Alastair Campbell plays the songs of Jacques Brel

I often find that discovering that somebody shares one of your passions can efficiently neutralise any misgivings or antipathy you previously held towards them. So it was this morning, as I listened to Alastair Campbell's programme on Radio 4 about the legendary chanson singer Jacques Brel:

Former Labour strategist Alastair Campbell reveals his passion for the music of the late Belgian singer/songwriter Jacques Brel. At the peak of his career during the 50s and 60s, Brel's music explored emotions darker and deeper than the conventional popular songs of the time, and his live performances were famed for their intensity and ferocity.

Contributors include Brel fanatic Mel Smith, impresario Jean Michel Boris, accordionist Jean Corti, journalist Olivier Todd and Brel's daughter France.

Before the programme started I didn't care too much care for Campbell; by the end of it, though, I wanted to invite him around for tea and macaroons. I assume there's a snappy psychological term for this phenomena, but it does worry me. Would I feel compelled to soften my position on George W. Bush, Melanie Phillips & Jim Davidson if they suddenly developed a passion for Tom Waits' music, Robert Anton Wilson's books and Grant Morrison's Invisibles comics?

Many of Brel's songs have been translated into English over the years, but - as Campbell mentioned - many of these are far from faithful to the source material. Even his most frequently covered song, If You Go Away (Ne Me Quitte Pas), is no exception. As Brel's Wiki entry states:

English translations of Brel's songs, in particular also Ne me quitte pas translations, have been subject to criticism and are regarded by some as being stripped of their original brilliance and magical lyricism. For example, Brel's Ne me quitte pas evocatively states, "Moi, je t'offrirai / Des perles de pluie / Venues de pays / Où il ne pleut pas" [As for me, I'll offer you pearls of rain that come from a country where rain never falls]. However, Rod McKuen’s English translation replaces that imagery with "But if you stay / I'll make you a day / Like no day has been / or will be again."

Sometimes the lyrical changes can be more substantial. One of his most famous songs, Jacky, has been covered by, amongst others, Scott Walker and Marc Almond:




While Messrs Walker and Almond stuck to translations that were reasonably faithful to Brel's original vision, not everyone has been quite so honourable:

And if one day I should become
A spinner with a brutish tongue
The scourge of all those politicians

And I will tell them how it is
Those sorry gutless sacks of piss
Will be no match for my ambitions

My pal will be called Tonio
And I will stand there by his side
And if there’s one thing you should know
It's that he's Jekyll and I'm Hyde

You’ll see me get my every wish
The Fourth Estate will be my bitch
Just watch me beat them with a fish
And leave them wimpering in a ditch

And when they say things I don’t like
I'll bash them senseless with a pike
Just ask The Guardian’s Michael White
And he will tell you Who’s the Daddy

If I could be for only an hour
If I could be for an hour every day
If I could be for just one little hour

Cute brute in a boot-yer-ass way

Next Week: Peter Mandelson plays the songs of Serge Gainsbourg

When life turns into a Robert Anton Wilson novel

It was 8am and I was driving to work, listening to Radio 4's Today Programme as John Humpreys served me a hearty breakfast of headlines. He told me that Republican Presidential candidate John McCain had promised to transform Washington and win back public trust. He said something about research indicating that some food prices had risen by as much as 40% this year. Finally, he reassured me that scientists working on CERN's Large Hadron Collider had insisted that their research into the start of the universe will not create a black hole that will swallow the planet next Wednesday.

Thanks for the reassurance, John. Mind you, I might have felt a lot more optimistic about the future - and possibly more energised for work - if the Today Programme's weather forecast took us up to next Thursday and beyond...

Who Watches the... What?

With the hype machine for next year's Watchmen film already powering up (it was the cover story to last month's Empire and the trailer is attached to Dark Knight, that bat-themed vigilante flick that's currently doing the rounds), it's only a matter of time before non-comics literate friends and affiliates start asking me: "What's it all about, fanboy?"

