Seb Patrick Who He Is And How He Came To Be

On Bloatware, Caps Lock, and Dell being Morons

(needlessly long post, this - it was going to be a quick point about what is hardly a major issue, but... well, I got rambling)

This week, I took delivery of a new PC - a Dell Studio 15, a replacement for the netbook I'd been using for just over a year, which was itself a stop-gap solution after my previous machine, a ThinkPad (the last in a long line of machines passed down as unwanted spares from my Dad's work), had all but given up the ghost. I'm very happy to have it - it's got a nice big widescreen display, it's got enough grunt that I can get back to playing games that were released more recently than 2005, and it's got Windows 7, with which I'm pleasantly surprised so far. All in all, it's lovely and shiny and new, and it's great.

However, it's not without its annoyances - a major one being something I've discovered this evening, which has proven to be a classic example of the age-old trend for computer manufacturers to get ideas way above their station. I'm sure anyone who's ever bought a new PC has encountered this sort of thing - it's commonly known as "bloatware", and particularly bad offenders include Acer and Dell. If you've ever seen an annoying toolbar or set of "widgets" on your desktop that don't look like part of Windows, chances are your PC manufacturer put them there - it's their attempt at stamping their own company branding across your screen, even though it's already quite clearly all over the hardware itself.

I just don't understand why companies do this. I mean, Microsoft - for all their faults - have been making operating systems for quite a while now. The odd blip aside (*cough*Vista*cough*), they know what they're doing, and how to make them work - why do the likes of Acer and Dell think they know how to do it better? Why do they have to interfere? I had the same thing with a Nokia N70 I got on Orange some years back - lovely phone, and the Symbian operating system was at the time the best and most effective smartphone interface out there. But for some reason, Orange - a telecom provider by trade, remember - thought they knew better than Nokia how to run Nokia's own phones, and had added their own ghastly, clunky, cripplingly slow homescreen. I eventually got rid of it, but it was baffling that they thought anyone would prefer to use it.

So. I'd already dealt with Dell's attempts to force this stuff upon me within minutes of starting my machine for the first time - or so I thought. First offender was something called the "Dell Dock", a shameless attempt to ape the, er, Dock function of Mac OS (and one that was particularly superfluous on Windows 7, an OS that itself shifts towards a dock-style setup courtesy of the new taskbar). Off it went. I then spent some time trying to figure out how to change the utterly ludicrous setup that meant that in order to use the function keys for their original purpose, one had to hold down the Fn key (as the default keypress for each would provide the alternate functions - e.g. brightness/volume control, etc.) As someone who bashes F2 and F5 quite a lot in the general course of working (not to mention F6 when gaming), this was of course entirely unacceptable - and I eventually discovered that it was possible to switch off in the BIOS.¹

Dell's software division, yesterday.

Anyway, with all of that dealt with, I was happily using the machine - until I started to notice another annoyance, this one worse than the others. With no LEDs anywhere on the machine itself to indicate the status of various key locks (most notably Caps), Dell instead employ a little notification icon that overlays onto the bottom right-hand corner of the screen whenever you turn Caps Lock on and off. Now, I've got a weird thing with Caps lock anyway - the way I have my hands on the keyboard for my fast (100wpm, people) typing, I have this odd little compulsion to frequently bash the lock on and off with my little finger, often at the end of sentences. No apparent reason for it, it's just a weird thing of mine. Anyway. Aside from that, though, I discovered while playing GTA: Vice City that when I tried to use the key for its assigned function in that game - looking over the character's shoulder in "on foot" mode² - the act of bringing up the notification actually took focus away from the game, minimizing it. It didn't crash, but it did mean I had to Alt-Tab back in, where a pause menu was waiting for me. Further experimentation revealed an irritation that I hadn't even noticed in a couple of days' worth of working - that sometimes, switching the Caps Lock on or off actually took focus away from a word processor or web browser. Thus defeating the point of even using it in the first place. Utterly, utterly insane.

