how dangerous a task that is. In an early highlight, Morris takes Ken Dodd’s famous line about the futility of analysing comedy – the one about how Freud never had to play Glasgow Empire on a Friday night – and analyses how Dodd himself tweaked its wording over a couple of decades to suit his audience. I’m only a short way into the book so far, but enjoying it a lot.

Music: Max Richter’s managed to get a lot of mileage out of his eight hour composition Sleep. We’ve had an edited version that fits on a single CD, numerous remixes (both dancey and ambient), and an arrangement for solo piano. In March we also got 90 Minutes Of Sleep, the premiere of an audio-visual presentation designed for IMAX cinemas. The audio part is a 90 minute edit of the piece, lovingly remixed for a 12.2 IMAX sound system - the subtle subsonic pulse running throughout several sections is something I'd never really noticed before. As for the visuals, it's topped and tailed with fairly straightforward performance footage. But the bulk of the film is a lovely piece of large-scale animation, a series of night sky views that subtly change with the ebbs and flows of the music, making it a completely immersive experience. Curiously, the animator is only named in a throwaway credit right at the end, and I've not been able to find out their name from anywhere else, which is massively frustrating. Hopefully it'll get more screenings where credit will be given where it's due.

Telly: Continuing our project of investigating Taskmasters Of Many Lands, here’s one you can all play at home if you live in the UK. Channel 4’s streaming service, as well as the OG British version, can also give you access to Taskmaster New Zealand and Taskmaster Sweden – or Bäst i Test, to give the latter its proper title. And for someone who's comparing one version of the show with another, the Swedes appear to have gone completely off track. On the surface, there's the novelty value of our first female Taskmaster, Babben Larsson, assisted by David Sundin. But there's a completely different set! There are only four regular contestants, with a series of rotating guests in the fifth slot! The team tasks only use two teams of two! The prize task prizes are presented on video like it's Sale Of The Frickin' Century or something! It's not even apparent until the final episode of the series that there's going to be a big prize for the overall winner! Nevertheless, the basic structure is stlll there, and there's a fun mix of classic tasks and brand new ones. Series 1 is only four episodes long if you just want to dip your toe in - based on that, I'm happy to give series 2 a go.