It’s an absolute, undeniable fact (for me anyway) that the 1980s were the golden age of cinema. The Back to the Future trilogy. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Teen Wolf. The Terminator. Monster Squad. The Karate Kid. I could go on. I’m the sort of person that will drop everything to watch Back to the Future 2 when it’s on TV (pretty much a bi-weekly occurrence it seems), even though I’ve owned the VHS box set, and in later years upgraded to DVD, and never, ever get bored. I can recite pretty much every word to Karate Kid, even down to belting out “YOU’RE THE BEST! ALL ROUUUUND! NOTHING’S GONNA EVER KEEP YOU DOWN!” straight after executing a perfectly timed crane-kick to the unsuspecting chin of my younger brother (my parents had to confiscate that video, along with Rocky 1- 3 due to the outbursts of violence that would inevitably follow). You just don’t get films that inspire that kind of brutality that anymore.

Which brings me to Indiana Jones. Arguably the greatest action hero of all time. I dread to think how many hours of my 29-year total have been spent watching everyone’s favourite archaeologist whip-cracking his way through Egypt, India and Germany. If I’d used this time more productively, I could probably be a classical pianist, sculptor, or be fluent in Mandarin. Maybe even all three, and more. Which is why, when a fourth instalment was announced, I regressed to being 8 years old again, grabbed a tie and nearly whipped my flatmate’s eye out.
George Lucas had a lot to live up to. I’ve managed to forgive what he did to the Star Wars trilogy – flexing the CGI muscle of Lucasarts was pretty inevitable with a science fiction series, and the kids that made the original films so successful by shelling out their hard earned pocket money on merchandise in the 70s and 80s now have kids of their own, so they were always going to be children’s films. But with Indy, it needed to be a different story. I’d already made my peace with the dodgy title before the trailer had even come out. And I can accept that Harrison Ford is no spring chicken, so wasn’t expecting to see him doing his own stunts. All I could do was put my trust in there being some truth behind all the clichéd interview quotes like “I’d only do it if the script was just right” and “we’ve gone to great lengths to stay true to the original films”.
Well, it turns out, that they were lying all along. I’m not going to spoil the film for anyone by revealing any of the details of the ‘plot’, but if you share any of the childhood sentiment I’ve described above, you’re not going to like what you see. It’s as if Lucas and Spielberg had commandeered Doc Brown’s Delorian, travelled back to 1980’s Wiltshire, found the young, innocent, short-trousered Rhys, poked him squarely in the eye, and mugged him of his sweets. It’s a clumsy, pointless, poorly written, abysmally acted shambles of a film. It’s not that I’m too old for this sort of thing – I watched ‘the Last Crusade’ the day before I went to the cinema, and enjoyed it ever bit as much as I had 19 years ago. It’s because it’s like an episode of the X Files, but written and filmed by baboons. If I’d know 20 years ago what I know now, I’d have spent all that time more productively and could be putting the finishing touches to my first symphony right now.

You’ve still got to go and see it though. It is Indy, after all.

Ahem. I have been absent from the blog of late; happily we’ve been very busy here at Blackbridge Inc. and while I’ve been up to all kinds of stuff from going to my first boxing match to seeing an awesome jazz gig to eating lobster in East London to watching Arsenal thoroughly not win the league, I have been not really writing about it.

But anyway, we are where we are. And I went to the National Portrait Gallery on Sunday. My co-visitor was mainly keen on taking photos of the ears of marble busts and examining any paintings of lace; that said,we both paid attention to a great exhibition they have of portraits from the first part of the 20th century - everybody from Kingsley Amis to General Montgomery, Walter Sickert to TS Elliot. I also saw a bust of Sir Noel Coward, taken from a face mask - he was a tiny man. Tiny.

Talking of ‘the Master’, I read over the weekend that the 19th of April is “record shop day”. Sad that it has come to that really; they’re dropping like flies. The best record shop I ever visited - or rather the shop with the best owner I ever met - was in Fargo, North Dakota, as in the Coen Brothers film. Previously, this guy had a shop in Minneapolis where I was living and a friend of mine knew him; he’d left the Twin Cities record community under a bit of a cloud in a dispute over the ownership of a Beatles Butcher cover. I was going up that way to see my then girlfriend’s parents and managed to persuade her that a two hour diversion followed by a similar amount of time looking through a room of dusty records was perfectly acceptable. What can I say? ‘4 Weddings and a Funeral’ had just come out in America and my stock has never been higher.

