0.16.1 - Snooker loopy nuts are we
Memory, especially distant, specific memory is obviously something not to be trusted as I climb slowly towards my 50th year. I can picture the living room of the house we were in that year, I know exactly where the TV is, the couch is, the record player and speakers are. I remember watching Star Fleet and Thunderbirds on that television, and I am certain I watched some snooker on that TV; I know for sure that the 1985 World Snooker Championship would have been on that television at some point - my father being a huge snooker fan as both a spectator and player. Did I watch that historic final at any point? Do I just remember Dennis Taylor's iconic celebration because I saw it on the news a couple of days later? I can't say with any accuracy; but the central fact is this - from a young age, because of the time that was and the family I was born into, snooker has been a part of my DNA since childhood.
I spent a lot of my pre-teen years moving on from my tiny table to regular visits to the Sergeant's Mess at various Air Force Bases around the country and the world, which all inevitably had a snooker room. If there was one thing I learned from being a Forces child it's that our armed services personnel can occasionally have significant amounts of free time, and that would be spent playing games of some kind. My Dad came from a working class background, as did much of the non-commissioned ranks at the time, so pub games - darts, cards, pool, and snooker - were very popular. I learned half a dozen different card games from my Dad, and Darts, and of course, Snooker as soon as I was tall enough to reach across the table with a cue. We'd play for 50p a frame, the safest bet in the world at the time because my still growing teen frame was barely co-ordinated enough to walk through a doorway without having to think hard about it, so long range hand-eye co-ordination was not my strong suit.
Now, living in Sheffield which is the home of Snooker, the two week period in April when the World Snooker Championship returns to the Crucible theatre (still set with its capacity of 980 people) is a magical time. For a subset of Sheffield residents, an annual visit to the Crucible to enjoy a meditative and fascinating 3 hour snooker session is something of a pilgrimage; and this week, it was time once again for me to spend some time enjoying the battle of the baize. And of course, knowing that, I used that as my inspiration for my listening this week. What it should look like is something like this:-
Let's get amongst the balls, shall we?
Red ball - 1 point
Originally, I was going to listen to Simply Red in this spot but I was feeling an inclination to listen to something a little more out of my normal comfort zone when I discovered the existence of K-pop girl group Red Velvet. I have an uneasy relationship with K-pop and its gradual ascendency into more mainstream western acceptance thanks in main part to BTS; I've had a few brushes with the K-pop and J-pop idol groups in the past, and each time I feel an eerie magnetic pull towards it as a genre. It's possible the few instances of it I have been exposed to have been very good, or at least well tailored to my taste, but every time I hear about a new K-pop band, I sense the yawning gulf of the idol band genre, waiting to destroy me.
Sometimes, like this, I take a swing on a band because their name fits my dumb gimmick for the week, and so I listened to Chill Kill - The 3rd Album not knowing how I was going to feel about it. The good news is that it was fine. Even with my limited experience of prior K-pop, I'm aware there is a formula and this album hit all the notes I was expecting; 3rd verse rap break in Korean, close harmony choruses/switched off vocals in the verses; interchangeable use of English and Korean, synthy, boppy music. I'm also aware that much of the experience of these groups is meant to be visual - dance routines, cute outfits, etc etc. Well, the bad news for Red Velvet is that this is not a multimedia blog, just an album blog, so I probably only got about 50% of the experience. And in the main, it was fine but unremarkable.
If you stretched the definition about as far as it could go, you could call me a hobbyist musician, so I've been trying to figure out how to discuss this realisation I have had without sounding incredibly dismissive to maybe hundreds of individual musicians I have listened to so far who are significantly more talented than I, and many more to come. When you listen to music in volume, as I have been doing, and you cast a wide net, it becomes apparent a lot of music is fine, as this Red Velvet album is. Maybe K-Pop, with its incredibly and ruthlessly manufactured quality stands as the prime example of this - but people, studio people, musicians, bedroom songwriters, they have decades and decades of prior examples of what makes music work to crib from. If you're in the music making machine, that system has countless tricks to sand away all the rough edges and make your product acceptable, low risk, but ultimately forgettable music.
So once more, I survive an encounter with K-Pop and resist the urge to fall into its cavernous maw and be destroyed. For the record, I like Cupid by Fifty-Fifty but nothing so far has taken me as close to the edge of the K-pop faultline as this song, which is way too good to also have been produced as promotional material for a videogame.
Yellow Ball - 2 points
Last year, towards the end of the year, I started collecting a bunch of slightly eerie ambient music to use as background music for a TTRPG I was running; generally, I'm a lyrics person, so I don't have a lot of ambient electronica background knowledge to pull from. However, the internet has a search function and a zillion people with opinions, so I went through a list of liminal space ambient music recommendations, and fortunately for me amongst them was this album from Yellow Belly.
