GLASTONBURYOFTHEMIND

maybe because anything Liverpool can’t do to fuck up their Liverpool of Culture celebrations the headless horsefolk of EMI will do for them. 

Including making  the the highly unpleasant and uninteresting and, in present context as 67 year old solo hasbeen, supremely untalented, Ringo Starr available (the week his album, not in the slightest opportunistically called Liverpool 8 was released, “funnily” enough) to open proceedings with his equally rivetting “mate” Dave Stewart. 

Not the Liverpool Capital of Culture Organizers best idea , that one.

Still, settle down, chances are they got more than a few Mersey trout up their sleeve befoere the 2 and 8 is over, lar.

The Weirdoes version of The Searchers Don’t Throw Your Love Away, supplied as a subsidiary “extra” track mp3 link to reviewers of Liverpool the Number Ones album, isnt on the album.

But The Weirdoes get a thanks on the sleeve.

What for ?

Rolling over and letting Elvis Costello’s horribly lugubrious overweening dripping in slow moving look liten to this its important version of the Billy Jackson and the Jimmy ‘The Wiz’ Wisner  tune take precedence?

Ok so tell me that, although The Weirdoes  recorded a fresh and funky, splendiforously lusty and felt  version of the tune, with a drummer kicking up a storm (and, poetically, sounding like Ringo did - back when he was “alive) The Weirdoes are no more.

Then tell me that it was THEIR management who didn’t think it was beneficial to have the tune on there and that it was their decision to let Elvis swan into pole position and excise the sweat and love from the album and, perhaps, “history” too?

Sorry Mister drummer mister singer mister whatnot and all that what you done is a good spunky piece of music but it just dont fit in with “plans”

What plans?

The hope that Liverpool Number Ones - featuring such hot to trot luminaries as Atomic Kitten the Real People (real people? get, er, real), Digsy and The Sums and The  talkabouts featuring - get ready for the Double Atomic whammy - Liz McLarnon (why not Kerry Katona and the gal who went to Sugagbabes  on there aaswell - you could have the set) sells even more than Liverpool 8?

What you mean get into 4 figures (possibly) ?

Its like an extremely  piss poor day on the Merseyside this album - a dog shat on the pavement outside your frontdoor, you wait for your man to come with something to cheer you up, and  and they come and turnoff the leccy.

Yes as Ringo once joked (backed when he could still tell jokes and not look mildly agitated) it should be called Liverpool Number 2s.

Oh how we would have laughed, if we had just a little more energy, thought and pulling power than the folk wot put the album together. 

An  album where even the very great Shack mark time with a cover of day Tripper Liverpool Number Ones  isnt a  a project you need to be involved in.

But The Weirdoes track, is , for what its worth, the best thing on there.

Or not on there.

So who owns this recording  and why is it not out there for people to hear and make their own judgement?

This couldn’t be a - not uncommon - case of recording companies and management colluding to “kill” music, could it?

I mean these are record companies who told us that we, the folk who traded TAPE copies of music back in the 80s were killing music.

I mean record companies  don’t kill music, do they?

Answers on a postcard to to the road they are , allegedly, building in China consisting of 2 million broken up unsold  (but not unsoiled - there’s “music” on em) of Robbie Williams Rudebox.

Anyway back to Elvis he’s been out putting the world to rights, from the safety of his Vancouver home and the miracle of the telephone.

Elvis , never one to miss an opportunity to promote himself in the “proper’ context, is there in a glossy music monthly special (they are all “speciual” now, aren’t they, darling?) because  its celebrating 50 years of  great British music and Elvis IS  one of the guys, isn’t he?

I mean as he says himself “Somebody once told me I was mentioned on the Rockford Files as well, which is insane”.

He could have added that he once depped as presenter for David Letterman in the “great” man’s absence which was even insaner …but he doesn’t.

Maybe because that little bit of promotion was even more embarassing than his - cultural icon in auspicious cameo alert - his bitin the Spice Girls movie.

Anyway the interview might be on the phone but there are a few points where the air seems to get into the upper chest cavity, a mild emission of steam can seen coming out the lugholes and the glasses get steamed and that puffed up Napoleonic Elvis of yore seems to appear.

Particularly when he refers to a letter which he wrote to a journalist which was published on the web after said journalist made it public (Public! can you imagine that public, how VERY frightful)

I mean Elvis letters are so prized aren’t they?

Sacred documents almost, you can’t have the public reading them!

Not when the letter’s specially marinated bile has been sent for one man and one man only .

A “private” letter that he sent, in some , its fair to say, the evidence being available freely enough, for those that know where to look (and are unable to get enough Elvis from official sources), anger and , an ever so slightly heated,  temper. .

It was, explains Elvis, actually a service that letter , a service to the journalist!

BEcause , he, Elvis, was writing to explain to the journalist ‘WHY HE WAS WRONG’.

How gracious!

And that the said journalist spread the information  - revealing aspects of the slightly tyrannical, tirade tirade inclined Elvis character as he did - showed what a person  the journalist was!!

Priceless, absolutely priceless.

One wouldn’t wish to presume that Elvis likes to have his cake and eat it.

But in the interview he says , of his 1989 song Thatcher song  Tramp The Dirt Down, that “you shouldn’t really celebrate when anybody dies.”

There’s a hint of Elvis here as moral legislator, the good guy, the humanitarian…who a few a paragraphs later is happy enough to inform us, with  Jesu(sh)ite certainty, of the afterlife Margaret Thatcher now faces.

“The crime,” says EC,  of sending “men …well, boys” to die in war in the Falklands will see “Thatcher in hell”.

I suspect she will be hearing Liverpool The Number Ones Album on repeat when she arrives.

WEird times but no weirdoes.