D-Bridge: Love Hotel/Dim Light

Music producer and all-round good egg D-Bridge released the single Love Hotel/Dim Light on Exit Records recently. Artwork is interesting even if you don't like the track...

World Cup 2010: Seven under par

Over and done with for another four years then; these seven flops will be reasonably pleased.

Wayne Rooney (England)

Very few will have had him down as a bottler before the tournament started but this, like everything else concerning England, is now up for revision. Rooney cut a frustrated and occasionally apathetic figure on the pitch, leading to rumours about both his fitness and happiness during the tournament. Irrespective of the alleged disillusionment in the England camp and the reasons for the lacklustre team performances, Rooney’s touch and passing were poor throughout and he displayed little of the determination that makes him such an intimidating prospect in the Premier League.

Fernando Torres (Spain)

Torres must be starting to wonder if he’ll ever be fully fit again after another important competition passed him by due to injury. He, like many other Premiership players this summer, did not look fit from the beginning and he remained rusty throughout, labouring with and without the ball. After coming on as a substitute in the final, his last minute groin injury meant that, while Spain saw out the remainder of extra time, he was lay prone on the grass, covering his face with his hands. Football and the future must have seemed pretty bleak as he received treatment for yet another injury while his compatriots celebrated victory at the final whistle.

Steven Pienaar (South Africa)

Heralded by every TV commentator as South Africa’s hero, it became impossible for Pienaar to touch the ball without a pundit reminding us of ‘what a season he had at Everton’. Unfortunately, while they waxed lyrical about the tackles he made away at Bolton last season, Pienaar was being outpaced as he made futile attempts at beating his marker. Pienaar looked slow and ineffective in all South Africa’s World Cup matches and was overshadowed by more dynamic team-mates like Siphiwe Tshabalala. He may well have had a decent season with Everton last year but, without Cahill or Arteta alongside him, he looked as average as his club side.

Nicklas Bendtner (Denmark)

After Denmark quietly bowed out at the group stage, the self-proclaimed greatest striker on the planet revealed he was carrying an injury at the World Cup. Arsenal will, in a perverse way, be hoping Bendtner isn’t just making excuses, as he was totally mediocre for the Danish. It would hardly have taken a virtuoso performance to look good playing up front with a decrepit John Dahl Tomasson but Bendtner often looked the least threatening out of the two and contributed little more than several miscued shots and some uninspiring back-passes. His optimistic assessments of his own ability mean he’s subject to added scrutiny, which, particularly on this occasion, is unfortunate.

Vincenzo Iaquinta (Italy)

Italy looked conservative and toothless in attack throughout their group games and it was baffling that Iaquinta played so much despite Lippi having Quagliarella in the squad. Iaquinta was slow, his first touch was consistently terrible, and he forced Italy to play a fruitless long ball style on numerous occasions. The sort of pace, craft and technical ability Quagliarella had to offer became evident during the second half of Italy’s match against Slovakia, when he played in his only game of the tournament. Iaquinta will be too old to play in Brazil 2014 and he was too inept to have played any major role in World Cup 2010.

Humberto Suazo (Chile)

There was always likely to be a certain level of curiosity, if not firm expectation, about a player who has been named The World’s Top Goal Scorer in the past, even if his 52 goals from 54 games in 2006 were scored in the Chilean league. Ultimately, Suazo’s tournament was compromised by a hamstring problem but in two appearances he committed unnecessary fouls and fluffed several good chances. Alexis Sanchez was the real spearhead of a fast, attacking Chilean side and Suazo looked more like hindrance than help whenever he got involved.

France

Even without Zidane, the French team was still good enough on paper to compete at a World Cup. Having players like Evra, Malouda, Anelka, Gallas, Sagna, Abidal, Ribery, Cisse and Henry should have ensured much better performances than France gave in Group A. No-one expected much from the French side but they still underachieved. Domenech should have been sacked years ago, it’s just a shame for the French people that members of their football federation were the only ones who didn’t see it.

You're not giving me the horn

On the eve of the opening match, the only phenomenon likely to spoil the 19th FIFA World Cup, other than injury to the best players, is the vuvuzela.

The vuvuzela, a plastic trumpet about a metre in length that emits a flat, loud, monotone blare, has been adopted by South African football fans as a symbol of their enthusiasm but was almost banned from this year’s World Cup after complaints from European players and coaches, and most broadcasters.

The decision not to ban these ‘instruments’ will prove detrimental to the world’s enjoyment of the tournament and the reasons behind allowing them are driven by political correctness and a confusion over the real issue with the vuvuzela.

When Sepp Blatter admonished those advocating a ban by saying, ‘we should not try to Europeanise an African World Cup.’, he showed that he had completely missed the point. A ban on the vuvuzela is not a ban on South African football culture, it is merely removing one particular element of it that the majority of people seem to find, at the very least, rather irritating. It is not racist or an attempt to impose an alternative culture on a group of people to ban the use of one particular instrument. Blatter adds that African and South African football ‘is all about excitement, dancing, shouting and enjoyment’, and nobody is trying to stop that; conflating the drone of thousands of vevuzelas with ‘excitement, dancing, shouting and enjoyment’ is absurd.