Online research eventually revealed that this behaviour was being caused by a background program called "quickset". Easy enough to kill from within Task Manager, and to locate in the registry and prevent from loading on startup. Except it wasn't even as simple as that. Because in another example of infinite-wisdomness, Dell decided that this PC shouldn't have a hard button for ejecting the DVD drive (it's not drawer-based - it's one of those annoying slot-based ones that you just know you're going to break one day by putting the disc in wrongly somehow). Instead, it's a key on the keyboard, inbetween the F keys and Print Screen. And guess what? If QuickSet isn't running... it doesn't work. In other words, by forcing this overlay into the same program that operates the control keys, Dell are forcing you into one of two equally undesirable options. One, lose the focus on your window every time you hit Caps Lock (and lose the ability to use the key in full-screen games that often require it). Or two, lose the ability to get your discs out of your drive (without having to browse to My Computer, right-click on the drive in question, wait for the menu to respond, and hit "Eject").

Still, eventually, I found a third option, and it's the one I've gone with - a registry hack changes the functionality of QuickSet, removing the keylock notifications while still allowing the control keys to work. But it also, oddly, changes the onscreen display for volume and brightness adjustment into the tackiest possible form - something that looks like it's come straight out of Windows 3.1 (right). So basically, Dell are making me choose between having stuff work properly, and having it look in any way sensible.

You have to admit, when it comes to sheer malevolent supervillainny, they could give Doctor Doom, Lex Luthor and Hank Scorpio a run for their money.

¹Although, as I subsequently discovered when trying to change something else tonight, there is an option buried deep in Windows itself to change it back - evidently a new addition by Dell, as people on various support forums certainly weren't aware of it.
²When playing GTA, I use a joypad for driving, but switch to the classic FPS system of WASD+mouse when on foot.

Aha!

Best costume ever.

Football Songs #2: Three Lions

Right, then. Just in time for England to get knocked out of the World Cup by Germany, let's do the next (or, possibly, last?) of my posts on football songs, in a vague attempt at whipping up a bit of spirit.

So. "Three Lions", then. Not actually a World Cup song originally, of course - but still just about the greatest football song ever written. No, seriously. Ignore the appropriation by the massed ranks of the boorish, and instead look at the song in its own right - what it sets out to do, what it's about, and how it does it - and it's pretty much without peer.

Three Lions (1996)

The thing that makes the original "Three Lions" the most endearing is theway it captures perfectly what it means to be an English football fan. Not the loud, beer-swilling, "IN-GUR-LUND!"-shouting kind, but those of us who approach each tournament with very little expectation yet plenty of hope. England are in a curious position - they're not a terrible team, even when they play as badly as they did against Algeria; but nor are they one of the best, despite the presence of players from pretty much the highest-paid and highest-profile league in Europe (if not the world). They're a team who could, on their day, beat just about anyone; but who are also likely, on most days, to stumble against... well, against the likes of Algeria and the USA.

"Three Lions" kicks off on a note of unbridled pessimism - well-chosen sound clips from Alan Hansen, Trevor Brooking and Jimmy Hill dismissing England's chances could have come from 2010 rather than 1996 (so long as you substitute the latter pair for Lawrenson and Shearer). Baddiel and Skinner, however, know that on their day England "can play", before launching into the sort of nostalgia-wallowing that frequently draws criticism for fans of both England and my club, Liverpool - "We did some good stuff in the past so we should be able to again" - but which is hard to deny that we're all guilty of at some point or another. It's hopeful, but it's realistic. They know England probably aren't going to win Euro '96, but they also know it's always a distinct possibility.

The best section of the lyrics is the part that makes clear that it's a song written by people who actually know their football. "I still see that tackle by Moore / And when Lineker scored" - first of all, the way that these two lines are phrased are effortlessly succinct. They're vague at first glance, but anyone who knows anything about football knows exactly the moments they refer to. And, what's more, those moments aren't even anything to do with English success - the first was one of the great defensive tackles of all time, by Bobby Moore on Pele, but it came in a 1-0 group stage defeat to Brazil; and the second was a scrappy equalising goal in a game (versus West Germany in 1990) that England went on to lose. Nevertheless, the fact that they're two of the most iconic moments in English football history - brilliant and ultimately meaningless individual moments amid overall failure - says everything about that history, and the overall tone of the song.

