Rolling the Dice (2009)

Recently rediscovered this, an ancient column from The Fly magazine

Rolling the dice

Feb 05 2009 12:12 pm, Joe Shooman

We’ve all heard the furore surrounding Coldplay’s song ‘Viva La Vida’ and its alleged similarities to Joe Satriani’s ‘If I Could Fly’; there’s all sorts of ‘evidence’ all over the web and more than one person has knocked up megamixes of the two tracks played separately and together. And admittedly the phrasing of Chris Martin atop that chord progression and the rhythmic figure are pretty damn similar to Satch’s guitar break.

It’s also likely that members of Coldplay had at least heard ‘If I Could Fly’ on a jukebox somewhere, possibly thought, “that’s a good tune, that” and then gone on to order another horlicks n absinth cocktail, forgetting all about it til jamming out songs for the new album. This kinda stored creative memory is pretty common and quite often it’s not obvious until you play someone your brand new guitar song and they go “yeah that’s cool and it was also cool when Robbie Williams did it in ‘Angels’” and then I feel sick and have to go and listen to lots of Motörhead to clean myself out again. I mean, one does.

Regardless, Coldplay fans as you might expect are a bit peeved by Satriani suing the band and have gone on to find several other songs that share the same chord progression as ‘If I Could Fly’ with varying degrees of dubiousness. So far we’ve had tracks by Cat Stevens, Enanitos Verdes and – my favourite – a bizarre Europop track by someone called Günter*. It’s pretty much possible to relate anything to anything if you put your mind to it and whatever the results of the case, they’ve all got some pretty decent publicity out of it.

 

What it does go to show though is that there is always a case to be made for similarities in songs. The savvy thing to do, I think, is to go down the route where the original composer is long gone and the melodies and chords are therefore public domain.

I was reminded of this listening to a promo of the new Bell X1 album, Blue Lights On The Runway, which is out next month. As ever, it’s well-put-together guitar pop and without giving too much away, you pretty much know what it’s gonna sound like already. So I got toward the final track, ‘The Curtains Are Twitching’, had a sip of my amaretto & Bisto and realised that, yup, that was familiar too. In fact, very familiar. I couldn’t place it til a name popped into my head and that was Johannes Pachabel. Specifically, his 'Canon In D Major' which is a lovely piece of pastoral Baroque arranged for strings and is the sort of thing that cheap Hollywood movies put over sequences of weddings in slow motion. Not a bad thing to use as the basis of a pop song and it’s what’s on top of the chords that makes Bell X1’s track unique. Whether it’s purposefully half-inched is a moot point; possibly the Killdare lads had seen said film once, stored the music away as ‘Dead Good, That’ and when it came to getting the new LP out, bosh – out it comes again, unbeknownst to all concerned, least of all Pachabel who died in 1706, which is either 300 years ago or just after finishing work depending how you look at it.

 

It’s a technique in fact that the likes of Stock, Aitken And Waterman were rumoured to be much enamoured of back some twenty years ago when launching the careers of Kylie, Stefan Dennis, Jason Donovan and loads of other mostly Aussie nobheads with shit hair and weird painted-on smiles and clothes; great songwriters the team were, which is hardly surprising considering that they’ve admitted in interviews over the years that several of their chart hits were, uh, let's say inspired by a whole host of classical music composers.

Canny stuff, see? It works, let’s use it. Result = hit upon hit of original music = buckets of cash with no possibility of being taken to court cause the chords and melodies are public domain. Stick another shrimp on the barbie, ya hoon.

The most famous classical nick, though, has gotta be Procul Harum’s ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’, which appears every few months on montages of, well, weddings gone a bit wrong in bad Hollywood movies. The keyboard part is incredibly close to Johann Sebastian Bach’s hit singles ‘Air On A G String’ and, possibly, ‘Sleepers Awake’. And why not: he’s popped it years back and it’s public domain**. It’s such an integral part of the song that without the organ in there it’d be a weedy piece of late 1960s nonsense rather than a bona fide psych/folk/rock classic. What’s most hilarious about the whole deal is that in 2005 Matthew Fisher, said organist, sued Procul Harum for back royalties and won 40% copyright from that day onwards. In a song where his organ part is patently and hugely similar to something J.S. Bach wrote sometime between 1717 and 1718. Good work old son.

