Are you familiar with the excellent British television series Spaced? It’s brilliant, far too brilliant to go into at length here – if you see repeats on UKTV, watch them… or, better yet, buy the DVDs, available at all good etc – they’re worth the money.
Anyways, having said that, remember this phrase, idly scribbled by Spaced’s main protagonist, Tim Bisley, on a portfolio of his cartoon artwork:
I AM A MASSIVE WANKER
As I say, remember this, because it will come in handy later on...
In (apparently) unrelated news, Western Australian/Californian hippy icons the John Butler Trio have released a new album, revolutionarily entitled The April Uprising.
It’s an unintentionally amusing moniker, given the fact that John and his trio would probably be as close to any form of organised insurrection as Tony Abbott would be to being found in one of the stalls in the gents at Cube, but what really raised And Another Thing’s hackles were the instructions that accompanied the review copies of said album.
Remember, then, that most uprisings usually have some form of natural justice, freedom of speech and/or release from oppression at their core… but the JBT, protectors of huggable trees the nation over, brewers of mung bean tea par excellence and general all round opposers of oppression and it’s earthly facilitator, ‘the man,’ have a different idea.
Y’see, every review copy of their new album comes with a piece of paper, which has to be signed, stating the user will only use the album for review purposes (shit… I could be taken to court already – there’s a hot cup of coffee resting on my copy even as I type), and – I’m not making this up – reviewers will only listen to the album in public places via the gift of headphones.
Now, that last piece of advice I’ll buy – I really don’t want people on the 318 to Belconnen and points North in the morning thinking I’m actually listening to this drivel because I’m enjoying it, but, really, sometimes I can’t control the overspill from my earpieces, and who knows who’s earwigging in the next seat? Where do these people get off? Could I be prosecuted by the same revisionist forces that John professes so much loathing for (hey man, those pigs and lawyers, are like, really bad… we should stage an uprising or something… if mom pays for it) simply by having the stereo cranked up and the back door open whilst my neighbours – none of whom I know, much less trust – stand concealed in the herbaceous borders of my backyard brandishing Dictaphones? Do they really have such an inflated opinion of themselves that they think bootleggers are lurking everywhere, desperate to get a sneak preview of the new John Butler Trio album?
The answer, you would hope, is no. But you really have to wonder about anybody prepared on the one hand to try and make a humble street press journalist sign all manner of spurious ‘confidentiality’ clauses just to review their bloody album (which is utter rubbish, by the way – I know because I happened to be standing outside someone’s window the other night whilst they were playing it) whilst on the other hitching their wagon to some sort of vague green/hippy/left of centre free thinking lentil-infused anti-establishment love-in, don’t you?
There’s a simple answer here – go out and buy the most recent Levellers album, Letters From the Underground – musical proof that you can hold sincere leftist, revolutionary political views, over decades, yet still not sell out, and then go back to Spaced, with John Butler and his Trio in mind, and remember that graffiti.
