stephenage

Wam Bam Bam

After six months of blog ubiquity that saw even Pitchfork sending critical bouquets, Anniemal is finally being given an official release in the UK at the beginning of March.  And after her first full day on the London promo treadmill, Annie still found the time to listen very patiently and answer very sweetly, as I asked her the question about being the Scandi-Kylie for the thousandth time... (An edited version of this chat will appear in a future issue of Uncut.)

I heard you just played your first ever gig in Norway - how did that go?

My very first gig, yes! I actually felt very very nervous when I walked up to the stage… and then I wasn’t nervous at all. Until I started to open my mouth to sing. But after that it was fine… and quite fun!

You used to be in an indie band called Suitcase. Did they ever play live? What were they like?

I guess it was a combination of indie rock and pop – in between those. It was me and my girlfriend, who was playing the synthesiser… and three other guys. And we played one gig, and after that we found out we had to break up. Because the guys wanted to play… trip-hop! And I didn’t want to play that.

Had you always been a pop fan, even when you were playing in an indie group?

I was listening to indie for a long while, but I’ve been listening to so many different things. I’m also really into rock, I’m into hip hop – many, many different things.

You started your own club, ‘Pop til you drop’. What kind of stuff did you play there?

Well, it was me and my girlfriend in Bergen. I guess we were playing electro-pop, some Peaches, some Beach Boys – basically everything that was inspired by pop.

What’s in your dj set these days?

It’s always different. I love stuff by the Clash, Suicide… Wam Bam Bam or whatever they’re called. They do ‘I want candy’ – that’s one of my favourite songs these days…

Bow Wow Wow?

Yeah, yeah that’s the name!! I love that song!

There are a lot of 80s references on Anniemal – Madonna, Shakatak, Tom tom Club – is that stuff you grew up with, or are you just discovering it now?

Tom Tom Club I guess I knew a little bit about when I was a kid, but Shakatak I’d never heard of until I worked with one of the guys from Royksopp. I can’t remember what the original track was called…

‘Easier said than done’?

Yes! We only sampled the beginning of the track. The rest of the track is quite cheesy – there's this awful piano…

I think you sampled the right bit. What is it that you like about 80s music?

I don’t know. I guess the 80s was – there was a lot happening. There’s a very big difference between the 70s and the 80s: production changed very much, very suddenly. People were experimenting with electronic music, quite extremely. Even people like Duran Duran! I think that kind of extremism disappeared some time in the 90s. People got a little bit…

Tasteful?

Boring!!

Would Anniemal have been a very different record if it’d been made in 1999 after ‘The Greatest Hit’?

Well, ‘Greatest Hit’ was produced by Tore, who died, as you probably know. We were supposed to produce an album... It probably would have sounded very different. It’s hard to tell with these things… But I don’t think ‘Greatest Hit’ sounds very much different from the rest of the album? I don’t think it’s dated too badly.

How was working with Richard X?

It was really exciting! I discovered him quite early on, when I was djing and he was doing the Girls on Top stuff, and I thought it was absolutely amazing. I think he’s a genius, he really has his own sound. You can immediately hear it’s produced by Richard X…

Do you think he approaches working with you differently to working with Rachel Stevens?

That’s hard to say! I’ve never really thought about that… I know he had been a big fan of ‘The Greatest Hit’, and he’d been following my career since the early days. I hope he was more of a fan of that than he was of the early Rachel Stevens stuff! Wasn’t she in Steps 5?

A lot of people thought ‘Chewing gum’ could be a huge hit, and were disappointed it didn’t get more airplay. Do you think it’s harder for Scandinavian acts to break through in the UK?

I think it must be. And also I’m a very new artist… So it’s probably much more difficult coming as a Norwegian artist to England. But I hope that maybe that the next single will… climb a bit higher. But I don’t really think about those things too much.

The album seemed to be tentatively released and then withdrawn again…

I think they were afraid of the Xmas rush, you know, afraid that it would just drown in the Elton Johns and compilations – all the Xmas stuff. And apparently it’s supposed to be easier to release new things in the spring.

How do you feel about people calling you the Norwegian Kylie?

