Quizzical Attraction

Oh I've been a bad blogger - hardly any updates this week, and I've got nowt planned. In which case, please accept this gratuitous plug for the daily trivia quiz wot I run, and which enjoys the regular patronage of such luminaries as DavyH, tvv, Breadman and Spike/Sutti (when she's not too busy to get online).

There are ten multiple choice questions to be answered each day on a variety of subjects (only one subject per day, mind, so it only takes a minute or two of your time). If you're not part of it already please do come and join in, as all are welcome. It's a good laugh and an education to boot!

Also, apropos of nothing, I seem to remember an old Girlfrendo single that I put up here a while back proving to be quite a hit with some of you, and which led to one or two people requesting to hear some more of the sadly now defunct winsome Swedish twee-piece (tweesome? twee-o?). So here, somewhat belatedly, you go!

Girlfrendo - Air mp3

PLAY THE DAILY TRIVIA QUIZ

Fantasy Football

With less than a month to go until the new English football season begins in earnest, there's never been a better time to sign up to play the free, official Premier League fantasy football game for 2009/10. As ever, we here at Too Much Apple Pie are running our own private league, which you, our uniquely talented and universally good-looking readership, are invited to join. Please feel free invite your friends along too - the more the merrier!

To enter, simply register for free here and then, once you've selected your squad of 15 players, click on "Leagues" in the left hand menu. Once you've done that simply click "Join", then enter the following code in the "Join private league" box:

34127-11064

And voila! Your team will now be enrolled in the fourth annual "Group of Death". Hope to see you there! (My team are called Optimists Anonymous, by the way. What's yours?)

Marit Bergman - This Is The Year mp3

Three of a Kind #93

Right, well, it's Saturday night so sod it - the drinks are on me!

My Bloody Valentine - Strawberry Wine mp3

The Champs - Tequila mp3

Helen Love - Diet Coke Girl mp3

Axe me I won't say no - how could I?

The man in the pic above is Dr Richard Beeching i.e. the fucker responsible for the infamous Beeching Report (what a coincidence that it bore his name!) which led to the closing down of thousands of miles of the UK railway network in the 1960s. He got paid a fortune for it too, by all accounts, wielding his "axe". There's really no justice sometimes.

What's that got to do with the price of an open return to Inverness, I don't hear you ask. Well, blog favourites the Pete Green Corporate Juggernaut have only gone and released a single about the man, in which Pete fantasises about travelling back in time and turning Beeching's axe back on him. Sounds like a plan!

Hey Doctor Beeching is available as a free mp3 from sparklemotion.co.uk, and while you're there they'd also appreciate it if you could make a voluntary donation to the Lincolnshire Wolds Railway, as Pete explains:

"The LWR is a little steam railway near where I grew up which is run by volunteers and needs funds to carry on its work restoring old locos, extending the track and enhancing the site for visitors. It's on a section of line which was closed following the recommendations of Dr Richard Beeching, as referred to in the lyrics of the song, so there's kind of a nice circularity about it if we can use the song to undo a little bit of the damage wrought by the Beeching Axe.

"The donation is entirely voluntary and you're quite welcome to download the song without making one. But we'd love it if you could put something in the hat. We suggest a donation of one pound (though, of course, it would be great if you could give more)."

Click here to download and donate

So there you go. Great bloke that Pete Green, lot of work for charity. I still think we need to divert some of those funds into financing that time machine though.

Three of a Kind #92

A good gauge of a band's popularity, I find, is to see how many plays they've accumulated on Last.fm. For example, the daddies of them all, The Beatles, have amassed a whopping total of 172,143,820 plays to date. The Rolling Stones, meanwhile, have racked up a healthy 41,176,357, The Smiths 38,610,847, The Kinks 16,776,569, Madness 4,211,755, Teenage Fanclub 2,452,694, Ride 1,956,548 and, erm, Bros 87,662.

Today's featured band, The Family Cat, may have only managed a paltry 18,553 Last.fm plays but, although relatively small in number, us fans are still as enthusiastic about their music as ever. How many Brosettes would still be able to claim the same of their own one-time favourites, I wonder?! (I'm guessing about three.)

In case you're under thirty and/or haven't come across them before, here's a bit about the Family Cat. Hailing from Devon, Hampshire and (mostly) Cornwall, and active between 1988 and 1995, the band had not one, not two, but three - count 'em! - guitarists, and made a pleasingly melodic racket (oxymoron alert!) that had a bit more oomph about it than a lot of the more shoegazy brand of indie doing the rounds at the time.

