Palatinate Blog

As I awoke this morning, I stumbled down stairs to find that a supposedly very important book has been published today. Maybe it’s because it is August, and the Westminster obsessed national media are short of stories, but the release of Blair’s memoirs does not strike me as headline news. What is more surprising is that journalists seem genuinely stunned and taken aback by some of the ‘revelations’ in the book.

It seems from ‘A Journey’, (which in line with Blair’s insurmountable ego was originally going to be titled ‘The Journey’, because there surely hasn’t been a more important journey…) we ‘learn’ that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did not really get on. Blair writes that, particularly after 2005, he was in a “continual fight” with Gordon. Is this really so shocking and worth discussion? Was it not so patently obvious when Brown and Blair shared their famous ice cream in the 2005 election campaign that, like much of the New Labour PR machine, it was a carefully choreographed stunt?

I am totally exasperated. I cannot understand why ‘respected’ media outlets, on the left and right of the political spectrum feel the need to have “live blogs” posting instant reaction to Blair’s oh so eagerly anticipated book. Rather bizarrely, the Telegraph’s website accidentally summarises the matter brilliantly.

“Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey, sent shockwaves rippling through political circles when it was released this morning.” Maybe it is because I am not part of any “political circles”, but I doubt that the book will even send the slightest tremor throughout the rest of the population. The public are not stupid: they are fully aware that the titanic personality struggles at the top of the New Labour hierarchy made it a government that was at times impotent, divided, and unclear of its direction. It is telling that there was no rush on book shops this morning, except for those in the media.

The notion that Blair’s memoirs will in any way provide an objective and enlightening account of his time in office is simply absurd. It is truly remarkable that for a man who many accuse of war crimes, there is not even a whiff of contrition. From some of the excerpts of the book (I must admit I have not yet splashed out for a copy, although I believe it is already half price in Amazon) it seems that ‘A Journey’ is Blair at his self-justifying worst. If having read the whole book, my opinion suddenly changes I will of course correct myself.

Yet, concerning the war in Iraq, he told Andrew Marr that “I can’t regret the decision to go to war”. How can he possibly arrive at such a position? Hundreds of British soldiers and millions of Iraqis died on the basis of a false premise! Regardless of what he may or may have not known at the time, knowing as we do now that there were no WMD’s, one might have hoped that he would modify his opinion somewhat.

Blair also plunges himself into one of the most important foreign policy debates of the new decade: Iran. Speaking in an interview with Andrew Marr, he said ”I think it is wholly unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapons capability and I think we have got to be prepared to confront them, if necessary militarily.” One might think that after overeager foreign interventions caused his popularity to plummet, he might favour a slightly more restrained, conciliatory approach. Perhaps that was hoping for too much.

Now I’m not being critical just for the sake of it. I do find it excessively cynical when people brand his donation to the Royal British Legion as ‘blood money’. Regardless of what his motives for the donation were, the donation was a welcome decision and Blair should be given credit for that. In addition, he does admit some of what he thought were mistakes. Namely: banning fox hunting, the freedom of information act and devolution. Yet that does not detract from his failure to even apologise for the Iraq War or for the damage his memoirs are likely to inflict on the party he professes to love.

This book is the apotheosis of the New Labour project. It seems that there are no great revelations or surprises in store. Released at a crucial point in the Labour leadership contest, (the ballot papers go out today) the release date seems designed to have maximum impact on the contest. Coincidence? I think not. Blair is unapologetic and unashamedly defiant about a war which has imbued a deep sense of mistrust in British politics which will take years to recover from. We should have expected nothing less from the master of spin.

With festival season drawing to a close, I find myself looking back at my experience working on the bar at V Festival. It was incredible: live music, sunshine, beer in full flow – it was all a kaleidoscope of tents, alcopops and rave paint. What destroys this image of hedonistic bliss? The sheer number of preteens running around treating the festival, clearly a designated lash zone, as a bloody playpark.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against kids having fun. But there is a time and a place, people. That place is not here, where the smell of weed or vomit emanates from every tent. On a selfish note, kids ruin the experience for the majority of festival goers. It is a place to rave, to drink, to dance, to scream. To basically go crazy. Not something you can really do when a girl with pigtails is looking inqusitively at you. Of course, parents may argue their kids love the music, and are there to have a good time. To be frank, when I liked a band they were usually singing about friendship and love, so as I’m jumping up and down to David Guetta it’s ever so slightly unnerving to see a little boy lisping along to Sexy Bitch.