Sadly, I'm no better equipped at providing a straightforward, snappy and easily digestible answer than I was when other friends and other affiliates were asking another me exactly the same question over twenty years' ago. It's just as well, then, that there are people out there prepared to do the hard work for me. Tom Spurgeon asked his Comics Reporter readers to define Watchmen to the uninitiated. I quite liked Cole Moore Odell's take on the book:

"Watchmen is about power: its trappings, its limits, and the consequences of its use. We see the USA and Russia as global superpowers; Dr. Manhattan with the literal power of a god; the power that normal people have to affect both individual lives and the course of history, and the power of writing to shape thinking. It is also about powerlessness -- as embodied by the child who would become Rorschach, or the inexorable slide toward war -- and the self-deception practiced by people (Ozymandias in particular, but all of them) struggling against that helplessness. It's only about superheroes to the extent that the genre allows Moore and Gibbons a multitude of ways to explore the theme."

I'm also quite partial to Matthias Wivel's explanation:

"Watchmen is about a lot of things, many of which have been brought up in your round-up, but fundamentally it is about what all Alan Moore's comics are about: Order. The sense that there is a structure to the universe, and to existence, and how this structure starts in ourselves and determines our perception of the world. Moore exemplifies this in the meticulous structure of the comic itself, but also in the character of Dr. Manhattan who perceives the order we can only intuit.

"The conflict of the story arises from the way the individual deals with it, and the main characters each make their own choices: The Comedian absolves himself and becomes amoral, Ozymandias wants to control it, Rorschach has lost faith in it, Dan and Julie chose to make their way within it, and Dr. Manhattan stands back. The play's the thing."

But the award for the most straightforward, snappy and easily digestible answer goes to Dustin Harbin:

"Watchmen starts out as a superhero murder mystery and turns into a really dense rumination on the motivations behind might and right."

It doesn't provide a full explanation as to why this book is still considered so important by people like me, but it'll be a damn sight easier for me to remember.



Thanks to Pete for the heads-up.

Flaming Lips' Christmas on Mars

The mighty Flaming Lips' long-awaited Christmas on Mars film is coming to DVD this autumn. If you're a Flaming Lips fan then you'll probably know about this already. If you're not a Flaming Lips fan, then shame on you.

Heres the trailer:

You be the judge

From The Grauniad earlier this week:

"Russell Crowe has confirmed speculation that he aims to star as the comic Bill Hicks during an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. Crowe, 44, is currently without a project for seven months due to a delay in filming Ridley Scott's alternative Robin Hood tale, Nottingham. He told the Herald: "I have another project based on the life of comedian Bill Hicks, which is going from treatment to draft stage with Kiwi writer Mark Staufer." The Herald says it understands Crowe would play Hicks, the outspoken US comedian who died at the age of 32 from pancreatic cancer."

Oh, dear.

If you go to the original Sydney Morning Herald scoop, however, you'll find the following:

"Crowe confirmed Nottingham would not go ahead until March next year because director Sir Ridley Scott wanted the leaves on the trees in England's Sherwood Forest to be the right colour."

Am I the only person in the room who finds that fucking hilarious?

Bull$#@% Bulletins

Here's something else I recently dug out from the archives. If you have no interest in comic books - or, for that matter, low humour - then I strongly suggest you look away now.

Some years' ago, during my ever-so-brief stint as a small-press comics creator, I used to write a page of made-up news stories in the style of Marvel Comics' old Bullpen Bulletins. Technically speaking, it was filler material. As Alphonse Karr would say: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

Be warned: there's plenty more where this came from...


This autumn, London's ICA will be hosting an exhibition dedicated to the notorious underground comix title, Outside Now!

Originally launched in 1964 by the now-defunct publishing house Bench Press Press, Outside, Now! featured cartoon interpretations of fact-based fights between the major comic creators of the day. As its former publisher Cornelius Numb recalls: "In those days, the comic industry was full of people from all sortsa different backgrounds. Like me, most of them started out on the bare-knuckle boxing circuit."

Holding up a 1960s Fantastic Four comic, Numb continues: "You only got to look at a page of Jack Kirby artwork to see for yourself. Take a look at that bold foreshortening and tough, no-nonsense linework. Just imagine the amount of muscle that went into each of those pencil strokes. Now, try to imagine the kind of damage the fist clenching that pencil could do to your face. It's no wonder we called him 'King'."