 

That’s the way to do it, Coldplay chaps: keep a hundred or two years out of trouble and you can nick what you like.

I'm off to write my unfinished eighth symphony by Schubert now, with the words to God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen over the top.

________________________________________________________________

* Course, where this all falls down is, as the bloke that pointed it out in the first place freely admits, Günter 's track was released way after Satriani's which is a bit of a shame but we'll ignore that cause it's more fun

 

** Anyway Bach blatantly nicked it off Ug The Caveman’s seminal 12,000 BC opus for rock and cave, ‘Ug Uuuhh Ruh Ruh Ruhhh Mu Mu (Slight Return)’ so he's not exactly in any position to whinge about it.

Zombie Paradise (lyrics, 2018)

Making darkness out of light

Now you’re living in Zombie Paradise

 

Now we’ve taken back control

The Agency will need your soul

 

Do you really want to do this

Do you really want to test me

Ah, you’re just another idiot

Another pound shop Crowley

 

The best thing that I ever stuck

Was to stop you people punching up

 

Do you really want to do this

Will you really take me on

When the forests are on fire

And the ecosystem’s gone

 

Burning world and dying light

Now you’re living in Zombie Paradise

 

I told you more than once

Jesus only saves

In fairytales on crumbled scrolls

In Middle Eastern caves

Too easy for me, word is that

You just aren’t fun these days

The truth is with the loudest -

For the righteous, only graves

“Oh Lord” you sing

“I pray to thee; your servant.

Come and save me”.

Did you think to ask yourself

What has that motherfucker done for you lately?

 

Making darkness out of light

Now you’re living in Zombie Paradise

Burning world and dying light

Now you’re living in Zombie Paradise

 

Delete if not Aloud

Your right. I should of been

More pacific.

You’re friends were’nt their

Too advice.

 

There absents was a damp squid

To all intensive purposes,

As time past they we’re mist

But we all no their the loosers.

 

Just a mute point maybe there

Escape goat’s?

I do’nt want a be a

Pre-Madonna.

 

LOLling out LOUD - I am bias,

Its EPIC irregadless of bantz –

Time four an expresso, supposably

The barista’s have’nt went home.

(I will check momentarily:

Borrow us a fiver justin case)

 

Jus' Fishnin'

Song from the soundtrack to the sequel to the novel which isn't out yet...

https://soundcloud.com/shooberry/jus-fishnin

Click pic for full score. I like this one.

Snippets from the bedside pad: Panoply of Plop

Twinks on the lawn

of The White House

It's a

Panoply of plop.

He who legislates

is lost

In the

Panoply of plop.

Getting flippered

off a penguin

Mons Hubris

Wanking Novery

Biffoland

Parade of Divs:
Panoply of plop

The Sad News Chair:

The trees turned

away from me.

Blunt force trauma

the BFT

The World to be

Rebooted

out the

Panoply of plop.

Live at the Co-op

Coin-op Bus Stop:

Markdown Morrisons

AL-D, supermarket rapper

Reverend Al D, supermarket

love crooner

Iron Madeley

Judy Priest

Gordon the Golfer

Chas and Dave and Elon Musk

sing Hyperloopy nuts are we

it's a festival;

it's a Panoply of plop.

Imagine if we treated artists

The way we treat TV chefs.

There's a boxer called the Tank

and he is wise,

a long-lost father found by daughter

doesn't know he is dad, 

and it's a mess of lust and hatred

it's the Panoply of plop.

A man buys no shoes.

Ghost Poet

Chocolate Potato Club

Archie Hopper

Biotech Quest

Marc Bolan shower cap

A Chocolate Dynamo

Cold Arse

Circles

Bugs

Mundane revelations,

council skip poetry:

Panoply of plop.