And let’s face it, much as authorities try to quash the drugs scene at festivals, the two go hand in hand. Minutes after pitching my tent I was offered pills at a reasonable price of £3 a hit. And that was only in the staff campsite. Although children may not be exposed to the drugs as directly as I was, the fact remains they are living, eating and sleeping in a drugs den for two nights, and are therefore surrounded by the stuff. You wouldn’t find parents letting their kids have free reign in a dodgy back alley, so why is it fine here? To compound the problem, there are various stalls offering ‘natural highs’ from herbal ecstasy and weed. To expose a child to this is to banalise the pursuit of pleasure through drugs, be they natural or otherwise (will a kid even know the difference?) All of this increases the risk children will come to believe tablets and thrills are a normal part of life. Don’t think my aim here is to be preachy and protest against any means of having fun – it’s not. What annoys me is the way children are entering what should remain a purely adult world.

Drugs aside, think of the level of alcohol and drunkeness a child has to witness in even an hour at a festival. People are smashed at 11am, 4pm, 2am, whenever, again making this seem an acceptable way to behave to youngsters. There’s nothing wrong with having a good time and getting wasted at a festival – I got as drunk as anyone – but I do have a problem with children having to weave in and out of stumbling drunks who aren’t going to notice if they spill their drinks or walk into someone under 5ft. It’s the equivalent of letting a kid into Klute (although that in itself would be morally wrong).

Children cannot possibly spend a weekend there without seeing at least five penises. Every time I looked at the wall next to the bar I was working on, at least three men had dropped their pants. Women, though more discreet, also take the piss, and do their business anywhere they fancy. Behaviour such as this, which wouldn’t be considered acceptable in normal social circumstances, is rife. People really do not care. Swearing too, is uninhibited. On a train a parent might complain to a fellow passenger who is spouting expletives in front of their child; at a festival, the rules change, and kids’ young ears are filled with every word under the sun. Even the performers throw in a ‘fuck’ here and a ‘bastard’ there to sound cool and like they’re ‘one of us’. However, I can’t deny I use swear words in everyday conversation, and having to check yourself whenever faced with someone under 12 is just contrary to the liberal tone of festivals in general.

Adults may also argue they’ll be able to keep an eye on their kids and that all will be well, but is this really the case? Is it really feasible to do so in such a place? I think not. If you really want to treat kids, take them to see Toy Story 3. Or the aquarium. Or Alton Towers. Anywhere that doesn’t involve more drugs, sex, alcohol and chaos than is appropriate for someone yet to hit puberty.

The topical oil-spill themed shoot by Steven Meisel in the August issue of Italian Vogue was subject to an unnecessary amount of scrutiny and a journalistic ‘clip round the ear’ by many who seem to have concerns about… no, not size 2 models creating unachievable images of beauty… no, not rhino-leather handbags…

Ohh, worries that oil spills are being glamorised and trivialised, of course! By viewing the overwhelming images of lacquered and choked life, depicting a hard-hitting similarity to the effect of trans-national corporations (namely BP) on wildlife through shockingly destructive scenes, we’re automatically going to think the oil spill is no biggy?

That’s like the things people say about ten-year-olds who play GTA.

Although Vogue Italia editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani claims that ‘There is nothing political. There is nothing social. It’s only visual’, I hope the shoot has had the same effect on others as it had on me. Through the clever usage of rugged, wiry and torn fabrics as well as clear imagery of skinny oil-slicked birds through… well… literal skinny oil-slicked birds, wearing feathered dresses and shoes. I think it’s both beautiful and disgusting.

Yeah okay, it does sort of conjur up the Derelicte by Mugatu show in Zoolander… But I think the shoot brings the Gulf of Mexico oil spill to reality.

Maybe this could be a pretty big market for the fashion world, perhaps it will push people to help out aid charities.

And the fashion world can pretend they’re really interested in current world politics! Yay.
Next up- Pakistan flood shoot…?