For me it’s quite strange. People always tend to compare you to people, cos it’s easy to have some kind of reference. I’ve also been compared a lot to St Etienne…

…who tried to sound Scandinavian themselves – when they worked with the Cardigans producer on Good Humor…

… which is a good album, I think! Very good. But I don’t really think about those things too much. People are always going to say that this sounds like that and so on. But actually I think some of the later Kylie stuff is quite good! But I certainly don’t feel offended to be compared to her!

What is it about Bergen that has produced Kings of Convenience, Royksopp and now you…

I get that question a lot, and it’s hard to answer. First of all, Bergen is not the capital, so it doesn’t really have that big record company on your back all the time. You don’t really feel the pressure so directly as you do in London…

It’s more like Manchester?

Maybe! I’ve never been to Manchester. Hopefully I’ll be going later this week… And I guess in Bergen, there’s not so much happening, either. So it’s easy to relax. And people also help each other a lot, everyone is very friendly.

Are you planning any shows in the UK?

Yes, I will be going on a short English tour. I’m sure you’ll hear about it soon enough!

Well, good luck!

Thank you very much. It was nice talking to you!

Epic soundtracks

Almost exactly a year ago I got quite spectacularly dumped and so, of course, I wrote a big, soppy, self-indulgent essay about trying to make sense of it through pop music for Freaky Trigger. Since FT's essay archive seems to have gone AWOL, I've put it up for posterity's sake on this site, here.

Twelve months on, things don't seem quite so bleak. And the story has a kind of happy ending: a little bird tells me that Baxendale's  'I built this city' is finally going to be given an official release later this year, on Cologne's sehr modern  Kompakt label. Ausgezeichnet!

And, this Saturday afternoon, Alex from the band will be performing at RoTA at the Notting Hill Arts Club with his new Green Gartside-joins-Steely-Dan-in-21st-century-Weimar-cabaret outfit Alexander's Festival Hall. Listen to their toothsome confection  'Crazy every night' here.

Dear Apostrophe Waitress

Out last night to a playback for New Order’s forthcoming Waiting for the Sirens Call, which I will tell you all about another time. The evening was noteworthy, however, for my first ever piece of promotional tat: a Luke Eyres scarf emblazoned with the title of the record. It is surely only a matter of time before I  get my hands on the likes of this or this and can retire as an ebay millionaire.

If you would like the chance to win this exclusive piece of neckwear, simply answer the following question, via email or the comments box.

Which item was given the official Factory catalogue number FAC191?

Exit this Norman shell!

The centre of London is going to become a Disneyland theme park; a heritage riverscape that people will battle over with globe theatres and public buildings without any real sense of occupation," he predicts. "An interesting culture will evolve where people will consider themselves Londoners while living 60 miles out, in places like Hastings.

Taking Iain Sinclair  at his word, last Saturday morning we took an empty shuttle (all the traffic was coming the other way) down to the South Coast, in the hope that a skip across the shingle in the bracing Channel gales might blow away that new year hangover.

As soon as you arrive at the tinted glass cube of a station, you get the sense of a town in transition. The entire street down to the seafront is lined with estate agents, promising the olde world prospect of property under £100,000.

With its tatty mix of asylum seekers, welfare claimants and pensioners, Sinclair refers to Hastings as “Hackney-on-Sea”, and certainly my last memories of the town, en route to a pop festival at Cambers Sands, bore that out: a generically drab shopping mall, bored, sullen teenagers and a seafront offering ever more waves of incoming gloom.

So maybe it was just an accident of timing - clear blue skies, crashing waves, the cute old town, and all that open space - but, this time, Hastings was quite a tonic… and the wintery twilight return to London felt hard to take.

Would any of the charm survive if you actually lived there? I don’t know. But, having spent over a decade in London, very few of its charms remain.

Photos

Little Cat Week # 2

When I discovered that there was a species of little cat called  Geoffroy's Cat  I thought the name must be the  hommage of  some literary-minded  zoologist to Christopher Smart, who once praised his own cat, Jeoffrey, so famously:

For the English cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his fore-paws of any quadrupede.
For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.

Much more mundanely, the cat was actually discovered by the French naturalist Geoffrey St. Hilaire, who traveled in South America in the early 1800s.

Smart was part of the large circle around Dr Johnson, and the good Doctor  was also fond of cats. An extract from Boswell's Life provides the epigraph to Pale Fire:

This reminds me of the ludicrous account which he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young Gentleman of good family. 'Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.' And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favourite cat, and said, 'But Hodge shan't be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.'