I try but in my dreams

I can do it.

Ce ci n'est pas d'arte.

I invented Footbines

Hands-Free fags

HOMO is an acronym

for Hatred Of Missing Out.

Pete Best left before

they were famous.

A panoply of plop.

Please don't feel sorry for the inventors of plate tectonics

They were only trying to find an answer to robotics

Gin and tonics

A.B.C.

Sings Tight Lee.

Bib cap March

Patch lovingly.

Panoply

panoply

panoply

of

plop.

____

(made of snippets from my bedside writing pad)

Philosophy in turmoil following newly discovered Cartesian principle

By Tangleberry Waldorf-Salad

The discovery of a new manuscript by Rene Descartes has stunned philosophers worldwide and threatens to undermine four hundred years of progress.

The previously unknown document, Meditationes de secondo philosophia, was found by builders restoring the fire-ravaged Notre Dame cathedral and contains an update to the Descartes’ famous maxim ‘I think, therefore I am’, written in his own hand.

“The Cartesian first principle of cogito ergo sum has been accepted as a key element of philosophical investigation,” said Engelbert P. Wittgenfunk of the Ffossip Society of Philosophy.

“We were therefore stunned to find, scribbled in the margins of Meditationes, an entirely new but indubitably genuine new maxim Sed quid ego novi te, or, in English ‘I know you are but what am I?’ ”

“It shows that even in his later years Decartes was busy refining his ideas of foundational knowledge and rationalist methodology and provides us with another phenomenological question with which to wrestle.”

Professor Wittgenfunk added that philosophers across the world were busy trying to find a definition for the words “I”, “Know”, “You”, “Are”, “But, “What” and “Am”, after which analysis could proceed to the next stage.

 

Previous finds

In 2005 builders working on a public toilet in Frankfurt dug up the partially rotted manuscript of Phanomelogie de Geistes which under further inspection was confirmed to be a new version of Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel’s 1807 work Phenomenology of Spirit. In the margins, in an unknown hand, was scrawled Man muss genauso sein um es zu verstehen.

For the last fifteen years, scholars have been arguing as to how to interpret the words. They were eventually provisionally decoded as ‘it takes one to know one’ by the 2020 Council of Philosophers.

Perhaps the most famous of all example is an inscription on a seemingly innocuous set of scraps of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Originally seen as separate and unintelligible possible test pen strokes, the breakthrough came in 1961 when researchers repositioned the scraps to reveal a new teaching on self-worth.

“תפסיק להכות את עצמך. למה אתה מכה בעצמך?” was translated after decades of debate as “Stop hitting yourself. Why are you hitting yourself?” and attributed tentatively as an addendum to the Sermon on the Mount.

The Motherfuckers

I let the Motherfuckers come through.

I might as well admit that.

I didn’t mean to.

But.

I would apologise if I thought there was any point.

 

To explain:

This apartment. Ha. Apartment! Hardly big enough to justify that name. A single, tiny room in which to sleep, eat, whatever. Somehow someone sometime had managed to squeeze a bed in. And you could half-open the door to get in and out, if you were a scrawny undernush like me. There was a table so you could look out the window and cry. It wasn’t legal to open it, and it was painted shut anyway. But it was a window. A possibility. A portal.

Two spiderwebs out the door was the kitchen/bathroom. A shower/sink/toilet unit, and a cooker, with the two separated by a rancid plastic curtain. No window. Size of a cupboard it was. A small one. It was horrible. But I didn’t chowit much – tried not to anyway. Pabulum was a sort of wan green or it was lens-lasering blue. People said the blue tasted better but fuck me it looked the same on the way out as it did on the way in. Cold, warm, fried, whatever. Likesay, I didn’t scrap much foodwise.

The apartment had an advantage: there was a blind on the window, which you could draw down. It still let in most of the grey, dying gloom of the day, but it also muffled the screams, the broken bottles, the sirens, the fighting, the rampaging, the burning, and the foulness. That was my soundtrack to sleep. A symphony of sickness. At least it covered up the scratching of the rats, I suppose.