Read more from Olivia Swash at http://oliviaswash.blogspot.com

For your daily pleasure:

Ra Ra Riot

Today, I’ll give you permission to gaze at the pretty young things in that orchestral string section, to be set with the perfect music for a long scenic drive through late summer sunshine-spattered roads , to get lost in boy/girl duets and violin and cello cadences. I present Ra Ra Riot and their second coming. The question is though, are they still essentially a poor shadow  of ivy-league chums and gig-sellouts Vampire Weekend?

Syracuse’s Ra Ra Riot is a welcome change of pace, with their new album out today, 24th August. The band’s sophomore album, The Orchard, comes on the heels of 2008’s The Rhumb Line, which was released after the tragic sudden death, by apparent drowning, of the band’s original drummer, John Pike.

9 of the ten tracks on the album are mixed by Death Cab For Cutie’s Chris Walla, and one mixed by Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, with obvious influences from both. Where Vampire Weekend made use of it’s now notorious Kenyan benga beats and cross-rhythms, Ra Ra Riot now occupies a neat niche between classical and indie-pop, yet debateably using the distinctive sound of Vampire Weekend’s “M79″ and pretty much repeating that formula repeatedly on one record…Lead singer Wes Miles’s high-pitched disquisitions on life, love, and dodgy social skills are akin to VW’s Ezra Koenig and will likely have the same wide appeal.

You can hear this similarity immediately on the opener and title track, but nowhere is it more obvious than on “Massachusetts,” which might as well be the come back to Vampire Weekend’s “Campus” and other songs about going to Ivy League schools. (Funny enough, Ra Ra Riot began playing together at Syracuse University, which is… an Ivy League school. Vampire Weekend went to Columbia.)

“Too Dramatic” nevertheless, is a gorgeous record, and not just for the pretty girls who are playing their strings and running through fields in the video. Thus, for those who want something slightly different, take a listen, but don’t be disappointed if it’s not quite up there with VW.

http://www.rarariot.com/

Editors in Chief
Ally Bacon

www.wix.com/allybacon/

Matthew Richardson

http://merelypersiflage.wordpress.com/

Deputy Editor

Rosie Boscawen

rosannaboscawen.blogspot.com

Comment Editor
Alexandra Bottomer

http://stochasticscrivener.wordpress.com

Music Editor
Olivia Swash

http://oliviaswash.blogspot.com/

Overseas Sports Editor
Delaney Chambers

http://delaney.alkharj.livejournal.com/

Deputy Sports Editor
John Burn-Murdoch

http://jburnmurdoch.wordpress.com/

Publicity Editor
Jo Rowley

http://frompariswithlovex.blogspot.com

Email editor@palatinate.org.uk to add yours to our list.

Politics Editor
David Wynne-Griffith

http://gravey123.livejournal.com/

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There’s really only one thing to do in the Lake District. Walk. To bestir oneself off one’s fleshy rear and sally forth into the undulating bosom of Mother Nature herself. If you come looking for nightlife, for Corinthian excess and the frolics and frivolity of summertime then disappointment awaits. The Lake District has still yet to hear of sunshine, it seems, duffel-coated as always in damp, clingy mist. Shops shut unseasonably early. People tromp and stomp along looking painfully walkerish. Residents bray with a countrified burr and rubberised vowel sounds. You would no more see a Waterstone’s in the middle of Keswick as a branch of Blacks in the middle of Trafalgar Square. Alfred Wainwright is a household name. It is all most unsettling. Walking, climbing and bleating, it seems, is all.

Unless. Unless, of course, one is an eager, daffodil-gazing, soppy-eyed, brow-clasping, pink-shirted sort of cove who knows his Wordsworth from his Southey. The sort of spongy waste-of-space who falls into a swoon at the mere sight of a gentle incline. The nails-on-the-board type irritant for whom family walks are a symptom of bourgeois hegemony and Dad holding the compass merely another example of patriarchal oppression.

For these sorts of pirouetting pests there is another escape route. Another priest-hole into which the unwanted can dive for safety. Dove Cottage has a long history of sheltering those pale, well-dressed sorts who feel breathless at the mere mention of peaks, scaling and crampons.