Which always makes me think more kindly of the Godfather of Geezaesthetics .

Geoffroy's cats are about the size of  domestic cats. They are  a golden yellow ground color with black spots all over. They have black bars on their face that run from the corner of their eyes and mouth to their ears, and vertically on its forehead. They have rather large eyes in relation to their head size, and they are set low on their face, forming a wide "V" from one eye to the nose to the other eye, unlike the rectangular "U" shape of other cats, which makes their heads look wider than they are.

The cause of the itch

I phoned up Green Gartside yesterday, to ask him some questions about a forthcoming Rough Trade reissue of the early Scritti Politti singles and eps. A tiny sliver of the Q&A will appear in Uncut next month, but I thought enough people might find the transcript interesting to justify putting it up here. As the interview begins, I have just interrupted Mr Gartside while he was engrossed in Halo 2.

Does the fact that you’ve agreed to this reissue mean you’re fonder of these records than you once were?

I’m not really fond of any of the music I’ve made and I’ve normally done my best to make sure that as few people get to hear it as possible! It’s always uncomfortable for me to listen to anything I’ve ever done. I mean, you try and make sure that the last time you leave the studio after having prepared the final mix is the last time you ever hear it. You go to extraordinary lengths (or you don’t) to make sure you never hear it again. It’s uncomfortable – let’s put it that way.

Would you rather other people didn’t hear it either?!

I can just reiterate that I find the whole business… uncomfortable is the word. The whole thing is so sonically and politically and emotionally… early. And that’s something you either feel comfortable with or feel a bit uncomfortable about. And I suppose I tend to the latter.

Do the contingencies of history and fashion affect how the music sounds?

You mean do I get to hear it afresh? The nearest I ever came to that was, I remember talking to Robert Wyatt a long time ago about how much I disliked… let’s just say, earlier work. And he said he felt the same way, and it was agony for him to listen to early stuff, until he took the imaginative leap into assuming that the music was by somebody else. It’s not an easy trick to pull off, and I’ve been mistrustful of it. I guess on those grounds I would certainly be prepared to forgive whoever made it!

There’s a lot of nostalgia for that scratchy early punk-funk sound at the moment…

It’s just the way things go, the amount of time that’s elapsed. I guess at the moment it is fashionable, and it’s for those with the stomach for it, and the spare time, and it’ll be rewritten and reread and I’m not sure I’ll take a whole heap of notice. I spend as little time thinking about the past as I’m able to and when called upon to try and remember the past I find years of active forgetfulness strategy and Guinness have done pretty well at blurring it all into a relatively inaccessible realm.

A band like Bloc Party, talking about themselves as an ‘autonomous unit’, seem to be entirely composed of these fashionable but empty signifiers…

And what was your degree in young man?! How empty are those gestures? Well that’s a very big question… I don’t know. I guess with a lot of it… Having been there “the first time around”, there’s not a lot to interest me about people who sound like any number of bands who could have walked into Rough Trade on a wet Wednesday back in the day. Not a very edifying spectacle I’m afraid.

Isn’t it depressing, this stripmining of cultural history?

That’s the way it goes! I guess that’s part of what drove me away from the whole indie thing in the first place – it became reified, fetishised, whatever. Institutionalised, really. It seems to have become quite comfortable with morphing through the shapes. And that’s when I headed off to America and hip hop and all things away from that. Although I’m back to that, now days… I accept the fact that I’m white and I play the guitar! So that’s who I am.

Simon Reynolds is about to publish new book about post-punk. I think he mourns a certain cultural purpose/mission, a sense that music was about more than just other music…

I have a sense that it would be mistaken, in my view, I’m not sure there was a fall from that Eden. And I’m not sure I’d be able to judge what form musical production and consumption might take in the future. Technology is bound to have a huge effect on all of that. It’s pretty unimaginable, the popular music of the future. I’d be neither too despairing of the future nor too enthusiastic about the past. It’s sounds boring I know!

Did you have much musical ambition before punk?

I played. I listened to a lot of music. I think I was probably headed for the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. I don’t know if I could have done the academic thing… Maybe.

But there was a Damascus moment?