It's also, tune-wise, easily the best official England song (or, at the very least depending on your own personal taste, on a par with "World In Motion") - and you have to give it credit for not one, but two, instantly-memorable refrains (both "It's coming home" and the "Three Lions on a shirt..." chorus). Yes, it's easy to get sick of morons shouting "FOOTBALL'S COMING HOME", and of the phrase being used on advertisement posters during tournaments that aren't taking place in England, thus missing the entire point of the lyrics - but it was perfect at the time for describing the first major tournament to be held in England for thirty years.

Three Lions '98 (1998)

And so to the 1998 reprise of the song - this time, actually for a World Cup. This gets a lot of flak for simply being a cheap, cynical cash-in on the success of the original - so I'm going to take the controversial view that it's not, and that it actually serves a purpose.

You see, it's the sequel. It's the morning after (even though it actually came out two years later). The original song ended on a cliffhanger - could England actually do it? The answer was: no, they couldn't. And "Three Lions '98" therefore picks up directly afterward, reflecting once again on failure rather than success - but still with that glimmer of hope among the despair. It's a necessary companion to the original song, because it shows that the hope of that song wasn't fulfilled - but that it'll carry on happening anyway, every time England get to a major tournament, even if they look absolutely useless when doing so.

Downsides? Well, the choice of commentary clips are poor this time out - not being able to use "official" BBC commentary, they instead turned to radio clips from Jonathan Pearce, and it's Pearce when he was shouty and annoying. It simply doesn't bear comparison with the '96 song's excellent use of Motson's "England have done it... in the last minute... of extra time!" (although come to think of it, that version should also have found room for "Augenthaler couldn't do it, Lineker probably could... aaaand England have equalised! It's GARY LINEKER!") The "I still see" section, meanwhile, is horribly dated - while the moments in the original are frozen in time forever, singing about "Ince ready for war, Gazza good as before, Shearer certain to score" was pretty much out of date by the time the '98 World Cup had even kicked off. And, of course, it still uses "football's coming home" when... well, it wasn't. It was going to France.

But even then, you can forgive re-using the refrain - rather than composing a new song entirely - because, well, they deserved to put out a record that featured fans actually singing it. It's the only time a football record has actually been properly picked up and sung on the terraces (well, alright, "in the stands") immediately after its release; and yes, a part of that is that it's simple and easy for even the most cretinous fan to remember, but it was nevertheless a brilliantly, instantly effective addition to the vernacular - and that deserved to be marked. And if nothing else, the re-recorded version is actually a bit better, musically, than the original - the production is beefier, and although the vocal performances from Skinner and - especially - Baddiel are worse, it's arguably still a better record overall. The original is still the one you'd want to listen to the most - it's a better reflection of its time (and the England of that glorious summer of 1996 were far easier to like than the England of that disappointing and slightly bleak summer of 1998 anyway) - but the sequel isn't just a nasty, pointless cash-in at all - it actually has merit on its own.

But the 2010 version, of course, can just fuck off and die.

Football Songs #1: The England Squad

I should have known that a bad performance in England's opening game - itself something of an inevitability - would have slightly dampened my enthusiasm for spending this week talking about various England-related World Cup songs, and so it's proved. Nevertheless, although I'm scaling back the "post a day" idea, I still want to get a few posts up trawling through a couple of instances of football song history, so as we gear up for the second game against Algeria, here's the first.

The football squad song was a curious phenomenon - unique, in British football at least, to the '70s, '80s and beginning of the '90s. England only qualified for four World Cups in that time - missing out in 1974 and '78 - and the four "official" tracks that featured the squads' voices were wildly different in musical style, lyrical tone and downright performance.

