holloway, music

Monkey goes Psycho

Exciting news indeed. An article in the Guardian today about Alex James’ bizarro Cocaine Panorama programme went on to discuss something total more appropriate – Alex Turner’s solo album taking a more psychedelic rock angle.

Image courtesy of huskworks.com

Now I can take or leave the Artic Monkeys despite their record NME nominations (seriously that list of nominations is at best bollocks, at worst an insult to anyone who has ever sung a chord or picked up an instrument). Now my malais towards the Monkeys may be because I remember regionally accented rock the first time round in the early to mid 90s but before you start throwing stuff at me, I do acknowledge that they have been outrageously successful and that they are talented young chaps.

So I’m pretty excited that Turner’s been working on this new direction with Miles Kane from “next big thing” band The Rascals and is apparently being heavily influenced by the penchants of The Horrors (check out their influences on their myspace page, next thing you know they’ll be saying Michael Howard is their favourite politician). If this is true, I expect it to be more psychobilly than psychedelic.

Anyway, on this topic of The Horrors’ influences, it reminded me of the surreal bus journey I had up to Holloway on Friday night. I was on the 271 and this American kid was going on-and-on about mushrooms and biker bars and a whole manner of other typical bullshit, but then, suddenly, he redeemed himself:

Twitting American Imbecile: Hey you guys heard of Joe Meek?
Clueless, dribbling British chums: Nope
Me (in background): *makes surprised scoobie doo noise
Babbling Yank: Yeah, he was basically the best producer of all time, he lived over there at 304 Holloway Road.

Now I’ll be damned, not only did he go up in my estimations but he managed to teach me something! Also I’m not one to pull out the scoobie doo noise willy-nilly! I spend quite a bit of time in Holloway (see our brief guide) but didn’t realise I was on the doorstep of a legend…Talking of doorsteps (or in this case tombs) did you know that Karl Marx is buried in Highgate?

I digress, to finish this post I wanted to add a few other snippets of conversation I heard on this surreal bus journey:

Irish Guy to friend on the phone: “look the way I see it, we can split the profit 40%/60%, 30%/70%, 10%/15% – whatever, I’m not greedy and I’m not going to sell out a friendship for money”. Either an example of a great business mantra or an example of a great liar…I know which one my money is on….

40 year old bottle blonde to scraggly looking guy outside the Hercules pub in Holloway: “The problem with your mother is that she is unable to love anyone”. I think this is my favourite passing remark ever – it’s so charged that I thought about sticking around to hear the riposte!

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