Dove Cottage is, of course, the home of the arch flower-gazer. The field-skipping fop above all field-skipping fops. Mr William Wordsworth. The most famous Romantic poet and the most famous resident of the Lake District. And now something of a cash cow for town councils who’d barely be able to spot a line of anapaestic tetrameter without the most sympathetic of spectacles. Busses, restaurants and endless books emblazoned with the poor man’s name.

Visiting these things can send you into something of a spin. It is only when eyeing up the place that those myths of lettuce-leaf spinelessness still hovering around Romanticism shatter. You realize what the outdoors and nature must have represented to them, plunged as they were in the late eighteenth century gloom. The roofs were low and windows sparse. The change when Wordsworth and Coleridge blubbed their way through the heaths and heather would have been truly sonnet-worthy, a complete gear-shift from the shadowy enclosure of life indoors. It is all, not to put too fine a point on it, rather intriguing. During the tour we were chatted round by a pony-tailed young neo-Romantic who pointed out Wordsworth’s chair, his travelling case, his bed, the scales of Thomas de Quincey and the washing chest where the pioneer of Romanticism pampered and preened of a morning.

But that wasn’t it. Far from it, indeed: merely an intriguing aperitif. As I pottered aimlessly up from the shop to the museum a trio of elderly folk bobbed up in my wake, led by a large, crinkle-faced fellow accoutred in a pleasingly Gandalfian mackintosh. I snatched a quick glance behind only to jerk slightly. If there is one mane of hair (machined-washed white and carelessly plumed) that all card-carrying Keatsians, all Shelley-spouting spongers would recognize in the dark it was this one. And then they started muttering to themselves. Pure Irish. The low, gravelled, sonorous sound of the greatest living poet in the English language merely yards away from me. Seamus Heaney. Famous Seamus himself!

An intriguing occurrence I thought? Or not…Maybe many of you are sick to death of bumping into Nobel Prize Winners and other Madonnas of the mind. For you it is the oldest of hat. More than likely, perhaps. Some Oxonians probably can’t shake off Geoffrey Hill or feel the faint onset of queasiness as Richard Dawkins rounds the corner, the former Simonyi Professor collaring them irksomely in the danger-spot of North Oxford. For all I know even the word Lucasian still bears unwelcome baggage for a handful of loyal Cantabrigians, eliciting weary moans at the thought of Professor Hawking espying them over the shelves of Border’s popular science section.

For me, however, it was something of an occasion. I thought it impolite to stare and so continued on my way while Heaney was welcomed warmly by a member of the Dove Cottage staff. I was clearly the trendsetter, however, as he proceeded to follow me into the small museum room. A nervous silence reigned. I commandeered the left hand side while Dr Heaney pulled up a chair on the right.

Even now I don’t think I alone imagined a faint unease on the great man’s face, the slight quiver of the upper lip or nervy movements of the hands. Understandable, I suppose. As an avid reader of the two small-press magazines my poetic attempts have graced thus far, he’s probably realized for some time that the game is up. He will have read the free-verse sprawl of ‘Park’, my debut masterpiece, and choked back tears of envy at the combustible new aesthetic initiated by what many have called the Dunciad of the third millennium: none other than my sprightly, Betjeman-esque lyric skip ‘Mr Chaucer’ topped off with some Eliotic border work.

In fact, thinking back, it was almost ceremonial the way he squirmed uneasily in his chair, readying himself for his imminent dethroning as the greatest poet in the language. His successor standing yards away, Bolingbroke enacting a poetic toppling of Richard II. At one point I thought about congratulating him on ‘Digging’, perhaps mentioning how much I’d learnt from North, but then realized this was no time for letting one’s guard down. In the Bloomian, Oedipal struggle for poetic supremacy little mercy can be shown. I rebuffed his grandfatherly smiles. I knew him not, misreading every whimpering cough and unsaid plea. If pushed, I suppose one might call it the baton-passing moment for post-post-modern poetry. Both of us, sipping from the Wordsworthian fount: he the John the Baptist presaging my arrival.

But I couldn’t keep it up. Just as I thought of leaving, I relented. I swallowed my pride whole for one last time and went to ask him for his autograph. He smiled, benevolently but with obvious sadness, scribbling his name, date and location. Then, for a few precious seconds, we locked in eye-to-eye: a Marlowe-Shakespeare, Amadeus-Mozart sort of a moment. As he handed back the card it seemed as if he was handing me the key to something more, to be amongst the poets truly.