TFC released two full-length albums - 1992's Furthest From The Sun and '94's Magic Happens - and quite a few singles in their time, most of which I bought and all of which still sound tremendous. There was also a Rick Buckler-produced mini-album, 1989's Tell 'Em We're Surfin', which I've never heard, but which, apparently, was so badly produced that the band spent the rest of their career disowning it!

Anyway, I could have chosen many more TFC songs just as good as the ones you're about to hear (assuming you take the plunge and download them), but I settled on the three below.

(By the way, although their CDs are long out of print, the iTunes Shop seems to have the Family Cat's output pretty well covered, so get yourselves along there for lots more of the same.)


The Family Cat - Amazing Hangover mp3

Mildly Interesting Pop Fact #1 Amazing Hangover started out life as the third track on the Airplane Gardens single, which may well make it the best b-side ever.

The Family Cat - Steamroller mp3

Mildly Interesting Pop Fact #2 Steamroller is largely about Southampton FC, the team of choice of one the the band members. I just had to include it here, as Southampton are in the news today - having just been bought by a Swiss billionaire. Topical!

The Family Cat - Colour Me Grey mp3

Mildly Interesting Pop Fact #3 Colour Me Grey features backing vocals from P.J. Harvey. Whoever he is.

I Love The 1990s

...or at least I love this song; I've not actually heard anything else Glasgow combo the 1990s have recorded. But this one jumped out at me as soon as I heard it on the radio the other day. Honestly, it's catchier than a bout of swine fever. Much less hyped though. (It somehow only reached #106 in the UK pop charts.)



1990s - See You At The Lights mp3

The Ad Man Cometh

Yesterday it was a Pelle Carlberg song appropriated for the purposes of flogging a leading brand of breakfast cereal; today it's a ditty that's actually a paean to cereals in general, courtesy of versatile Sheffield singer-songwriter John Shuttleworth. Serial Cereal Eater (for that is it) even mentions Special K at one point, which makes me wonder if Kellogg's weren't missing a trick by not hiring Mr Shuttleworth for that ad campaign. Ho hum.

Funnily enough, John has recently been appearing in a series of TV commercials, for Yorkshire Tea. Which at least makes some kind of sense I s'pose. Still, though, if he must advertise a tipple, I reckon Ken Worthington's Bitter would be a better bet. Ooph!

John Shuttleworth - Serial Cereal Eater mp3

Carlberg: Probably the best ad music in the world

It's always disappointing when your favourite music is appropriated by The Man (whoever he is) for the purposes of hawking tat on TV commercials; but I was more surprised than anything else when Riverbank by Pelle Carlberg popped up as the music on the latest Kellogg's Special K advert in the UK. It's even more surprising when you bear in mind that the song is actually about unquestioning consumer consumption and opportunistic advertisers shoving their products down our throats. Oh the irony!



Pelle Carlberg - Riverbank mp3

Three of a Kind #91

Not been featuring an awful lot of Swedish music on here lately, which seems a tad remiss; so here are three cast-iron made-in-Sweden classics to reduce the shortfall a bit. Honestly, I don't half spoil you lot sometimes!

Sweet Chariots - Cry No More Tears mp3

Suburban Kids With Biblical Names - Trumpets and Violins mp3

The Bear Quartet - What's Your Virtue? mp3

R.I.P. it up and start again

I see that, following Michael Jackson's death the other day (apologies to anyone reading this who may not be aware of his sad and scarcely-reported demise, by the way), sales of his back catalogue have skyrocketed. Seven of his albums are expected to be riding high in the UK charts this week, for example, including his greatest hits album Number Ones at, funnily enough, number one.

The download charts are similarly top-heavy with Wacko product, with a whopping eight of his albums in the current iTunes top ten best sellers list, while record shops all over the, erm, shop are selling out of his CDs almost as quickly as they're putting them on the shelves.

I liked the "tribute" on the Amazon front page the other day, by the way, that said something like: "Michael Jackson has died. Share your favourite thoughts about the great man in our special guestbook" - but which somehow managed to avoid adding: "Oh, and while you're there why not stock up on his albums from our very competitively-priced store." The temptation must have been great.

Going slightly, but not altogether, off topic, I noticed that the two big rolling news channels in the UK, BBC News 24 and Sky News, both had the legend MICHAEL JACKSON IS DEAD emblazoned across the screen in huge letters just above the news tickers all day on Friday, even when the news of the unfortunate megastar's demise had been in the public domain for almost 24 hours. It was almost as if they couldn't believe their luck in having such a big story to fill their bulletins with all day, or something.

Again, top marks for restraint must go to whoever decides these things for, in their obvious excitement, not adding an exclamation mark or three at the end of the onscreen headline: MICHAEL JACKSON IS DEAD!!! (Or even writing it in textspeak: MICHEAL JACKSEN IZ WEL DEAD INNIT WTF?? LOOLZ!!!???. Gawd help us.)