When I was younger, and they still tell this to the kids, I always believed that one day the smog would clear and that the choking death would disappear, and we’d throw away the Hazmasks and there would be… well. It was impossible to imagine anything other than the insipid filth of the daybyday. At least, now I can’t do it. Maybe I did once. Maybe I believed in colourbrush, in breathgood. Nap. Nap. Nap.

 

Enough. It was enough. It was at least somewhere and I fucking kicked enough homeless out the way each day to get to work and back home. Locks, locks, locks. Spiced out their grapplers anyway, they were fuckall but jellybrains. Maybe that was better. But somehow I never fell. Not even now the Motherfuckers are here.

I kept this bit til now because you don’t know who’s watching so you have to assume everyone is, always. But the apartment also had a ladder on the wall. A red, rusting one, leading to some kind of crawlspace attic. Locked, locked, locked. Course it was. I tried it most days for a bit. But it wouldn’t budge. Not for a scratchy little angler like me. I was so tired most of the time I could barely make it home anyway so after a while I stopped trying and forgot about it. I had better things to occupy me, like a highly-illegal Oxydet. Fuck knows why they were illegal. Everything seemed to be. So you assumed everything was too. You get the picture.

It was said that if you hit an Oxybubble, if you just managed to capture one, you could not only be maskless but it tasted good. Imagine that. Tasting the air. On purpose! I always thought it was an urban myth, even when I was angling. I will keep trying. Sometimes that’s the only thing that keeps me going in this unrelenting nothingness, this ugly souplife. Wading through the effluent hours trying not to fall in because you don’t die when you drown, you just drown forever. Some people liked it, according to another story. That moment of scrabbling to the very bottom of your lungs for anything at all. Anything to keep you alive one moment longer. Perpetually in that state. Ecstatically on the verge of expiring in prime pain. The drowners. They were no use either: fucking cop-outs.

So I angled and I forgot about everything else and I got scrawnier and scrawnier and pallid and transparent until eventually I sort of flopped down and decided that this was the day I’d probably die and so be it. I was looking forward to it, and the hunger in my belly was a welcome stab toward the ultimate, and the burning in my lungs was my hand-holding doula, and my eyes crossed and the room span and split in two and as I was about to let go I knew how to open the trapdoor, because that was split into two as well and I could slide in between the worlds and so I did and.

Pardon my swear but GOSH

G
O
S
H

I was sitting in a restaurant, a restaurant like the rumours, ornate wooden furnishings and pictures on the walls. Holy smokes. A man, who looked a lot like an ant dressed in a dinner suit, approached. I urined a bit. Warm it was. The mant brought me a cup which steamed and I clawed at my face because I had no mask on at all and I held my breath until I couldn’t anymore and the air was so sweet so sweet so sweet and my mind expanded to fill the world and the cup, the cup, the cup was full of what I later found out was called coffee with milk and whatever those things are it was the best thing, the only thing, the ever-thing, I’d ever tasted. Its warmth filled me and engulfed me and hugged me and loved me.

I was restored. And around me others seemed to be restored too. There were a million voices and laughing noises and slurping and belonging, and though I couldn’t understand any of them, that was my overture of awesomeness. My melody of magnificence. Course, aside from the mants and the women that looked like beetles dressed up in leg-frocks everyone else was sort of blurred. Underwater, maybe. But not chokers, and not drowners, and not soupers. Just fuzzy around the edges. What a place!

I finished the coffee. The mant came and took the cup away. I stayed for ages but it wasn’t replaced and the pressure built up and up and up and suddenly there was an enormous POP.

Screams. Stabbings. All manner of fuckery. And that damned mask stuck to my face again. But an added creepy feeling of something just out of the eyeline. Someone, lurking. Someone with the sort of face that popped out in front of you on a ghost train in a cheap funfair. Rictus grin. Eye sockets so deep you sank into them because you saw yourself.

So yeah I admit it.

It was me that let the Motherfuckers in.

They dine, they thrive, they appear

Where there’s

hope.