I wandered out, clasping it to my breast and knowing with a full stop here and a heroic couplet there the peaks of Parnassus could be mine. But then came an alarm bell, a dreaded siren call, the sight of walking boots and jackets being unloaded from the car: symptoms the only diagnosis of which was another enforced walk en famille.

AIas, I wasn’t built for such things, and so, to this day, all I know is that somewhere among the gauze and grass, the heathery peaks and crags of the Lake District, lies the mislaid key to poetic immortality. Lost for a generation. It seems, perhaps, that I’m not genetically primed for such literary feats after all. Some future Wordsworth more fit for duty than I will find it couched beneath the rocky stubble and finally hear the call of Calliope.

As for me…at least I can say I once met Seamus Heaney.

As I sat in my college bar and watched England lose its heart, dignity and World Cup aspirations, the sadness I felt was only partly inspired by patriotic sentiment. A large part of me was well aware of the problems England’s loss would cause for the females of the country, who have to put up with the miserable/angry state of their husbands, boyfriends, brothers, dads…The World Cup is such bad news for the fairer sex. When England’s winning, most of the male population seem to think they have permission to become even rowdier than usual; when we’re losing, they revert to a pathetic state of melancholy.

I used to think maybe it’s a male precondition that they have to pretend to be obsessed with football, that it was a following-the-herd-style activity like downing pints for ‘banter’. Although there will be the odd guy faking football fanaticism to fit in, the majority of males I know genuinely care deeply about the ups and downs of the league table. I’ve seen guys who have that hard boy, laddy persona reduced to tears when their team fail to get promoted/win the Champions League/whatever else it is that goes on.

Sitting watching the notorious England vs. Germany game, the mix of testosterone, heat and alcohol made for a deadly combination. Never have I seen so much passion for something so mundane in my life. I mean, when we break it down, it really is just about 22 guys kicking around a ball of air, trying to get it into a designated area on a piece of grass. Why then does it ignite such intense levels of pride, anger, happiness, lamentation? Why is football so close to the hearts of Englishmen when we’re a country that excels in rugby, cricket, countless other sports?

Maybe it comes down to a possession thing: we invented football so should be the best. Although I don’t understand why rugby isn’t more popular; for a start, it’s a contact sport which means plenty more aggression and a greater likelihood of broken bones. However, have you ever heard the saying ‘rugby is a thug’s sport played by gentlemen, football a gentleman’s sport played by thugs’? Maybe that’s the reason for the latter’s popularity; you know the footballers aren’t going to take that yellow card lightly – they’ll shout down the ref much to the entertainment of the baying crowd. I guess it’s almost like gladiators in Ancient Rome – we can’t help but enjoy watching them being antagonised, baited, provoked, and this happens in football more than any other sport.

Although it largely is the preserve of men, it is true that women too get involved when the stakes are high, myself included. Despite my cynicism for ‘the beautiful game’ (the only beauty I see comes in the form of a certain Cesc Fabregas) I couldn’t help but get excited when one of our boys got his hands (feet?) on the ball in the World Cup games. Maybe it’s just that boys are so into it I can almost convince myself I am, when really, I don’t particularly care. I mean, I do kind of follow West Brom. By follow I mean I want them to win their games. That is all. I don’t actually watch the games, God forbid. Well, I have watched a few in the bar, but that’s mostly because it was a good way of catching up with the males in my life: I know for a fact I can find them in my college bar, grouped together whenever an important match is on.

So yes, it would have been nice if we had gone on to World Cup glory, but a small part of me knows my happiness would be because the nation’s men would be so much more accommodating to the girls surrounding them. So if you see me in four years time yelling “Come on England!” with the rest of the rabble, you’ll know it’s just because no boy will be in a pullable state if we lose…

I was reminded recently by a fellow editor about the benefits of telling lies, of pretending to innocent bakers that you are soon to be wed and you must test every flavour of cake in their pretty little shop to find the perfect spongy goodness for your perfectly special day. And you can do it for free!

So I tested this theory the following day.