Back Home (1970) - mp3

More than anything, the odd thing about "Back Home" is just how old-fashioned it sounds. I mean, while it was 40 years ago now, it was still 1970. The swinging Sixties had been and gone. And George Best's career was well underway, so it's not as if we hadn't yet reached the point where football and pop culture would begin to merge. Yet "Back Home" presumably must have felt dated even in the year it was released. It's jaunty enough, but it's essentially a safe, incredibly simple two-minute football chant delivered in a boisterous yet stiff-upper-lip fashion, sounding for all the world like the 1958 squad rather than the 1970 one. Lyrically, the team are coming from a position they never would be again - they're the reigning champions at this point. Arguably, they had nothing to prove going into the 1970 tournament save for the question of whether or not they could repeat the accomplishment on foreign soil - which is perhaps why the song's preoccupation with "the folks back home" is so noteworthy.

The song arguably more notable nowadays, of course (at least to my generation) as having its tune nicked for the theme to Fantasy Football League, also being used for a number of musical refrains throughout the show's run where a single lyric would be repeated over and over again and fit (deliberately awkwardly) around the tune. I think my favourite examples were Saint aaaaand, Greavsie talk about the Endsleigh League as if it's im, portaaaaant... and Peleeee, was shite Pele was shite, he was worse than Jason Leeee...

This Time (We'll Get It Right) (1982) - mp3

Whisper it, but I quite like this. The tune, at least - it's catchy, and pleasant, and after a somewhat bizarre little intro, builds to a fairly memorable chorus. Okay, so it's an absolutely massive ripoff of "Stop the Cavalry", but it's quite a good one.

Lyrically, though, I'm not sure it hits the mark. There's a (not entirely unjustified) lack of conviction to it, and it's almost apologetic in tone - while I rather doubt the assertion that "We're on our way / We are Ron [Greenwood]'s twenty-two" had the rest of the world shaking in their boots. Furthermore, the point that it's trying to make - "We've been buggering World Cups up recently, but we're going to get it right this time" doesn't even work, because they hadn't even qualified for twelve years. So really, they'd already "got it right", relative to recent performances, simply by qualifying. Anything else was a bonus.

Still, for all of that, it's hard to dislike, particularly once it reaches a climax that could almost be described as rousing - provided you ignore the further oddness of a brief calypso-style insert on the bridge. They did realise the tournament was taking place in Spain and not Barbados, right?

We've Got The Whole World At Our Feet (1986)

Oh god. Oh god. This is just... awful. From the title, you might expect this to be sung to the tune of "He's Got The Whole World In His Hands", but it doesn't even have the decency to be a clever parody (if only they'd let Nigel Blackwell have a go...) Quite aside from that disappointment, though, this fails on every conceivable level. The tune is bland and forgettable. The backing track is flat and insipid, sounding more like "The Chicken Song" than anything else (only, you know, not as good as "The Chicken Song"). The lyrics are meaningless rhetoric, lacking in a theme for the first time (following 1970's "We'll bring it back with us this time" and 1982's "Come on, we can do better this time"), resorting to lines like "There ain't a single team that we can't beat". And of the three songs that feature the entire squad singing en masse, this is the one where they sound the most like a bunch of tuneless footballers trying to sing when they can't.

I don't have an MP3 of this to link to, but if you want to subject yourself to it, here's a Youtube link. But I suggest you spend the three minutes listening to "Paintball's Coming Home" instead.

World In Motion (1990) - mp3

You've got to hold and give, but do it at the right time. You can be slow or fast, but you must get to the line. They'll always hit you and hurt you - defend and attack. There's only one way to beat them: get round the back. Catch me if you can, 'cos I'm an England man, and what you're looking at is the master plan. We ain't no hooligans, this ain't a football song. Three lions on my chest, I know we can't go wrong.