There really was, yes. It’s not fanciful to say, particularly on the evening in Leeds when I saw the Pistols, The Clash, The Damned and The Heartbreakers, I entered the room one person and left… quite another.

How did you measure the success of those first singles? Just the fact that you had released them? Been played on John Peel? Sold 500 copies?

Ambition was a very funny idea at the time. I guess it’s an interesting question: what one’s hopes were for the business of making music. There were significant numbers of us then who viewed the whole business of having a career or ambitions for our music in a different way. I guess, yes it felt good if you had a few of them returned to you with nasty comments! We always put our home address on the records so people could get in touch. At the height of it, people were getting in touch from all over Europe in their droves. That’s a slight exaggeration. But that was enormous fun, staying up all night, drinking and arguing with dirty eurocommunist crusties. That kind of direct feedback. I remember, the last band I really liked before punk was Henry Cow, and I used to try and promote gigs for them when I was a student. And Chris Cutler, their drummer, was one of the first people to go out and buy our single and promptly stick it in an envelope and send it back to us saying we should leave the business of making music to real musicians!

Are you still engaged with strands of what you once called the “rich axminster of pop”?

I make music whenever I’m not in the pub! I’m working on a new album and it’s going… slowly. There’s a lot of it, but not a great deal of it is really… finished. But it’s supposed to be being finished fairly soon, so I’m getting into a bit of a panic about that. But yes, I make music, I’ve got a studio at home, an engineer who works with me every day, and I… continue.

Do you listen to the East London pirates, are you still up with hip hop?

I’m off hip hop at the moment. I’m really just listening to… myself. And lots of old reggae. But it depends – the music I’ve recorded in the last couple of years, I don’t know which of it is going to make the final cut, and what it will all add up to. Which influences will be expressed and which will be put aside for my 60s!

And is the music still informed by philosophy and critical theory?

I’m still addicted to it a bit. It’s a cliché to say it’s an abiding passion. It’s just like an itch, really. It’s a very pre-postmodern desire to think about epistemology and stuff… That’s probably the roots of it, the cause of the itch.

Little Cat Week # 1

With typical sizeism, the BBC are  running a series entitled Big Cat Week. Inspired by the work of the  Small Cat Conservation Alliance  we decided it was about time  the little guys got their fair share of the limelight, so all this week we present our Little Cat Week.

The kodkod or guiña (sometimes hûina or huiña) is the smallest South American cat, about half the size of a large domestic cat. It is said to be very similar in appearance to Geoffroy’s cat. Grey-brown/buff in colour, the kodkod is marked with round black spots with some streaking on the head and shoulders. The underparts are white.

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Passing Through

When your heart is not so much broken as subject to a spectacular compound fracture… When the plans you conscientiously drafted for months now seem as grandiose and daftly ruined as, yes, a cake, left out in, yes, the rain… When you find yourself cut adrift and washed ashore on the out-of-season seaside resort of your mid-30s… Well, when all that happens, there is nothing to do but to work out which pop song is going to soundtrack the latest scene in that long-running fiasco, your life.

*****

As I type this I worry… this must all sound very Hornbyish: Emotionally Distant Man of a Certain Age Seeks Refuge in the Foul Second-Hand Shop of his Heart. But I’ve never been very good at compiling lists, being blokeishly anal about being analytic, stitching up a wound with surgical precision.

It’s just that I feel that so many of us, plugged into scenes and screens before we walked, now make sense of our lives as movies or tv shows, forever being re-edited. Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t mean to suggest epic delusion or monstrous egotism. But I’d like to consider how we now have a sense of memory as not so much a passive recording, but rather something that is actively composed. Entire reels rustle forgotten on the cutting room floor, hoping for reinstated afterlife in expanded editions on undreamt-of media (with voice-overs and complaints from minor characters and notable critics). Directors and writers who handled several runs with immaculate professionalism are ruthlessly dismissed mid-season, their material reworked by ambitious newcomers, their scripts doctored to rude health.

And somewhere amid this frantic post-production, the re-casting and re-shooting, the hopeless, retrospective quest for continuity, The Studio must find time to commission the soundtrack. It’s a serious business: you can’t be slapdash. The daily rushes might be cut to a tune that later proves unavailable or unaffordable, though this can create its own dippy serendipity (think how much poorer the dawning dream of ‘Donnie Darko’ might have been if Richard Kelly had sufficient budget for his first choice of song: INXS’s ‘Never Tear Us Apart’).