In any case, there is enough evidence to suggest that the vuvuzela is far from an ancient African artifact and actually a cunning invention by someone with entrepreneurial spirit and a faith in mob culture. There will certainly be a few people somewhere that like the vuvuzela, knowing that they’ve become a whole lot richer courtesy of those who decided it was better to pay for an oversized horn than make noise with their own (free) voices.

There is a need to recognise that there are some noises that we, as human beings, find deeply unpleasant. If, through some strange arrangement, the FA supplied every England fan with a chalkboard and asked them to scratch them incessantly for 90 minutes, people from other countries could, legitimately, demand that they refrain. The same would be true if German fans were all given a copy of their Eurovision entry for 2010 and asked to play it on their own personal ghetto blasters inside the ground for a full 90 minutes.

This last scenario would, in fact, be more musical than the noise the vuvuzela makes. It is bad enough to have been compared to the tortured wail of a dying elephant, so when writers begin articles with sentences like, ‘Music will play a big part [in the world cup], and in particular, a trumpet called the vuvuzela’ they are, in fact, making paradoxical statements. There is nothing to recommend one, flat droning note as ‘music’, just in the same way you wouldn’t liken the noise of a washing machine to a Brahms violin sonata.

For all the accurate descriptions of the awful noise this terrible invention makes, it would not be so unbearable, and there would not be such desire to ban it, if it didn’t go on constantly. It's not the noise they make per se, but that fact that it never stops. Apologists for the vuvuzela talk about the ‘electrifying atmosphere’ it creates, when in fact it does nothing but drown out all other noise and detract from the match. People blowing the vuvuzelas do so all the time, with no reference to actual events in the game. It creates the impression that most of those in the stadium have very little interest in the football itself. If fans blew them in reaction to on-field events rather than relentlessly, the noise wouldn’t be so intolerable and might genuinely add to the atmosphere, as there would be some contrast in its volume over the course of 90 minutes. If someone wants to argue that the idea of fans reacting to on-field events is inherently European, then we should also admit the argument that blowing a trumpet constantly for 90 minutes, with no regard for the football, is inherently moronic. Thousands of vuvuzelas blown constantly do nothing for the atmosphere but create expressionless and soulless noise that detracts from more rousing crowd noise, including the euphoria of goal celebrations and the drama of controversial decisions.

Ultimately, the vuvuzela will prove to be an irritant and possibly the lasting legacy of the 2010 World Cup. It’s a pity for those interested in watching the tournament over the next six weeks but the real losers will be the people of Africa because the rest of the world will want their football played elsewhere from now on.

Boating in Amsterdam

Despite numerous previous visits, I had never seen the tall, wonky buildings and bicycle-clad bridges of Amsterdam from the unique perspective of the canals, and with this playing on my mind, my compatriots and I made our way down to the docks to hire an aqueous steed for the afternoon.

We arrived at a small hut at the end of a rickety jetty. It was roughly twice the size of a portaloo and on approach one could only envisage a troll angrily emerging from inside, scuttling up the jetty to the creaking, swaying bridge between jetty and canal bank, and manically waving his arms around whilst roaring a torrent of indecipherable abuse in an attempt to defend his territory. This, however, was not to be the case, as on inspection the shack was sparsely decorated with sailing accoutrements but eerily bereft of human (or troll) life.

In the enforced lull we took time to inspect the boats for hire. Whilst robust and evidently seaworthy, these were not the plush, comfortable motorboats frequently observed making waves serenely through the city's famous waterways. In fact, the boats were no more than several different sized sheets of steel welded together. The concept of relaxed and comfortable seating was poorly represented by three strips of bare metal which braced the boat width ways. It was at this point in the assessment that a man approached our party.

Bounding carefree over other small boats tied to the dock came a small fellow of oriental descent, evidently the proprietor or a person working under the employ of such a figure. He seemed a genial man, eager to iron out the bureaucratic formalities that would characterise our final few moments on terra firma and with them smoothly out of the way, he instructed us on the methods of steering and propelling our craft. Furnishing us each with a small sheet of five millimeter thick foam to protect our posteriors from numbness, our cruise facilitator untethered us from the dock and, with trepidation, we began to navigate the most major of the canals that we would encounter during our journey, one that would take us to the network of smaller canals in the heart of Amsterdam.

Having traversed the aforementioned intimidating stretch of water, we breathed a collective sigh of relief as the canal banks closed around our boat and we became free to concentrate on the scenery about us. We made past other travelers relaxing on the bank with drinks and snacks, under arched bridges alive with the sound of cyclists' bells and through streets lined with homes that tilted and slanted in numerous directions. As we coasted past moored canalboats serving as dwellings, adorned with furnishings and decoration to make them warm and welcoming places to inhabit, the sun threw off its blanket of cloud and cast warm, gentle rays over the water, ripples sparkling and twinkling in appreciation.