Aside from everything else that's ever been said about possibly the only "credible" football song also to include performance by actual players (and the first single I ever bought on cassette, fact fans), what interests me is how indicative of its time it is - not for the style employed by New Order, or John Barnes' rap, or the "edgier" lyrics, or the presence of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Keith Allen, but for the use of samples. It's not the first football record to make use of samples of actual commentary and other soundbites (if nothing else, "Anfield Rap" had done so two years previously), but it's the first England one to do so, kicking off a tradition that would run through the nineties. They're good choices, too, with Kenneth Wolstenhome's defining hour along with a great snippet of the narration from the film Goal! ("'We Want Goals'. Against Mexico, they got one - a beauty scored by Bobby Charlton.")

But if nothing else, it's hard to believe that there were only four years between this and "We've Got The Whole World..." It's like they're from different planets.

Next time: The best football song of them all, and how its sequel is entirely justifiable rather than self-indulgent horse-flogging.

The Beautiful Frame

With the World Cup underway (I'm watching South Africa v. Mexico in another browser window as I type this, having waited until 3pm for my lunch hour so I can catch the whole first half), I've decided to do a bit of blogging about football over the next couple of weeks. Not so much about the on-field happenings of the game itself - there are plenty of other places where people do that better than I could - but instead in the cultural and contextual aspects of the sport that particularly interest me. Next week, I'll be doing a series of posts about various football songs, while after that I may pop up with some brief musings on topics such as football stickers, Subbuteo, kits, and that sort of thing.

For now, though, I wanted to link to a video. In 1994, BBC2 ran a theme night called "Goal TV". This was back in the infancy of the TV "theme night" concept, and unlike some of the lazy efforts that would later characterise the genre, "Goal TV" had proper thought and care put into it. It ran for bloody hours, and had some lovely, specially-crafted continuity inbetween segments. It had longer and shorter programmes, including a brilliant Nick Hornby-narrated documentary on the game's appeal called "The Ball is Round", a musing on goalkeepers called "L'Etranger", that Likely Lads episode, the 1966 film Goal!, and that sort of thing - as well as being interspersed with little two- or three-minute highlight packages of some classic World Cup games and a "Greatest Goal Ever Scored" phone vote (Maradona '86 won). It had a very When Saturday Comes sort of feel to it - in that it was a bit intelligent, and was about a general appreciation of the game and its rich and varied culture and history, rather than descending into the laddishness, flag-waving or tribalism that often sadly blight it. Basically, it was fantastic, and I watched it - or its constituent parts - many many times on a taped copy that for a good decade or more has now sadly been lost to the ages.

I've tried for years to track down a copy online - either to download or even to buy on tape - but sadly very little reference to it exists. Which is why finding this rather daft but fun 20-minute programme called The Beautiful Frame, in which Clare Grogan looks at the checkered history of football's relationship with film and TV, was such a joy. It's a bit cheap and cheesy, but it's still pretty enjoyable, and was the first time I'd heard of things like Jossy's Giants. Pleasingly, the clip also includes the accompanying section of the aforementioned lovely continuity. Despite dating from two years after the Premier League's formation, there's a pleasant sense of pre-Sky innocence about the whole thing, and if the World Cup has got you in an all-things-football kind of mood, it's well worth a look. Er, once this game's finished, anyway.

Seb Watches Movies! Vol. 2

By way of celebrating this blog's Exciting New URL!, let's do another batch of my thoughts on the films I've watched over the past couple of months that I hadn't previously seen. I've slowed down a little with my Lovefilm viewing - partly because my commutes for a month or so were taken up with ploughing through all three seasons of The Big Bang Theory in quick succession - but have still managed to keep up a rate of just about one "new" film per week. Which ain't bad going, especially when I also keep getting distracted by the desire to go and watch things I've seen countless-times-but-not-for-ages like Galaxy Quest and Dumb & Dumber. Anyway, this is what I've rented and cinema-ised since finishing Goodfellas in February...

The Science of Sleep
Meant to see this for ages, as Eternal Sunshine is one of my favourite films and I adore Michel Gondry's aesthetic. And "aesthetic" is what this is really about - it's a dreamy, gentle trip through his own personal oddness. It's nowhere near as sharp as anything scripted by Kaufman, but it's got a very quiet charm to it nevertheless - helped considerably by the two leads, who make the stuttering and flawed relationship feel real despite the surrealism that surrounds it. And I spent the film finding Charlotte Gainsbourg quite attractive but not being able to figure out why.