*****

Those legendary first seasons, my teenage years, have remained unaltered for a while now. They were directed, for union rates, by Hal Hartley, Bill Forsyth and the Phil Redmond of early ‘Brookside’, and were blessed by a soundtrack from Morrissey, Marr, Tennant and Lowe. You may notice that the film stock was specially chosen by Derek Jarman for its sensitivity to the very pantone blue of the cover of ‘Hatful of Hollow’.

Die-hard snobs maintain that this was classic Troussé and the show should have been quietly discontinued, before it jumped the shark, to live on in syndicated immortality with those perfect episodes of ‘Fawlty Towers’. Many feel that the ‘University Years’, complete with a gimmicky exchange season in the United States, were messy and unsatisfying, and point to the turnover of directors – including disastrous stints by Leo Carax and a young Richard Linklater – as the prime culprit. Nevertheless the soundtrack – a baggy mix of New Order, The Sundays, The Stone Roses, MBV and Mary Margaret O’Hara – continues to sell healthily.

Since then, some would say, the show has lost the plot as definitively as the post-school seasons of ‘Buffy’. But who now would give up those Mike Leigh scenes on the council estates of Stevenage? That gorgeous tracking shot down the Westway on the first drive into London, skillfully cut to Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’? The epically bleak year when the only thing on the soundtrack was the first Portishead album? (In a classic case of internet contrari-wisdom, a breakaway clique of hipsters maintain that the 1998-2000 ‘Café Years’ are as good as it gets, and a significant part of Michael Winterbottom’s wayward oeuvre.)

Critics have dismissed this latest mid-season V2 of melodrama as a typically desparate attempt by a fading show to claw back sliding ratings. But the soundtrack poses its own problem.

The wry, disillusioned classicism of The Shins’ ‘A Call to Apathy’ was an early favourite, though ever since James Mercer took the McDonalds and Gap shilling I fear he may have priced himself out of the market. The rights to ‘Goodbye Lucille No. 1’ were sadly unavailable. That damned Sophia Coppola beat me to ‘More than This’. Stephin Merritt, with the characteristic hauteur of the auteur, has failed to return my calls. And the Scissors Sisters’ ‘Comfortably Numb’ was deemed ‘too ironic’.

*****

So, provisionally, subject to full Studio approval, I have plumped for Baxendale’s ‘I Built this City’. From the chuckles at the back, I realise that this may seem a quixotic choice. Older viewers may remember the band’s guest appearance in a 1999 club scene – much-mocked at the time as a new nadir.

But I continue to love the band, in the tender way you love your own lost causes. They showed up on the toilet-circuit at the fag-end of the nineties, with a handbag full of songs that suggested a Southern Jarvis Cocker had been rummaging through the Pet Shop Boys’ bins. But they put their swag together in a way that was all their own. They raged against the twee retreat of their spacetime, but their pop entryism owed just as much to the eponymous Leo as it did to the Human League. ‘Top Deck’ cheerily promised that they were going to ride a routemaster to the top of the Pepsi Chart. If you triangulate a point between Jonathan Richman’s ‘Roadrunner’, the Smiths’ ‘There is a light’ and the PSB’s ‘Paninaro’ you will find ‘I love the sound of dance music’, neglected and forgotten, waiting for you to kiss life into it. The videos they never made were directed by the Phil Redmond of ‘Hollyoakes’ and scripted by the Kevin Williamson of early ‘Dawson’s’.

And, in my circles at least, they mostly met with the special disdain reserved for failed wannabees. I would see them sometimes around London, with a watery mix of duty and expectation, half hoping they might, like a stopped clock, or Pulp, chime with the times by sheer persistence and accident. They made a defiant anthem from their situation: ‘Ghetto Fabulous’, the only time Belle and Sebastian are likely to be sampled in a song that hymns Rodney Jerkins. And, just when my faith was guttering, they brought out ‘Your Body Needs my Sugar’, which, in a kinder world, was the song Kylie chose to follow up ‘Can’t Get You out of My Head’.

