Category: http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post

EUROPOP


Bp just keeps on serving it up. Last night we went to see Frenchies Jack of Heart (bestockinged frontman, marvellous) and The Magnetix (knackered, falling over, wonderful) play on a boat on the Danube, tethered under the Erzsébet híd. The word on the street is – natch – all in Hungarian, so our gig intelligence was rather less sophisticated: a poster on the toilet door at Joe’s favourite bar.


Joe’s notes the innate suitability of the Frenchies and garage here, and I think he’s dead on. Garage rock French-style replaces US-UK blokishness with a playful element of high camp. As a teenager, flummoxed by the ineffability of taste, I leant heavily on the descriptors masculine and feminine to explain why I like, say, Blur over Oasis and I think this kind of gendering, crude as it is, still stands.

The gig also QED’d the thoughts on music and cultural difference (a pretty grand title for thoughts liberally sprinkled over beer at Szimpla, but nonetheless) we’ve been having during our time here. The reason for the inexorability of the UK pop industry overseas is only partially Anglophone pop imperialism; it must also be something to do with how UK pop introjects British culture’s self consciousness and fashions it into irony or longing or scathing, with examples too obvious to illustrate.

Oh, okay, like him here (any excuse):


Cor!

Anyway, teenagers from Paris and Kiev and Florence and Johannesburg and Osaka &c &c &c are all sweet on UK pop exports because they’re drawn to those elements, that worldview, that are being pubescently produced in them but aren’t so readily available from pop at home in cultures that aren’t eternally afflicted with the awkward dance. I think that’s why Brits abroad find European pop (obvious shite – Sash!, The Finger Song – aside) such a shocker: it’s done straight, there’s something missing. And Brits simonising their own weirdness, well, that’s not a British trait at all, is it?

Jack of Heart and The Magnetix are currently on what looks like a thoroughly gruelling European tour. You can catch them in Belgrade tonight or follow pictorally here. A bazillion props to organisers RNR 666 – my first gig in Budapest was utterly marvellous.

THE CAKES IN BUDAPEST ARE EVEN BETTER THAN THE CAKES IN VIENNA

…as a very wise man once told me. This is the strudel at Muvesz, a marvellously fin-de-siecle kávéház on Andrássy út, the monster boulevard that stretches between Erzsébet ter and the Városliget (City Park). Joe thinks it’s changed, become too bright, too slick, too breakbeat/acid jazz. For me its much the same: astonishing coffee n’ cake and served with an enormous dollop of Properness that makes my Hyacinth Bucket-ish heart sing. Still the kind of place where watching a Man of Distinction freeing his coat from the hatstand and re-robing can make you audibly gasp with admiration.


For us non-Men of Distinction, us Cheaper Dates, there’s lángos, a fried doughnut-come-pizza pie-come-pancake-come-churro, smothered in raw garlic and sour cream and available from metro stations, markets and street vendors.

SIMPLETON PLEASURES

We did it. We’re here! On the back end of a week of chronic social discomfort and headspin, I’m reclining in my Euro-tastic new apartment in the Erzsébetváros. Although I had planned to document the initial adaptation process, inside-outside anthropology-style, I (with a characteristically drippy excuse) simply couldn’t find the appropriate notepad.

We now live off an ochre-ish courtyard in Budapest’s VII district, in a studio apartment with a bath in the middle of the room. Now, armed with a 18HUF yellow exercise book, allow me to take you on a tour of our new neighbourhood. Roll your eyes heavenward as your host – very definitely the awe-struck provincial – marvels at the 24 hour supermarket (0-24 élelmiszer) at the end of her street, the utterly decent bar across the way and the mack-off (second biggest in the world) synagogue down the road.


This is Szimpla Kert, a gigantic romkert (ruined garden) and almighty jawdropper a stone’s throw away from our pad. Entered through an unassuming set of industrial strip doors, it’s an abandoned building transformed into a late bar and cinema, festooned with all manner of picturesque debris, de-tuned televisions, heeeeavy fag smoke, car parts pot plants, grafitto, flotsam, jetsam, &c, &c.

For future reference, you can view pictures of confectionary, buildings and fairground kitschery, as well as pseudo-exploitative photos of my boyfriend, Joe, (amongst other things) at my Flickr here.

* And the relevance of the picture at the top of this entry? Well, I like to sample my cultural difference at the supermarket – here the milk (tej) is sold, udder-style, in bags. You slide it into a jug, snip the top, then chill in the fridge.