Be Kind Rewind
This, on the other hand, was a disappointment. At the time of release I'd looked forward to it hugely, but while there are some cracking moments (largely revolving around the "sweding") and good performances, too much of the film is lost in a bizarre and pointless subplot that simply doesn't work, and shows even more than Science of Sleep that Gondry needs a better writer to work with than himself - he simply never comes close to establishing who the characters are, how they relate to one-another, and why we should care. Not entirely without merit, but considerably disjointed.

Adventureland
As yet another quirky and slightly melancholic sort-of-rom-com about a nerdish guy and an aloof girl, I'm not sure this quite manages to fully carve out a specific reason to exist. It doesn't help, either, that Kristen Stewart's character is so spectacularly unlikeable, lacking the idiosyncratic charm that these characters usually have when played by someone like Zooey Deschanel (or, er, Charlotte Gainsbourg?). Where it does work, however, is in its devastatingly accurate portrayal of long summers working at theme parks - speaking directly to my own personal experiences (three years at the now-closed Southport Pleasureland) even down to the fact that it's specifically the games that they all work on (I even had a near-identical experience with a customer who was trying to cheat - only mine involved being spat at in the face rather than an attempted knifing). It's generally a warm film, if a little slow, and Eisenberg is likeable - plus there's a surprisingly strong turn from Ryan Reynolds - but aside from evoking memories of Uni summer work, it's not the most memorable.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
This seems to have become my sister's All Time Favourite Movie over the last year or so, and while I'd consider her enthusiasm a little excessive, I can still sort of see where she's coming from. You wouldn't think a documentary about thirtysomething men who devote their entire lives to beating each others' top scores on Donkey Kong and other '80s arcade games to be that compelling - but it is, bizarrely and magnificently so. Most of the discussion about it centres on the awe-inspiringly malevolent Billy Mitchell - and it's true that he's a pantomime supervillain to put Lex Luthor, Doctor Doom and the Master to shame - but my favourite aspect by far is Brian "There's a potential Donkey Kong killscreen coming up" Kuh, a character I'd call one of the greatest comic creations of all time were it not for the simple matter of his not being fictional. The only really disappointing thing about the film is that it ends - you could happily run an ongoing TV docusoap about these guys, and it'd pretty much never get tiresome.

District 9
Took far too long to get round to seeing this, but finally caught it on Sky Box Office while at home visiting my parents. And it's cracking, isn't it? Probably vies with Moon as the best sci-fi film of the last few years. Thoroughly gripping, and with a brilliantly inventive and near-unique alien design, it's perhaps a little heavy-handed in its "here's the allegory"ness - but then, pretty much all social-commentary-sci-fi is heavy-handed with it, it's sort of a facet of the genre. The action and visual effects are quite astonishing for a film of its budget, and Sharlto Copley is superb (even though I couldn't help but think of this when watching his excited spiels to camera early in the film). Slightly slow to begin with but it really kicks in to become pretty darned thrilling by the end.

I Love You Philip Morris
Okay, so if you don't like Jim Carrey, you're not going to get on with this - but I like Jim Carrey a lot, so I thought it was terrific. Great fun, and easily his best comedy in years - but actually a surprisingly warm love story for all that, too. Features an absolutely brilliant twist (that simply seemed too ludicrous to expect - and I still refuse to believe it actually happened in real life), and a great soundtrack to boot. Just really enjoyable stuff, basically - and it offers Carrey the opportunity to do what he does best without overdoing it.

Ghost Town
I generally try and avoid doing this with discs I've rented, but man... I just got bored of this about halfway through, and ended up sending it back rather than spending another 45 minutes on it. It's not terrible - the performances are decent (Gervais just doing his usual schtick, admittedly - but I don't hate that as much as some - and Greg Kinnear is always good value), it's just that it was dull and uninspired, and I could see exactly where it was going. And Tea Leoni is tedious, tedious, tedious. And while pleasant enough, as a comedy it would have been better served by some jokes.