The general novelty of our predicament began to wane after some time and we continued our slow but steady progress through the canals considering what direction best to point our vessel. Soon we were heading for a notorious thoroughfare of Amsterdam, one made famous by a multitude of harlots who repeatedly bequeath the fruits of their loins to gentleman willing and able to pay suitable recompense. It would be a delightful folly, thought the three of us, to witness the usual scenes of exhibition, bravado and barter from the comfort of our boat.

We eventually reached the top of the particular canal. The sunshine became more modest and the sky grayed somewhat, various shades of neon red still visible in the daylight. Flesh jiggled in windows, eyes attempted to ensnare, fake fingernails tapped on windows, folds of unkept skin obscured economical undergarments. Giggling, intrigued tourists walked in parallel with our boat on the canal banks, mixing all the time with groups of boisterous, leering men and shabbily dressed individuals quietly exiting doorways or surreptitiously making enquiries. Our steel tub continued to slice through the water, the occasional swan gently swimming out of our path, its gleaming white plumage in stark contrast to the dull, litter-strewn water beneath, and the seedy machinations of the street in whose midst it now swam.

Two thirds of our journey down this canal, we came across an unusually high volume of ducks. Perhaps, we conjectured, this was related to the amount of food-related litter deposited in the water on this stretch, thanks to its popularity with tourists and sexually repressed males, of which, surely, there are many. Thankfully these ducks were taking evasive action in order to avoid collisions with our vessel, much like the swans, including swimming from its path but also, on this occasion, flying away from the bow of our ship.

A piercing shriek from an associate suddenly drew my attention and almost before I'd turned around to regard my company I felt repeated and heavy thuds on my head, as if a torrential rain shower had begun. In that same instant, I adopted a cowering posture, similar to that of the brace position made famous by flight attendants, and could only wait in this defensive position until the deluge had subsided. When I straightened myself and turned to my shipmates with a look of both shock and dread on my face, the exact nature of our misfortune quickly became apparent. At first I thought we may have been pelted by jealous contemporaries from the shore but it was with alarm I realised that our craft and its party had been heavily defecated on by fleeing ducks. Our clothes were streaked with earth coloured stains, each of which had a nucleus of grit which was quite clearly feces. Numerous witnesses laughed uproariously, as well they might, while we smiled in resigned dismay, contemplating the fact that we were at our furthest point from the harbour, with at least an hour's journey back through Amsterdam's waterways covered in shite.

With heavy hearts we set out on the long, ardous path back to the dock. The overcast skies and falling temperatures seemed to mimic the sombre atmosphere aboard our craft. At every turn the waterways seem to stretch endlessly toward the horizon, a prospect which reminded me of tales of adventure involving Columbus, Vasco Da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan.

Through careful retracing of our steps, we eventually made it back to the first, wide expanse of water where our voyage had begun. As the small rental shack came into vision, our boat began to slow from its usual, deliberate walking pace to a state of total inertia. We were all immediately concerned; I wondered if perhaps a used prophylactic had become entwined on our propellor but after closer inspection the offending article happened to be a plastic bag. With no propulsion or steering, our craft gradually began to turn 180 degrees and bob gently back the way we had come, like flotsam and jetsam being washed out to the ocean. My associates, by now, were frantically attempting to remove the detritus that was preventing us from continuing and were doing so with scant regard to the weight distribution in the boat. The danger of us capsizing was tangible, and as a man who was cold, in need of refreshment, drifting in the direction opposite to the one in which I wished to go, and covered in shite, I did the only thing I could and collapsed in the boat, in tears of delirious hysterics.

When we finally arrived back at our mooring we paid our good friend his frankly exorbitant fee for the use of his boat. Being the conscientious man he so clearly was, he politely asked us if we had enjoyed ourselves and, lest he should notice the shite that was so abundant about our personage and so deep within the hairs on my head, we sheepishly said yes and quickly made off to our residence.

Bulletproof

La Roux have been rattling the loose fixtures in my flat with their Skream remixed version of In For The Kill for the last couple of months.

Please find attached the video for their new single Bulletproof. Watch for it raining shapes in the Tron influenced video at 2:35.

Back with some writing in the next few days.

It was acceptable in the 80s (and now)

Ah, fashion; crazy isn't it? There I was, as a 15 year old, hating anything and everything the 1980s had to offer and now I'm like a rabid dog frothing at the mouth with glee anytime I see a shellsuit or hear a synth or a vocoder. Step in 2000F & J Kamata to prove my point: You Don't Know What Love Is.

Sun, drinks, music and a bank holiday weekend. These days are why we bother.

Heavenly Communications

If he wants to split-up, he should call me, not the other way round.