Not to skip to the end too quickly, but this is the album I'm going to recommend any of my readers who care about my opinions dip into. Ghostwriter feels like an excellent continuation of the kind of lineage of music which began with Portishead and travelled through more modern bands like The xx or Chvrches. It's dark and brooding and soaring and beautiful all at the same time and I genuinely am so glad the name was stuck in the back of my mind when I was trying to think of 'Yellow' bands or it might have forever just been a half-remembered recommendation which I never ended up using.
Go listen to Ghostwriter, if only because of the joy of getting to hit play on Spotify tracks with no recorded plays.
Green Ball - 3 points
It's a strange thing to me that I never owned a Green Day album. Not even a bootleg, a copy, a folder of mp3s stashed somewhere on a harddrive or burned onto a CDROM. As has been demonstrated by many of my previous purchases, it's not much of a bar to clear to get me to buy your album (or rather, it wasn't until I started buying Vinyl again at £25 a pop). I like so many of their songs; the opening lines of Basket Case trigger a pavlovian response which has me looking for the nearest dancefloor. When I Come Around and Welcome to Paradise cycled endlessly on MTV2 while we played card games sat in D's back room until 2 in the morning. Why did they never end up on my shelf?
Is it because the album is called Dookie? There was a kind of juvenile humour bred across the 90's pop-punk movement, but that never stopped me from buying Blink 182's Enema of the State or The Bloodhound Gang's Hooray For Boobies. It might just have been the ubiquity of Green Day at the time, but really I think it's because I never found myself at any point saying to myself "I wonder what the other Green Day songs sound like? I'm really in the mood to listen to a Green Day album". I like Green Day (and I listen to American Idiot with intent because I enjoy it), but maybe this is just not as exciting an album to me for some reason.
Brown Ball - 4 points
I debated including this album, in main part because Ian Brown, formerly of the Stone Roses now solo musician, turned into a weird hardcore anti-vax nutcase during the pandemic and did a lot to sour my opinion of him. But if this project meant that I couldn't listen to albums I've previously enjoyed because I have moral concerns about the creators of that music, this would be a shorter, more boring musical journey and I'd be back to listening to the 11 Taylor Swift albums on a loop which was the pattern I was trying to get out of by doing this.
The Stone Roses were a band I never really understood the hype around (see also Primal Scream, who similarly enjoy critical darling status while making the 90's equivalent of Black Eyed Peas 'we love to party' songs) but I had a soft spot for She Bangs The Drum and Fool's Gold and Love Spreads because my housemate Dave loved a bit of The Stone Roses from time to time. So imagine my surprise that after his inevitable acrimonious split with John Squire, Ian Brown would put out a really great introspective mid-tempo rock album with some interesting lyrical flourishes (I particularly like The F.E.A.R., where every verse is four-word couplets starting with F, E, A and R). I think someone put F.E.A.R. on a mix CD for me back in the day, which I both enjoyed and was astounded by the performer, enough so that I sought out the album.
So yes, I've lost some of the unexpected respect Ian Brown earned from me with this album due to his particular brand of Rock Star Crazy, but this album is still an underappreciated great.
Blue Ball - 5 points
If I hadn't already covered The Blue Nile, this would have been ideal. With that crossed off my list, I was worried I would be priced into listening to British boy band 'Blue' before remembering early 90's Scottish pop-rock band Deacon Blue existed, even though I did totally confuse them with Del Amitri, who are a different band from a different nation and spent 5 minutes trying to find which Deacon Blue album had Roll To Me on it.
I'm going to be honest, I don't have much to say about this album which after 450 and then some albums with only a couple I've failed to summon anything meaningful to say about it, that's a decent strike rate. I remember Real Gone Kid and Fergus Sings The Blues and I think this might be a decent album; it feels more honest, more handcrafted than Red Velvet for example - this isn't corporate machine engineered music, it's people coming together to write pop songs. I wish all the music I didn't care much about was all this good.
Pink Ball* - 7 points
The first live music gig I ever went to was in 1994. I was eighteen, and while I'd certainly seen bands play in pubs and clubs (infamously, the cramped dancefloor at Montmatre in Chesterfield would occasionally host local bands who were studiously ignored by the people waiting to use it for dancing), I'd never paid for, or been taken to a show by a band I had heard on records, seen on TV, and certainly not one I loved like I loved Pink Floyd. Outside of the Beatles, there isn't a band I grew up listening to more than Floyd. My parents would put me down as a child with headphones on, put on The Wall and leave me to listen. When, in 1981, when I was five years old, I learned that my father was going to see Pink Floyd play at Earl's Court and were performing The Wall, the album that I loved so much, I was inconsolable. Thirteen years later, for my 18th birthday, I was gifted a ticket to see the band which had defined my childhood in person.
It was a weird time to be a Pink Floyd fan. The public breakup between notable prick Roger Waters and the rest of Pink Floyd had been a long time coming, and had finally happened after they released The Final Cut in 1983. In the decade since Waters left the band, they'd been in semi-retirement doing solo work, and in legal battles with their former frontman. They'd released an album in 1987 A Momentary Lapse of Reason but it lacked whatever magic it was which made previous Pink Floyd albums so powerful. In 1994, they released The Division Bell, the first real Pink Floyd album without Roger Waters, and depending on who you ask, the first real Pink Floyd album since The Wall in 1980.
I had only a couple of months between my birthday and the show, and spent most of those two months listening to this album. With such a distance, both in emotional maturity, life experience, and personnel between The Wall and The Division Bell, the modern Pink Floyd sounded very different, but I was determined to persevere. I don't know what the critical consensus on this album is, and I did not look, for this album holds a special place in my heart. Conceptually I think about this album and I think "its not classic Floyd" but I love it in a different way. It's a coda, an epilogue, a final statement from a band which weathered the storms of ego and success to produce music and a tour which will live on in my memory.
There are moments in live music which stay with you. Right now, with no effort, I can close my mind and go back to the moment in that show, half way up the stands in Earls Court, with the lightshow which had illuminated the whole arena all night cut to black, just a single spotlight in the centre of the stage. Dave Gilmour sat down with his guitar, played the opening notes of Wish You Were Here, and a crowd of twenty thousand people sang every word. It was, for me, fundamentally formative. Maybe any other gig would not have made me the person I am, the lover of live music, the lover of all music that I have become. It was magical, and then it was gone, never to return. They never toured again, never released anything after, but at the very edge of possibility, with the last chance I had, I got to share a room with a band that means the world to me, and sing along with their songs.
Black Ball - 7 points AND White/Cue Ball (-4 points technically)
Somewhere in the early 2000s someone remembered that blues and rock existed, and that bands didn't have to be hyperproduced rock monsters; they could instead sound like the kind of band you felt might be on stage at a dive bar down a back street you wandered into halfway through a night of barhopping. Despite the difference in age, and possibly because I like the floating opposites their names represent, there's always been a kinship in my mind between The Black Keys and The White Stripes. The rough-around-the-edges quality, the lack of pretention, the straightforward but still compelling nature of the music they made felt completely at odds with the trends in music at the time, which made them stand out all the more. These were bands where I shamelessly pirated both of these albums, White Blood Cells and El Camino, back when I was much poorer and more morally flexible. But because I didn't pay for them, just got them included in various 'Click here for 20 rock albums from 2002-2007' torrents, I never valued them as a whole**. Instead, they would be ruthlessly harvested for single .mp3 tracks to go onto the collection of burned mix CDs which I would play on my bus commute to work every day.
The real issue is, and you can interchangeably mix in either band name to this train of thought, I ask myself; 'Are you a fan of <band>? Not really. Do you like some of their songs? I sure do. Do you think they're talented, interesting musicians? Impossible to deny. Are you going to listen to any more of their records? Probably not'. There's a chance I am missing out here. In truth, I've probably listened to Brothers by The Black Keys a couple of times through, as well as these two albums about the same amount; but while I approve of their stripped back approach and blues rock chops, I've just got other stuff I would rather spend my time with.
The Venue
So finally, to the band Crucible. Yes, I googled bands called Crucible because I knew there had to be one, and there were in fact three; one only had three singles, one had an EP, but the third iteration ticked all the right boxes except one. First, they had an album cover with a snooker table on it! Second, they are obviously from my home city of Sheffield based on some of the song titles on this album (Walkley Anthem was the giveaway), which means almost certainly that their name is in reference to the actual Crucible theatre. However, their style of music, extremely traditional English folk songs full of acapella close harmony singing is something I really struggle to engage with. Intellectually, I recognise the skill and musicianship involved; having tried to sing harmonies before it's stupidly hard to do with one other person, let alone three or four. So, yes, incredible talent on display; just wish I enjoyed it more.
So, I did it, I wrote a blog post about snooker and obscure music, this has to be the thinnest sliver of the venn diagram I can manage. If this won't scare the readers off, nothing will. And if I can convince you, reader of this, ignorant of the game of Snooker, can I encourage you to spare 6 minutes of your time to watch this, a very representative sample of what all snooker matches are like.
* I considered listening to BLACKPINK here but obviously that would be playing the colours out of sequence, and result in a 7 point penalty and end of break.
** Was piracy bad? Yes. Is the way we consume music now anything better than legalised torrents controlled by a massive corporation which profits significantly off artists work? Also yes.
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