Teddies

This in-between time has me feeling a little like an émigré to Hull, when in fact I’ve done an eighteen year stretch. Nevertheless, as a old-newcomer, it’s good to know someone with an ear to the ground. Enter Han, with whom I went to the third of the Seeds and Bridges 2008 contemporary music series.

We saw Nalle, who were just wonderful, and came off like fifteen year-old, multi-instrumentalist wiccans going hell for leather in the school music room.

P.S. And if, like me, you fear the Newsome effect, stick with it, I promise Hannah Tuulikki’s voice is less babytalk and more word-chewing.

Infilling / Something Good


We’re winding down our last days in Norwich. With a week and a half to go, my Boo is holed up in the Graduate Resource Centre putting his PhD to bed whilst I potter around, feeling about as a “chill” as I ever have, making wrinkle-nose gross faces at our flat’s mould infestation, tinkering with my new swank camera, taking day trips, mentally compiling Norwich’s Greatest Hits, toying with a PhD proposal.

In Every Tourer Caravan a Portatoilet: The Roxy Music Story

On Saturday I watched More Than This: The Roxy Music Story. I’m certain the BBC only have the one narrative arc for these rockumentaries, interspersing the talking heads with stock footage of Thatcher, the Miner’s Strike, football hooligans or the generalised white dog shit Britain of the 1970s, as chronologically appropriate. The social realist rags to outrageous riches yarn is British pop music’s favourite bedtime story and Bryan Ferry’s is pretty outré, “escaping” Tyne and Wear for art college, then London, Jerry Hall, Bel Air, Miss World, Marks and Spencer &c &c &c.

However, what interested me wasn’t so much the fabulously strange records of Roxy’s early career – Ladytron, Virginia Plain, In Every Dream Home a Heartache and Do the Strand – but their other lineage, the one that held vast appeal for the core 35 – 44 audience of medium wave radio stations specialising in smooth, contemporary classics. During my early nineties childhood, grotesqueries like Dance Away, Avalon and More Than This were still in heavy rotation on Yorkshire Coast Radio. As the hiss n’ crackle soundtrack to summers spent in a tourer caravan on the coast of Filey, those records, along with Weather With You by Crowded House, Spandau Ballet’s True, Hazard by Richard Marx and Save the Best for Last by Vanessa Williams, still smell of car sick, soft furnishings and boredom. And I’ll never be able to associate them my Dad’s copy of Virginia Plain on lilac 7”, which was the mainstay of our front room discos on nights that mum was at work.

Watch here.

Countdown

Appleby Horse Fair, Dave Thomas

… and hello from my desk, a corner of our front room that’s currently pretending to my office, and where I can be found – intermittently – ploughing through research assignments, attempting to summon a PhD proposal from the depths of my psyche and half-heartedly making peace with the city of Norwich (Fine City, I love you, but you’re bringing me down) as my final days here rattle through at a pace that’s something like fast-slow-fast-fast-fast-slow.

Appleby Horse Fair, Dave Thomas

I’m peering above the parapet to direct you to photographer Simon Robert’s response to my look at his work-in-progress We English. That is, if you’re interested in two Englishness pervs hashing out the finer points of the concept of nostalgia. And to urge you to look at the archive of Northeastern film and photography collective Amber who are pretty much too wonderful to write about (although I’ll give it a go in the next few days, no doubt). Go look!

Scheming

So, regular readers (scratch that, regular IRL listeners to my one glass of wine fantasy-ramblings) will know that in a matter of mere weeks myself and J will be transplanting the J&J Roadshow from dearest Norwich to Budapest, Hungary! As a subscriber to the fail-safe strategy of “talk about it enough and you’ll have to do it” I’ve not been able to shut up about it. In fact, if you’ve been within a five metre radius of me these past six months, you won’t have missed:

  • Optimistic proclamations of the relative cost of living, UK vs. Hungary (it’s half! I’ve calculated! Well, sort of…)
  • Incoherent plans to become an internet millionaire/professional photographer/all-round good guy/actual grown-up before our projected lift-off date of late (very late) October
  • Rapturous descriptions of the elegant balconnied, high-ceilinged, two-bedroomed apartment that will (hypothetically) be Chez Jenny come aforementioned date
  • Foot-in-mouth attempts at transcultural understanding
  • Graphic descriptions of the dental work I need before I go
  • Tedious and unrealistic in-depth budgetary calculations

And, of course, its been a hive of careful preparation this end. J has the small matter of a PhD to put to bed, of course, whilst I’ve been scouting down the back of every available sofa for money to put into the emigrating kitty. On Friday, I passed my first leaving town landmark: I left the job where I’ve been reluctantly shilling my “general office skills” for the past six months, and as of today I’m fully freelance and fancy-free.