As I’m not even a feature on the indie ‘Zzz’ list (in the popularity stakes, I’m somewhere in-between Jonathan King and the drummer from Half Man Half Biscuit) I sat amongst the great unwashed – the troglodytes incarnate – in the upstairs section. This was a bit like some hellish indie Apartheid. The ‘sleb/pleb entrances were separated by giant wooden slabs, and cloven-fisted brick shithouses ensured we didn’t get within 300 yards of him from Gay Dad. People were ACTUALLY clambering on one-another (like extras from Zombie Holocaust) just to peer through cracks and get a glimpse of Rick Witter. After genocide, nuclear warfare and Snog, Marry Avoid on BBC3, this represented a new low for humankind.
I don’t really like people, so I haven’t a great deal of experience of these horrible self-aggrandizing rallies; these flagrant feasts of backslapping. However, when watching this repugnant spectacle live, you realise how much time is spent sat around scratching a collective arse. Booming announcements over the PA suggest how weighty and epoch-making tonight’s shambles is, as if you’re there to witness a brave new dawn for mankind. Arcane footage that should have been long consigned to the vaults of hell tries to skate over any reference to Ultrasound or Terris. Some poor hired hand guides everyone through the Health and Safety procedure – which is actually a great deal more entertaining than anything else seen that night. Surely though, if he was giving any rational (mental) health guidance, he’d advise you get the fuck out before this shitstorm began. John Niven’s wonderful book ‘Kill Your Friends’ suddenly has even more gravitas in this setting.
Host Mark Watson (Welsh chap from Mock The Week) does the standard slack-jawed, Club 18-30 style hosting (“So who’s pissed? Who’s going to eat cat food with a spade?” etc.) and is pish poor. Admittedly, trying to peddle a comedy routine to the glazed expressions of members from Piccadilly Bedpan and The Neurotic Shinpads is a thankless and unenviable task. Musicians don’t laugh, don’t you know – as they are pondering Sartre and the great mysteries of the cosmos (and where to buy horse tranquilisers after the show). Fortunately, Watson soon realises this and loses his rag, quietly raging against feckless indie whilst looking a tad flustered. It’s a bit like that episode of Father Ted when Henry Sellars comes to visit.
In-between his meanderings we’re treated to various meaningless non-celebs (‘Wow, some bint from Skins!’) presenting various meaningless non-awards (‘Best DVD packaging!’ ‘Sexiest ankles!’) whilst the cameras pan around various meaningless non-entities (‘Is that really the bongo player from The Paddingtons?’). NME’s Editor, the Crown Prince of Cock, seems chronically incapable of reading various hollow platitudes from an autocue. This is a man whose ‘fame’ means he could, most likely, demand oral sex from whichever girl featured in Nuts magazine he liked, despite the fact he looks like a jug-eared freak from Troll 2. You could feasibly dig U2 a grave in 5 minutes using his nose as a shovel. Plus, he definitely got binned at school. He has even possessed Steve Lamacq – whose sledgehammered face means he could challenge McNicholas in the beauty stakes – and uses his sexy dulcet tones to read abject tedium in the manner of a cyborg, a sort of indie-rock take on 2001’s Hal.
Because it’s all about the muzak, maaaan, we get performances from White Lies (N-Sync covering Echo & The Bunnymen), Elbow (fantastic, actually), Franz Ferdinand (good, but needed the bog), Friendly Fires (doing the kind of drum-heavy jam you might expect from one of the lesser nations at a World Cup – like Trinidad), Glasvegas and a woman with orange hair (slo-mo Elvis cover, dreary) and ‘Blur’ (Coxon and Albarn, minus cheese farmer and The Other One) playing ‘This Is A Low’ acoustically – a fantastic song, reproduced in a frankly lacklustre fashion.
Of course, the main attraction is Fat Bob Smith and The Cure. According to the En-em-my, goff is coming back in a big way, which would explain the presence of numerous aging lardarses with awful backcombed barnets and smeared lipstick, accompanied by waddling tarts squeezed into ill-fitting corsets. Now, verily, is the time to pretend you cut yourself with a potato peeler at 16 because your dad wouldn’t let you tattoo eyeliner on your mush. Rather than that penis from Type O Negative, we have Tim Burton – TIM BURTON! – presenting The Cure with the ‘Best Ever Band in The History of the Universe, EVER’ award. Whoever thought you’d get the two worst haircuts in the galaxy together in the same place? Burton has the look and air of a man who’s been rudely awakened in a bin round the back of the venue, before being dragged on-stage and forced to bestow an award at gunpoint. Compared to the band, though, he looks positively radiant. Robert now looks like a shrivelled bollock with a haircut atop it, whilst the bald guitarist appears to have daubed on his bonce in biro. Their rather amiable, half-arsed trundle through da hitz leaves me cold.
Of course, nothing leaves me quite as Arcticly cold as the news that Oasis were, apparently, the best British group of the past year. Bonehead is turning in his grave and he isn’t even dead yet. Fortunately, even the cloth-eared luddites on the top deck recognise the injustice of this and boo unremittingly, which restores a molecule of my faith in humanity. Some payback after being subjected to a mole’s-eye view all night, and sound that can only be compared to listening to a transistor radio through the wall of a bank vault. All-in-all, this ghastly Nazi spunkfest has made want to hibernate under my dining table, surrounded by a protective layer of barb wire, far from the world of monosyllabic acceptance speeches and magazine editors that look like malformed hobbits. I would genuinely rather have been at the Brit Awards. Of course I’m even referring to the year when booze was banned. The enemy is amongst us. Public NME Number 1, please step forward in our time of need.
No comments:
Post a Comment