Date Night
Not amazing, but a perfectly enjoyable Saturday-night-out kinda thing. Wouldn't be anywhere near as good if not for its two stars - Steve Carell and Tina Fey, in case you didn't know - but playing slightly more grounded versions of their famed sitcom characters they carry it effortlessly, and as a bonus spark off each other really well. Lots of nice "Oh, it's so-and-so!" cameos, too, including an uncredited Ray Liotta and a highly amusing Mark Wahlberg.

Iron Man 2
Reviewed here and also discussed on the blog recently. Good fun, but not as good as the original, and makes me look forward to The Avengers more than to Iron Man 3, basically.

Son of Rambow
Aw, this was cute. Such a completely different sort of film from Garth Jennings' previous effort (the Hitchhiker's Guide movie, which - while far from perfect - I definitely liked more than some) but the similarity in directorial style is clear (as is the fact that it appeared to again be Joby Talbot doing the music). I think I expected there to be a bit more focus on (and footage of) the film being made by the kids, rather than it really being a macguffin on which to hang the story of their friendship (and, to a lesser extent, the story of his mother - Jessica Stevenson yay! - breaking free of the oppression of her religious group). And it's really rather sweet and likeable, even if it hits all the classic "angry rebel kid meets quiet meek kid" story notes. I'm not sure the subplot of the French exchange students really works, but it makes for some amusing moments (most notably when Didier, considered impossibly cool by all the English kids, gets back on the bus at the end and is immediately pilloried as the uncool nerd). Quiet, but enjoyable - and if anything, in showing the kids' Rambo-inspired film, it almost beats Be Kind Rewind at its own game.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil
So absolutely not what I was expecting. The comparisons to Spinal Tap (and yes, the connections are hard to shake - from the visit to Stonehenge to the bit where they talk about the first song they wrote together to the drummer named Robb Reiner) made me think this was going to be an exercise in schadenfreude, laughing at the trials and tribulations of a terrible, ageing metal band with delusions of grandeur. It's not, though - it's really not. It's funny, sure - but it's also warm, and affectionate, and uplifting. The guys themselves, particularly Lips, have an appealing, honest charm about them (most telling is the part where, in an attempt to raise the money needed to go to the UK and record a new album with Chris Tsangarides, he takes a second job at a telemarketing centre - but admits he's terrible at it because he simply can't lie and be rude to people) - and really, the film is just about ordinary people who know they're quite good at something (and although I'm not a metal connoisseur, it's clear Anvil aren't exactly hopeless) and just want to pursue their dream of having fun with it and giving other people enjoyment. It's not quite at King of Kong levels of genius, but it's a very well-put together (if at times, you suspect, mildly contrived), touching and winning documentary nevertheless.

Pavement, Brixton Academy, 12th May 2010

Yeah, rubbish picture. iPhone camera, stuck up in the seating area. Seating position didn't hamper enjoyment as much as I'd anticipated, mind. I'm getting old.

My sister and I spent the entire gig hoping they'd play "Carrot Rope". It's one of the quintessential videos from the days, around ten years ago, when we'd sit in front of MTV2 during pretty much any period of time that we weren't in school and our parents weren't watching the telly. It was always one of our favourites. And it's their best song, let's face it. But clearly it holds too many bad memories of being the last track on their last album, the album that they fell out while making and that was seen as unfairly skewed towards Malkmus' songwriting (as it happens, Terror Twilight is by far my favourite of their records, though I know I'm in a minority there). But still, they did a wonderful "Shady Lane", and "Cut Your Hair", and "Summer Babe", and "Trigger Cut", and "Gold Soundz", and "Range Life", and a lot more in a two-hour set. Little about it felt truly magical, but it was just nice to get to see them, as them, playing those songs.

But in honour of the fact that they didn't play it: