Sinister: Pegasus realizes they're playing his tune

[P F]

Greenflies, bluebottles, milk cartons,

I'm not totally sure about this, but I have a feeling I spent the last five 
days in a cupboard playing 240 folk songs on a three-string guitar. It's 
with fascination, therefore, that I return to find such a plethora of rich 
material.

As stasis and the predictable have long been my domestos, I mean, domain, a 
word on the same old subject as last week. People have been foreswearing the 
inkies debate like it contained nicotine, or like there was no tomorrow: 
which is probably wise, cos one day it just won't come. Still:

About those end-of-year lists: they usually had, doubtless still (and more 
than ever) have, the capacity to alienate and inflame ('which is what rock 
writing is all about!', says someone off-screen - but no, I'm not sure); and 
few can have found it easy to agree with more than half of the 50 or so LPs 
named. (One tired, yawning example. Costello made at least four major 
records in the 90s; I'm not sure that any of them made the weekly polls.) 
BUT to get specific. Nick D (who despite forementioned foreswearing is the 
coollest smoker in town, no danger) gives the poll-toppers from NME and MM 
1987-9 and reckons the NME's choices now look better, MM's verging on the 
bizarre. Naturally I can't agree - which is just to say that my preferences 
happen to be the other way round. I've racked my brains to think of a 1989 
LP I prefer to Disintegration, but don't think I can quite do it. It was 
indeed bizarre to see it top that poll; but it still cheers me up to think 
of it.

That's just to come down to arbitraryish personal tastes - on which debates 
like this may always be partially founded anyway. But I also think Steady 
Mike's right: the preposterousness and daftness had their function; what was 
bad and what was good about MM were cheek-by-jowl, if not even identical. He 
makes me reflect on one other thing about Reynolds and Roberts - probably my 
last comment on this, honest: *they described music so that it didn't matter 
whether you'd heard it or not*. Indeed, hearing it could be a handicap, for 
their descriptions were so self-serving, so off the wall or up a gumtree, 
that the actual record might only get in the way of their fantastic verbal 
concoctions, the sheer fictions they loosely based from what they claimed to 
have heard. I still haven't heard most of the records they wrote about back 
then, but can still remember half of what they said, which may in some cases 
have been more interesting than the sound of the records anyway. Not always 
the best criterion for writing about music, to be sure, but there is, or 
was, a place for it, and it did save you a lot of money you'd otherwise have 
had to spend on hearing the dull discs themselves.

I must say it was a shock to see Steady Mike back on sinister. Since I waved 
him off as he took the boat to work in an Alaskan pipeline back in, I think, 
January (he'd been inspired by rereading Everett True on Neil Young's 
'Someday', in a MM review from autumn 1989. Nothing could dissuade him), 
there's been neither hide nor seek, I mean hair, of him in evidence. And 
suddenly, ever the master of the coup de tayatrer, he reveals in the most 
melodramatic way possible that he's back in town (no mention of the 
pipeline. I guess things didn't work out) and having barmy adventures.

It's odd, cos the other day I had a slightly similar experience to his. I 
was coming round the bend on a train to Kansas City the other day (this is 
in Northamptonshire, by the way - they moved it in 1988, responding to 
demand) when I was set upon by a short, stocky figure with a puggish pout 
who turned out to be former Old Trafford keeper Chris Turner. Once he'd 
overpowered me and knocked me out I woke to find myself in a shuddering, 
rattling freight car, first used in 'Starlight Express' in 1985. As I raised 
my head I realized I was confronted by the decrepit forms of the original 
line-up of Fascinating Aida - though now I come to think of it it could even 
have been the Mint Juleps, whichever you think most plausible. As I spoke I 
realized the erstwhile custodian had knocked out some of my teeth. Still, I 
managed to get out the obvious question. 'You - you've reformed?' 'No!', 
they laughed in unison (it later emerged that they'd been persuaded to 
affiliate by a  shop steward in Kettering, who'd assured them of the 
benefits of the 2000 insurance deal and given them each a key ring), 'We're 
the same corrupt, louche, decadent, dissolute, promiscuous, sponging drunks 
we've always been'.



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