According to Numb, Kirby wasn't the only Comic Book Clobberer or Silver Age Scrapper. "These were stand-up guys who settled things the old fashioned way. Take [Steve] Ditko, a skinny guy to look at, but a real dirty fighter all the same. He never gave up. I watched him beat seven shades of shinola out of Carmine Infantino and Bill Everett after a Marvel vs DC baseball game turned ugly. He kept screaming: 'Submit to my will! Submit to my will!' He really knew how to psyche out his opponents.

"We ran that fight in our double-sized Christmas 1971 issues. Despite their injuries, Steve, Bill and Carmine [all] collaborated on the strip. Say what you like, but those guys were pros."

The magazine reached its peak in popularity during the 1970s, and Numb claims that mainstream publishers were quick to cash-in on the phenomena: "You ever see that Superman vs Muhammed Ali book that DC put out? I rest my case."

During the 1980s, however, Outside, Now! experienced a sharp decline in sales. A new wave of comic book artists went straight into the industry from art school or advertising. "Most of them were derivative little sons of bitches who just wanted to imitate their favourite comic artists," recalls Numb. "Those guys didn't know the first thing about fighting."

"I mean no disrespect, but most of these people were fans," says Numb bitterly. "If you ask me fans shouldn't be making comics, they should be reading them." By the time the 80s came around the only people in the industry who'd fight on a regular basis were the letterers. People like John Costanza, Ken Bruzenak and Tom Frame tried to keep the tradition alive, but without the involvement of 'hot' comic artists of the day, the days of Outside, Now! were numbered.

"Those guys tried their best," says Numb, "but what kind of chump wants to read a book that doesn't have drawings?"

Vexicon: Quadrilogy

Vexicon is a term that I coined a while ago to describe the body of words, phrases and language structures that irritate, annoy or perplex the damn hell out of me. Like a lot of people who maintain a blog, I suffer from a somewhat heightened sensitivity to the words wot we use. The contents of my vexicon, then, are those combinations of letters that invariably cause me neuro-linguistic palpitations and a bad case of irritable vowel syndrome.

I was browsing the Interwebs during my lunch break at work today when I noticed that Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is now available for pre-order from Amazon. For one reason or another this was the first Indy flick that I never got around to catching at the cinema, so no doubt I'll buy it when it comes out and add it to my monstro DVD collection.

I also noticed that there's going to be a new Indiana Jones DVD box set that'll include Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but I've already got a box set containing of the first three films so I'll be skipping on that. Now, I'm well aware that the new Indy film received a fairly mixed reception from critics and the public upon release. Some claimed that the film's title itself was part of the problem, saying it was cumbersome, ungainly and had far too many syllables. Even it's abbreviated form - IJATKOTCS - was accused by some of looking suspiciously like an anagram of something you could catch from a toilet seat.

Just to clarify matters, I wasn't one of those people. If anything, I'm rather fond of cumbersome, ungainly film titles that have far too many syllables. No, I didn't have a problem with the film's title. What I do have a problem with is what they're calling the new DVD box set.

They're calling it The Indiana Jones Quadrilogy.

Not 'The Indiana Jones Saga' or even 'The Indiana Jones Legacy'... no, it's 'The Fucking Indiana Jones Quadrilogy'. Yes, Quadrilogy. It really is a grotesque word. To paraphrase an old insult, if your dog looked that ugly you'd shave it's arse and teach it to walk backwards.

It's not a proper word, of course. Something like that could only be spawned in the fetid bowls of some Hollywood marketing department. I imagine the filthy, denatured committee of bright young things who first coined the term probably got a nice fat bonus for their efforts. Of course, if a sequence of three films is a 'trilogy' then a sequence of four should really be 'quartet', but these little bastards always know better. "Market research tells us otherwise," they'll claim. "If you package a lucrative franchise property like the Indiana Jones, Alien or Die Hard series' as a 'quartet', a significant percentage of our target demographic will perceive this as a threat to genre convention. There's a very real concern amongst Middle Americans that Indy, Ripley and John McClane will pull out a pair of violins and a cello and do a Vivaldi recital."

Bill Hicks was right about these people.