I needed a friend to assist me, just in case anything with pralines came up. I hate pralines.

Not to mention, I needed an empty stomach and a straight face, to inform the lovely baker that I was there with my doting bridesmaid-to-be and required a taster sesh pronto before the Big ol’ Date.

We also needed to locate a bakery that made massive incredible wedding cakes where they try to persuade you to choose them exclusively for all your wedding cake needs and desires.

So this is what we did one rainy morning in July. The saleslady brought out fat binders brimming with glossy photographs of decadently massive cakes. She mentioned words like marzipan and almond dust and tried to explain how this certain type of icing wouldn’t melt during the heat of my approaching “outdoor August Summer Wedding”.

I barely even wanted to get married at this point, barely squeezing out of my teens, but here they were giving me and my pal free wedding cake to try for our very special selves!

It was awfully exciting. Vanilla, lemon, orange, rum and raisin, red velvet, raspberry, Pistachio, coconut, strawberries and cream, maple syrup, dark chocolate, white chocolate! You could even get Haribo on top. Honestly, I was in total heaven.

After a couple of hours or so I began to lose track. There was just So. Much. Cake.

Even if you feel like you’ve had enough cake to last forever/feed an entire army, they then bring out a funny shaped apricot and honey tart, and well, we said, we’ve never tried that before. So we have that too.

And then it dawns on us.

They will never stop giving us cake. Not until they make the sale. They will keep feeding us epic portions of utterly delightful but horrendously calorific divine wonderful cake until we can stand it no more and we’re forced to pay them just to cease.

I found myself feeling horribly sick too after the circa 29th slice. Oh, how much buttercream…so delicious, but oh my Lord the pain that followed. I had to take a moment outside, to “phone my darling fiance”. (To breathe unsweet, uncalorific fresh air)

My companion by comparison was loving it, she’d managed to dig into her third slice of lime and marzipan or something, and I had to play it cool, sit back down and return to face yet another cake.

There’s one thing I was now certain of. I never wanted to see another piece of cake ever again.

Ever. I hate cake. With every fibre of my being.

But then, as if to tease the very heart of my sugar-lovin’ soul, they bring it out. The piece de resistance.
It actually has a soft glowing light surrounding it.

It’s the sort of cake that you have never been allowed before. A caramel butterscotch extravaganza with edible dainty little flowers that taste like candy-floss and your true love’s first kiss.

Oh. Orgasm.

My friend and I slowly melt into the dish. I really wished I was actually getting married at this point.

I bet you’re wondering how the heck we got out of there without going into debt again.

I paid for one weeny perfect little cake. Five inches wide. Fifteen quid or so. They were pretty peeved to say the least but we didn’t mind so much, we still had free chocolate sauce smudged happily all over our chins.

The cake had a little daisy on top made of soft white icing.

I haven’t touched it since. It’s in the freezer, somewhere tucked secretly into the back behind the frozen peas so I can maybe possibly use it someday, when I pretend to get married for real this time. Maybe.

19.04.10

In the suitably dingy basement of the Newcastle Uni Student’s Union, support for Black Rebel Motorcycle Club comes from Dark Horses, who play a bewildering form of gloom-rock and come complete with their very own goth-Bez, except with less dancing and a steel chain instead of a tambourine. Then, the perpetually pissed-off Black Rebel Motorcycle Club take to the stage. Opening with a few off their lackluster new album ‘Beat The Devil’s Tattoo’, the show only really begins when a barrage of singles shock the crowd into life, with ‘Love Burns’ and ‘Berlin’ unleashing a wave of lager over a circle of fist-pumping fans. The contrast between these older and much stronger songs and the disappointing new material sums up the night, signaling a band in decline.

Save for an extended acoustic version of ‘Sympathetic Noose’ and a couple of others from their career-best third album ‘Howl’, material comes largely from BRMC’s bulging arsenal of heavy, four-to-the-floor, feedback-laden and riff-driven rock. This all makes for a pretty good time, particularly during ‘Spread Your Love’, a song which encapsulates the spirit of BRMC in it’s fuzz-bass, stomping drums and electrifying harmonica. Before this, ‘Weapon of Choice’ and ‘Whatever Happened To My Rock ‘n’ Roll’ buoy the energetic crowd and allow for sweaty heads to meet leather jackets in sticky matrimony. But the cracks start to appear once BRMC ignore the material off their debut and ‘Howl’, bringing out a number of patchy songs from their other, inferior, albums.