So… not the obvious choice to represent the mix of bitterness, regret and distant hope I need for my soundtrack. But when I came across ‘I Built this City’ - available now on the new Robopop compilation, or, in blatant violation of international copyright laws, from your favourite p2p - I fell in love all over again. Perhaps I’m just being especially sentimental, overpraising an old friend, but right now the track seems perfect for my needs. In its defiance and surprise, it warns us against the temptation of growing prematurely wistful, writing off the possibility of novelty and adventure.

*****

It begins, choppy with funk guitar, in familiar territory: Tim Benton is out of his mind in love with a new girl. But this time he’s not content with the Spector route of building a cathedral of sound around her. He’s going to build a metropolis.

I scattered paving stones
The first night you took me home
I made a street on that first love feeling
I built the airport the following evening.

The song builds, block by block, purposefully piecing together the architecture of desire…

Carparks and traffic lanes
Connecting motorways
Follow the curving of every new bridge
Oh, I created them in your image!

…ascending, through three-part harmonies, into the title and best chorus of their career. Where they used to seem technologically dated, they’re now pro-tooled-up, if not quite in the premier league. This is a sleeker, more competitive Baxendale, but nothing we haven’t heard before.

But the song is driving on, the urgency of the pulse promising that the conceit of the chorus isn’t its final word.

The skyline in summertime
The sunset in your design
How can you say that you didn’t want this?
I stole the blueprints from your office!

Well, by now the fanfare of the chorus is less confident, not so much a proud boast as a reprimand. And then, as you listen, with your own heightened sense of the deceit of desire, keenly attuned to the potholes lying unmended in what seemed such a smooth road to the future, Alex Mayor, previously a stylish but underused player in Team Baxendale – in the way that Eric Cantona was underused at Leeds United – storms the microphone, seemingly channelling the livid falsetto of Curtis Mayfield and playing a guitar that hasn’t been touched since an early Benitez/Madonna session, and sings.

Don’t tell me that my highrise has to end
That you’re never going to be my only friend
Don’t try to tear it down to the floor
Cos it’s happened before
I’m going to build this city again.

It is – I’m afraid you’re going to have to take my word on this – a stunning moment. Not so much a band moving up a gear as discovering a gear they never even suspected they had. And as a private pop moment, happening at a certain time, in a certain mood, to a certain person, it’s IT, the reason we all keep buying and filing and downloading and listening: a piece of secret public art, out there, floating around on the airwaves and on the file servers, waiting for you to complete it, so it can read your mind and – for a moment at least – frame the very possibilities of life.

This is heady stuff, and Tim seems a bit taken aback by it himself. So much so, that he’s moved to take a breather in a classic Baxendale spoken interlude (no one since Oakey has carried these off with such rueful aplomb).

I’ll meet you at the top of the tallest building, with the sunshine on my back. I’ll be working hard to make up for that interest that I’ve lacked. Oh it’s such a boy thing, focussing on something you can see, instead of giving back the good things that you gave to me. Oh, I’ve built so many cities that have collapsed into the mud, and sung so many songs for girls I never understood, but you come up here and tell me that you’re only passing through, but I… I built this city for you.

And here’s the final melody in the song’s jarred harmony: after the pride, the anger and the denial, right here at the calm eye of the song is a terrible loneliness, the eerieness of the financial district early Sunday morning or the evacuation simulation. The relationship planned and blueprinted and built… and then deserted. A ghost town of the heart. In this part of the city, Baxendale are the number one pop group of all time, but only because I’m the only one still here, the only one still listening.

But the song can’t stop here, as much as it’s run out of fuel and hope, just as the endless agonising reel at the raw end of a relationship doesn’t stop when you’ve ticked off all those classic stages of grief. All the hurt and anger and pride and loss just have to keep whirling around, none of your moods believing in each other. It can only wind back on itself, revolving like a locked groove you’re powerless to lift the needle from. The only real way it can end is in a slow fade, drifting out until… Until it’s magically superceded by new song, a song that really understands you, that was waiting all this time for the perfect moment to teleport into your life and onto your definitive soundtrack.

*****

I’m confident that my endorsement will be just the thing to give Baxendale that final push into the stardom they deserve. And I’m equally confident that there is still life in this old show, despite the doleful rumours that it won’t be recommissioned, that the actors and situations are tired, that the lead has seen better days. There are always new seasons, new stories, new songs. And if a romantic lead feels typecast and walks out for a better role? Well, there are always spin-offs.