Avant-garde Experimentalism

In the car today as its pub day and my turn to drive. My pub companion is back from his holidays today, on a pub day, talk about perfect timing. The drive in was very good. It took 20 minutes. School holidays do have benefits.

I'm paying for all this sporting lark though; I can barely lift my arms this morning. These dangerous sports are not good for me, might need to cut back on the swimming. L says I'll soon have arm muscles to match my thigh muscles. She doesn't say whether she sees that as a good thing or not. It doesn’t sound like a pretty sight to me.

The Leeds fan who's retired from being a football supporter proposes that we go watch Leeds play at Forest next season. Unfortunately he can’t as he's given up football, he’ll have to rely on me telling him what it was like. Unless he's coming out of retirement already.

The pub was good. Our usual cottage pie and some practically AF Ale 3.7% from the Durham Brewery. The only problem was it took us twenty minutes to get through the legendary Derby road works and ten minutes to get back. We need a longer lunch hour.

In the evening me make our apologies to Doggo, who is dumped, as we go out with L's parents for a film and a meal. Both Son and Daughter were due to come but as expected Son dropped out at the last minute, good job he's predictable. Then Daughter drops out after being invited round to a friend's house, which funnily enough always seems to happen when she is due to go anywhere exciting without her friend in tow.

We have an excellent meal. I have a lamb curry that was one of the best I've had for some time, with two stonking pickles :- lime and chilli (undeniably out of a Patak's jar, I know them well but no complaints). Washed down with one and a half Everards Tiger,

The film we see is 'Scott Walker: 30 Century Man', as L's folks are big Scott Walker fans. The film tells the story of his transformation from teen idol Scott Engel, through his time with The Walker Brothers and then into his solo career. His records gradually got weirder and weirder and sales declined. Save for a brief Walkers reunion he disappeared until a record label finally let him do things his way. Even then his output was less than prolific, averaging about one record every ten years. His way turned out to be very avant-garde. It is described as exploring the boundaries between chord and dis-chord. I have to say that, although the programme probably overdid his later stuff, I found myself rather taken with the pretentious experimentalism of his material. Particularly with a song about the hanging of Mussolini, which for the recording required a percussionist to punch a slab of meat with his fists.



There are many gushing contributions from celebrity fans who you feel are courtesy of David Bowie's address book, he is credited as being as executive producer - Damon Albarn, Johnny Marr (yes him again), Julian Cope (no idea my favourite poet was a fan and even compiled an album of Scott's stuff), Marc Almond, Radiohead, Simon Raymonde, Jarvis Cocker and many more. Quite a cult following.

His songs are dark, depressing, daunting, discomforting and even disturbing, all the d's. My kind of stuff. I'm intrigued. I can feel a CD purchase or two coming on.

Get home and I'm tempted to ask L if she fancies some avant-garde experimentalism in the bedroom but in the end I settle for a large port (L measured it) and a quickie instead.