My friend had called ahead to say we were coming and in my girlfriend’s Honda Civic we headed north. A bit too slowly as it happened; we must have left late and were still miles away when my hard-fought diversion was cancelled despite my very best Hugh Grant-esq pleading. I called my friend when we got to Crookston (home of the world-famous Sugar Beet Museum) and he promised to ring Jim and say we’d come back on Sunday for definite. Sure enough, a couple of days later we left early and got to the place in a little strip mall in Fargo and sure enough Jim was there. A friendly fellow, grizzled hippy-type. “I’ve just got here myself, Keith said you were coming today so I went and got a twelve pack” - a twelve pack! - “while I waited for you”. I was glad he had; I went through his records while drinking his kindly offered bottles of Miller and found some brilliant stuff: Shamek Farrah’s ‘First Impressions’ on Strata East, a psych-rock Loading Zone album (that Youtube clip is WELL weird), a great Jackie and Roy album, lots of soul - hell, he even threw in three Dean Martin records for my girlfriend as “today is his birthday so they’re free”; it probably wasn’t his birthday.

What I also picked up and probably paid a couple of dollars for were some records as unlikely to end up in a North Dakota record shop in the midday sun as I was, two albums by the aforementioned Noël Coward, both of which - by coincidence - I had listened to while lounging on Saturday afternoon.

The Live in Las Vegas one is superior; it’s absolutely hilarious. And surprisingly risque for the time, I can’t recommend it enough. Best of all is his update of Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Do It’ - I read a great biography of Porter while on holiday in Spain a few years ago and it listed quite a few of the wonderfully salacious unpublished lyrics from his more intimate live performances. I’ll perhaps not mention them all here.

Right. That’s it for now, more next week. Honest.

Nostalgia, as the joke goes, is not what it was. I spent most of Sunday morning listening to old time Music Hall records - not the first time some of these would have been heard in London E2 I’ll warrant. And needing to go to the shops anyway, I strolled up to where I was led to believe Bethnal Green’s Foresters Music Hall had been, but there wasn’t really much to see there anymore. Of course not.

For some reason I struggle to understand that previous eras could be nostalgic for their pasts in the same way as we are, but that’s stupid - in the 1950s the Music Halls would be packed with people singing along to the very same songs I was listening to preserved on scratchy 78’s from the twenties and thirties, almost equally disconnected from their life and times. And what songs they are! To name but two I particularly enjoyed - Leslie Sarony’s ‘Ain’t It Grand To Be Bloomin’ Well Dead’ is a curious concoction; the narrator cheerfully imagines his funeral, obviously without any aitches : “Look at the flowers, bloomin’ great orchids, look at the corfin, bloomin’ great ‘andles - ain’t it grand, to be bloomin’ well dead!” The way Sarony sings “grand” with a distinct emphasis on the “a” seems to crystallise an entire era in one syllable. And sounding very contemporary today is Lily Morris’ ‘Don’t Have Any More, Missis Moore’ - warning against binge drinking and unprotected sex no less, with the prescient advice “Double gins give the ladies double chins”. Great fun.

I suppose this stuff has a resonance for me as my parents used to sing some of these songs around the old joanna when I was a child, though I’m not actually in my seventies, despite the impression this might give. Amongst many, I remember ‘Loves Old Sweet Song’ - a genuine Victorian ballad as opposed to some of these later songs and in particular, the awesomely lachrymose ‘Ticket To Heaven’ - I can’t find the lyrics on the interwebs, sadly but can try and sum this masterpiece up: man is knocked over while working on the railway and thought dead. His child (perhaps bringing him lunch) arrives on the scene to hear that poor Bill (I think it was Bill) has gone to heaven and proceeds to the ticket office and the tremendous chorus arrives:

Give me a ticket to Heaven, please.
That’s where Dad’s gone, they say.
He’ll be so lonely without me
Travelling all that way.
My mother died when I was born, Sir.
And left Dad and me all alone.
So give me a ticket to Heaven, please,
Before the last train has gone.

Amazing. And before you can barely read on through your tears, I can point out that in the final verse it is revealed that “though injured, he has not been killed” and father and child are reunited. The Victorians and Edwardians just loved this kind of sentimental stuff, bless ‘em.

There are also a couple of recordings by comedian George Robey on the record I was listening to - the so called Prime Minister of Mirth. And waxing nostalgic, the Sir George Robey (named after him) was a horrible pub in Finsbury Park which held dub nights when I was a teenager (the Proustian aroma of these events is not similar to the smell of Madelines) and years later - when the place was briefly run by the folks who owned Hoxton Square’s the Blue Note club - I remember playing records there and literally emptying a room full of people with the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s ‘Theme De Yo Yo’. Should have stuck to the man himself.

Anyway… I know that there is another popularity contest going on in the US at the moment (I write this on ‘Super Tuesday’) but the return of American Idol is obviously good news, even though it’ll struggle to beat some of last year’s contestants: beatboxing pixie-boy Blake, no necked and strangely sex-less belter Melinda Doolittle and of course, pony-hawked Sanjaya - should have put when he made that girl cry as one of my highlights of the year. It’s only once they go to Hollywood (”baby!”) that it gets interesting so I still have a few weeks to persuade my colleague Nik Dowlet to write an American Idol blog for the site. Here’s looking forward to that, dawg.

More next week.