2004-10-28 - 12:35 p.m.

Gig review- Mercian FM Thunderball Concert, Coventry Skydome, October 23 2004
When I heard that Coventry had managed to get a succesful and famous group who I actually like, I couldn't resist indulging my pop cheese side, and dragged my sister along for the ride. Where will the madness end?
We start with Rooster, who are pretty bad, miming their Busted-meets-Reef junkola. (*1/2). Phixx are also obviously miming, but their late 90s boyband sound, their lack of choreography (they just shamble about) and their so-macho-they're-clearly-homosexual style was a lot of fun. ***1/2. Jay Sean was my sister's highlight, with him doing a bizarre a capella version of 'Yeah' by Usher in which he did the human beatbox and the synth line at the same time, and then doing some speed-of-light rapping. Hooray! Shame all his songs sounded the same. ***

Stonebridge, unlike everyone else, started with a song nobody had heard, which was a disaster because who the fuck are they anyway? The mystery is solved with the second song, which is one of those dance songs I can't remember and you won't know the name, but, eh, if you heard it you'd know it. The singer, Terese, is an eccentric stage presence, but it was too late. ** I don't see the point of the next band, Traphic, either, who start with 'Twist and Shout' of all things and generally sound like 'Heartbeat'. 1/2* Thankfully, 411 lift the mood, starting with 'On My Knees' and finishing with a song which samples 'Sour Times' by Portishead and features a line like "Every time you suffer, it's a breath of fresh air to my soul". O-o-okay. ****

A break then, and we return with Intenso Project, who turn out to be the black dude from Phats and Small and Lisa Scott-Lee off Steps. They're miming, and they're inaudible, and not very good. *1/2. Things don't get much better with 2wenty 4our 7even and their forgettable McFly-isms, which are probably about **, nor for Mark Joseph, who, bless him, is live and backed only by his acoustic guitar, but whose songs are like the Manics or something. ** Things get even worse with the self-indulgent Mercia FM Presenters, who've already driven me to insanity with their never-ending talking masquerading as hosting, murdering 'Kids' by Robbie Williams, and this ain't no mercy killing- this is the foxhunt of music. (0)

Then there's Sarah Luciens and the crowd are all "who?", and it turns out she wrote 'Jumpin'' by Liberty X, but hang on, her own songs sound like Christian Aguilera's 'Beautiful'. It's a weird contrast to everything else, and the crowd aren't digging it at all (it's now past 9pm and da kidz are flagging). Never mind, the songs are OK. *** It's followed by Lemar, who I had low hopes for, but he actually has the crowd in the palm of his hand, doing a version of 'I Believe In A Thing Called Love' reinvented as a soulful acoustic number, and being actually-pretty-good with his own tunes. ***1/2. Then we get to Girls Aloud who have clearly only just turned up. They're hardly perfect- they sound like incoherent chavs, they blow their dances and there's no 'Life Got Cold'- but they DO sing live, wheel on 'Sound of the Underground' and all their songs are great. They then vanish after just 25 minutes, which is a birrova screwjob, but you've got to expect it from these things. ***1/2

All in all, as a live concert it wasn't much, none of the acts got much more than four songs, and the Mercian FM presenters were utter imbeciles (at one point, they rambled on for TEN MINUTES between acts). But... if you take it as a sort of cheesy Poll Winners Party-type affair, it was a whole lot of fun.

DVD review- Super Furry Animals, 'Songbook'

Ah, the Super Furry Animals. Catching them on the Chart Show one bleary morning in May 1996 changed my world. The first band I was madly obsessed with, and it all goes back to 'God! Show Me Magic', 106 seconds of fuzzy, maniacal pop with screaming, coupled with a super-cheap video with a bunch of random weirdos attempting to sabotage the band's performance.

Of course, the video is here in all its lo-fi glory, together with 20- yes, 20- other videos that doth reek of awesomeness. You get to watch the band mooch around in Cuba during 'Demons' in a sorta 'Lost In Translation' way, you see them in cartoon form in the ridiculously entertaining 'Do Or Die' video, and watch them do not very much at all in any of the videos from their first album. Plus, you watch a short video on curling in 'Northern Lites' and watch some origami animals having sex in the slightly scary video for 'Smokin'', while there's also entertainment to be had seeing Rhys Ifans, now best known as Hugh Grant's housemate in Notting Hill, looking like Richard E Grant in their '96 era.

All the songs that sounded great anyway still sound great, but even the ones that didn't do much for me at the time are ace: 'If You Don't Want Me To Destroy You' is revealed as a veiled dig at a suffocating girlfriend backed by a string-sodden ballad of isolation and wonder, 'Play It Cool' shows itself to be a great pop song and 'Focus Pocus/Debiel?" from their really-not-very-good 'Moog Droog' EP is an awesome metallic rawwwk song that fuses with medieval melancholy (and check the zero money video). I can still give 'Hello Sunshine' and its boring-ass animated video a wide berth though...

Not much on the DVD extras (that I've found, anyway), apart from a vaguely boring film called "American Sasquach" (yes, I know that's not how you spell it, but that's what's on the DVD). Honestly, would it have killed them to get the rights for their more interesting 1998 documentary from S4C?

So yeah, it's great, but then, I always knew it would be. And the sequencing is perfect, making every song special. Yay! ****3/4

Film review- Alien vs Predator
Like Freddy vs Jason, a potentially exciting moneyfest takes over a decade to get to the big screen and by the time it does, the impact of all those films is but a distant memory. Obviously the money feud would be Blair Witch vs Sadako... or maybe that's just me.

The plot is labyrinthine (read: stupid)- a pyramid is discovered in Antartica, where nobody knew that one even existed. Turns out that the Predators built them, or at least, forced man to make them. In the pyramid, they housed xenomorps (that's the Alien, guys), who they hunt to give their young a sort of rite-of-passage. Every hundred years.
Regardless of why the predators use this digital time when they surely measure their time in THEIR OWN TIME and not this Earth's time (or perhaps they don't), we find ourselves watching a bunch of humans. The humans are there to explore the pyramid, despite their lack of training, because the old man financing the project simply cannot wait to seize it for his corporation, despite the fact that he's on the brink of death. The humans don't really get on, and the conditions are awful. Meanwhile, it's the 10th of the 10th of, er, 2004 and the aliens are waking up... and the Predators are coming...

However, despite these suspiciously familiar traits- humans in the ice battling alien monster? How NEW!- 'The Thing' this isn't. Mysteriously, Paul WS Anderson seems to suck all the excitement out of this flick in favour of the tepid cast (you know most of them won't survive and you simply don't care), and the jumpy MTV editing makes the first Alien v Predator showdown boring as hell. How can this be? Still, once you've endured an hour of really not very much going on, and the last human finds that she has to pick a side in the War Of The Horrible Space Monsters, things start to pick up, even if the movie still totally lacks any of the politics or themes that the original movies had in spades.

I'm getting more and more weary of these films, though- in which ludicrous storylines meet with oh-so-expensive CGI. It may have worked for 'The Mummy', but at least you had characters to care about in The Mummy. When the CGI and jumpy montage stuff is so overdone at the expense of writing a decent script that even a showdown betwee, ooh, say, Aliens and Predators, or vampires and werewolves, is totally bloodless, what is the point of their existence? Oh, and the 'AVP' title? Forget about it. When the best thing to say about a movie is "not quite as awful as The Chronicles of Riddick", you know you're in trouble. *

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