Anyway, back to the subject in hand. I do wonder just what the thought processes of the people buying all this Michael Jackson stuff are: "Well, I wasn't that fussed about him while he was alive, really, but now that he's dead I think he's great and must own everything he ever recorded immediately!"

I mean, they can't all be people who are too young to remember him first time round; and it's not as if he's been out of the headlines and therefore the public consciousness (whatever that is) all that much in recent years. A lot of the time those headlines weren't exactly positive either. Odd.

It's hardly a unique phenomenon, of course, this massive posthumous rise in sales; similar things happened in the past with John Lennon and Kurt Cobain, to name but two, when sales of their respective back catalogues shot up (sorry, poor choice of words there) as soon as they karked it.

Then, of course, we had Elton John's 1997 update of Candle In The Wind, recorded and released soon after Lady Di died (di-ed) - which I believe went on to become the highest-selling single of all time in the UK. And what a load of mawkish old bollocks that was. But the Candle In The Wind debacle more than anything just goes to show you: death sells. And how. Would you like a bag with that?

Altered Images - Dead Pop Stars mp3

Strange Ways Here We Come (Again)

We don't often get asked to repost stuff on here but, after Steve Lamacq apparently played it on his 6 Music show yesterday, a couple of people have left guestbook requests for the the mp3 of the insanely brilliant Strange Ways by The Family Way to be put up again. So, John from Nottingham, Adam from I.T. Services and anyone else who might be interested, this one's for you.

The Family Way - Strange Ways mp3

Allo Allo Allo (Darlin')

The fabulous Allo, Darlin' have a new single out. Henry Rollins Don't Dance (if the title alone isn't enough to make you want to buy the single then there's really not a lot I can do for you) is backed with Dear Stephen Hawking and Heartbeat Chilli. Elizabeth sounds spookily like Frente's Angie Hart on the latter, by the way. Here, have a listen and see if I'm not right!

And while you're over there, you may as well buy the tracks in mp3 form. Be rude not to really. Alternatively, you can buy the single on good old 7" vinyl from the Weepop shop. Now there's lovely.

Wrongkong cooee!

Another one from the TMAP inbox today - and a spot of, umm, new new wave, courtesy of Nuremberg-based five-piece Wrongkong, and the frankly rather wondrous Sweat. What an ace video too. (OK, so I know you can hardly turn on the radio these days without hearing loads of contemporary bands churning out stuff that's clearly been massively influenced by the sounds of twenty-five years ago, but this one's a cut above - honest!)



Buy Wrongkong mp3s over here

Three of a Kind #90

God Help The Girl is the latest project from Belle & Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch, and by crikey they're good. They played a session comprising three songs - God Help The Girl, Baby's Just Waiting and The Psychiatrist Is In - on Marc Riley's 6 Music show the other night, and every one was a gem. If you like the sound of sixties girl groups, the best bits of eighties indie pop and/or classic musicals (and why wouldn't you, frankly?) then God Help The Girl are definitely the band for you.

You can download all three of the songs from the Marc Riley session at Peenko's Blog.

God Help The Girl's self-titled debut album is released today! Listen to more tracks from it on their MySpace page.

The Life of O'Brien

There was this mildly terrifying teacher at my old junior school called Mr O'Brien, a bearded Irishman prone to flying off the handle for no apparent reason. We used to call him Mr B.O. because a) it was a reversal of his initials; and b) because he had all the personal hygiene problems that you might expect from someone with such a nickname. My god he reeked.

Thankfully, despite sharing part of a name with my old form teacher, up-and-coming Bermondsey combo Lion O'Brien don't share any of the traits outlined above - well, not unless they forget to shower before taking the stage at gigs and then spend the duration of their sets haranguing the audience for not applauding loudly enough between songs, or something. But I can't really see that happening; they look like such a nice bunch.

One thing I do know about Lion O'Brien, having listened to their soon-to-be-released debut EP Raincloud v Sunshine, is that they do a fine line in infectious, feel-good indie pop. It's not often music that's submitted to us via email catches my ear but I was really impressed with these songs from the first play. Have a listen to lead track This Life and see if you agree!

Lion O'Brien - This Life mp3 (for 7 days)

The Raincloud v Sunshine EP is released on 20th July through iTunes and Amazon

Mock The Weak

Couldn't manage to get this clip embedded but I beseech you to click on this link and watch the minute-long clip therein featuring Labour backbenchers Diane Abbott and Keith Vaz and new Home Secretary Alan Johnson. It's the funniest thing I've seen for ages.

My Life Story - Funny Ha Ha mp3