There’s a clear difference between the songs BRMC wrote 10 years ago and the songs they’re writing now- it’s just the difference comes in the crowd’s stunted reaction to them, not in the actual songs themselves. Some of the band’s songs all too often regurgitate the template they followed on their debut, devoid of anything new at all, painfully clear during the nine-minute dirge of ‘Generation-X’ from ‘Baby 81’. BRMC have never been a particularly original band and the garage-rock revival we saw at the turn of the millennium has always worn its influences on its heavily-tattooed sleeve, but BRMC’s new songs reveal a severe lack of ideas: classics aside, they are fast becoming garage-rock dinosaurs, desperately needing to evolve.

James Murphy has always been something of an elder-statesman of the disco/dance/punk music scene, but now, aged 40, he’s apparently decided to bring LCD Soundsystem to an end. With This Is Happening he’s ended the band on a high, showing courage to jump ship before the ship has even started sinking.

Staring middle-age in the face, he must be starting to realise that he can’t go on being the oldest person at his own DJ sets for much longer: in album opener Dance Yrself Clean the singer laments, “everybody’s getting younger/ it’s the end of an era- it’s true”. Despite this, Murphy is not shrinking away quietly, as the song erupts into a glorious battle between a drumbeat and a pulsating keyboard riff. Guitar driven and unashamedly stupid in the same way that Daft Punk Is Playing At My House was, the raucous Drunk Girls sustains the momentum. The song is Murphy’s soundtrack to the kinds of parties he’s too old to go to nowadays, where food isn’t safe in cupboards and boys and girls wake up in bed together. If this is to be LCD Soundsystem’s last album, these two songs show that the band have left some of their best till last.

A self-confessed music dweeb, Murphy is the first to admit that LCD aren’t the most original of bands, more the sum of their influences, often making a song with the sole purpose of sounding like someone else. This can backfire, as in third song One Touch, which owes too much to its obscure electro-punk influences. Sometimes though, when they’ve channeled bands like Joy Division (All My Friends) and The Beatles (Never As Tired As When I’m Waking Up), the results can be inspired. In All I Want, Murphy turns to Bowie, borrowing the elongated guitar note that runs through Heroes and creating something altogether new. The music brims with confidence and style, contrasting with Murphy’s lyrics which invert Heroes’ optimism, revealing his insecurities: “now all I want is your pity / or all I want is your bitter tears”. The song ends with Murphy wailing to be taken home, a morose feeling of homesickness that reappears throughout different songs on the album that isn’t lifted until final song Home.

The self-deprecating I Can Change sees Murphy mix his love of the best of 80s-synth-pop with his ability to write surprisingly earnest and emotive lyrics, in this case about unrequited love: “tell me a line, make it easy for me / open your arms, dance with me until I feel alright”. He’s America’s equivalent to Guy Garvey from Elbow, except he lives in New York, listens to Suicide and thinks a Mancunian is something you get done to clean your nails. You Wanted A Hit, a self-reflexive account of songwriting, which at 9 minutes long sums up Murphy’s position on the subject of writing ‘hits’: “You wanted a hit- but maybe we don’t do hits/ I try and try… it ends up feeling kind of wrong”. The song is satisfying in its simplicity, a conversation between Murphy and the listener set to a steady drumbeat and a weaving keyboard line, with a brash, Gang Of Four-esque guitar solo in the middle.

But not all the songs come up to the standard set on Sound Of Silver, with Pow Pow erring towards the annoying and Somebody’s Calling Me, written in a haze of anti-anxiety medicine, structured around the queasy-drone of a synthesizer and a single piano note, is baffling in all the wrong ways. Home, on the other hand, rescues the album, the closest the band will come to writing a perfect feel-good (albeit 8 minute) pop song, an amalgamation of keyboards, guitars, drums, harmonies and lyrics like “if you’re afraid of what you need look around you, you’re surrounded, it won’t get any better so good night”. All this combines to close an album that, despite its slight inconsistencies, if it is to be LCD Soundsystem’s last, should be cherished.