'Cause not everything is uniform

[sovay]

Last night as an ironic side effect of falling through a bunch of Welsh-language folk-rock, I discovered the Pipettes, whose retro-bubblegum I had completely missed at the time it was going through its polka-dotted shape-pulling moment in the disco lights. It turns out that I have about the same aural tolerance for the retro style as the historical stuff, which means that I can enjoy the equivalent of an LP before I start wanting something with a pencil stuck through its speaker cone, but I am deeply charmed by the early single from their short-lived original lineup, "I Like a Boy in Uniform (School Uniform)" (2005), which plays at first like the teen-pop version of Anakreon fr. 358 before pivoting into a jubilant discovery of its narrator's bisexuality: And now I know that all it is / Is plenty more that I can kiss / And when I think about the bliss / Of looking at the girls, looking at the girls, looking at the girls . . . Her cheerfully, climactically all-encompassing attraction to her classmates reminded me of the opener of Dorothy's "I Confess" (1980): I like boys in Beatle boots / And tall slim girls in well-cut suits, which is how I discovered that since the last time I checked, there had been a remastered resurrection of Rema-Rema, the abrasively art-rock band for which Dorothy Max Prior drummed before lending her vocals to some unrecognizably breathy, boppy pop. So I listened to their ear-snarling feedback and was satisfied. It is not lost on me that since recovering the archive of Bertie's music, I am just listening a lot more.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

Another random Martin Jarvis comment (sorry), but I happened to stumble over a new-to-me YT uploader of Old Brit TV and noticed that they had both series of Breakaway. I don't know if you're interested in watching s1 as well as s2 (the serial where Martin Jarvis tries to write a children's book in his beige murder flat), but if you are, it's here, for the moment at least: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZaEXw0agZE

[sovay]

Another random Martin Jarvis comment (sorry), but I happened to stumble over a new-to-me YT uploader of Old Brit TV and noticed that they had both series of Breakaway.

Nice! Thank you for the link and please keep me appraised of further developments. Distractions always appreciated whether or not I can actually watch that many of them.