Strawberet Berry

I really ought to dig the beret out again, it hasn't seen nearly enough wear recently. Not since the Frank Spencer Blues Explosion gig, tbh be honest. Anyway, enough of that nonsense, we have sPazAmp nonsense to attend to. And how!


I has a haircut. To celebrate this fact, I shall presently embark on a sPazAmp. I've dumped sPazTunes in favour of sPazAmp due to shuffling all my music over to the new HDD. However, as a result of this, there is only about a fifth or so of the music to choose from (20gb or so). Furthermore, as I tend to categorise along genre lines and have diligently been moving the files a folder at a time (and in order), the available selections are somewhat particular. In short, be prepared for a high probability of Nick Cave songs (seeing as he constitutes 1/20th of the available songs by size).

Christ that's a boring paragraph. I reckon as I'll start again.

I has a haircut. I'm doing a sPazAmp, there aren't a great variety of songs, deal with it, cementheads.

That's better.


1. 13th Floor Elevators - You're Gonna Miss Me
On a regular shuffle day, it would look like a fix having this first. However, given that one of the few folders I've moved in its entirety is 60s Garage and also given that this song appears in there about nine times, then it's less surprising. It's also still one of the finest songs in dom. I'll not be wittering about it now, I've put my more considered thoughts on the matter down elsewhere (very possibly repeatedly).

2. The Mono Men - Burning Bush
Perverted pyro-rapists.

3. Lula Cortes e Ze Ramalho - Maracas de Fogo
I know I've missed off many and assorted accents, but I'm a little too tired to care. Besides, it's a song about maracas made of airborne water droplets, and that's just silly (in a good way).

4. The Bambi Molesters - The Wedge
The finest Croatian twangsome surfmerchants in the whole wide world. And don't let anyone tell you any different.

5. The Squirrels - Seasons in the Sun
Most of the first half is gloriously off key, then it speeds up and manages to morph into The Hustle. What's not to love?

6. The Mummies - Whitecaps
Parts I and II joined together in a glorious feast of BudgetRock(tm) perfection. Rusty Spoon Music ((c) JamieC) par excellence.

7. Driving Stupid - Horror Asparagus Stories
Toad! Toad! A big old Toad! Road! Road! Middle thereof! Fucking wonderful, and I don't say that lightly.

8. Mad Violets - I Can Hear the Grass Grow
I don't care how good your song is, or how horribly underrated your 80s take on all things psychey with a girl singing was, the fact is that no, you can't. You just can't. It's impossible. Nobody has ears that clever.

9. Knights of the New Crusade - He Has Risen
My God is alive! Sorry about yours! Still magnificent, and I won't shut up about it until you are all Saved.

10. The Mono Men - Took That Thing
The first song I ever heard by The Mono Men (bought on impulse thanks to being on Estrus and having a Coop-like cover), still one of the finest songs my ears have ever fondled and recorded from my very own blue marble vinyl 7''. Which I've since had to sell. Not every story has a happy ending, bitch.

11. The Reatards - You Fucked Up My Dreams
Yeah, well you can't spell. So we're even.

12. Bango - Inferno No Mundo
One of the best songs I don't understand the words to. And that's a pretty fucking big category, let me tell you. Which I just did. Cheers!

13. The Monsters - Gozilla
Their go-go-garagetastic paean to their favourite simian-tinged web-browser.

14. Naz Nomad & The Nightmares - (Do You Know) I Know
Alright! HUH! Get outta my way! The only proper song on the album that isn't a cover, and it sounds more twisted 60s garage than the actual covers. I like it! (that last bit is also a lyric, not just an oddly excited exclamation from me).

15. Earls of Suave - Stranger in my Hometown
If songs were all limited to five seconds in length, then this would possibly be my favourite song ever. Unfortunately, the other one hundred and forty four seconds of the song aren't anywhere near as good.

16. The Third Bardo - Five Years Ahead of My Time
You weren't even five minutes ahead of your time, you average gimps.

17. The Sonics - Psycho
If you can think of a better song, then you are an earless cementhead. Or just possibly not in the mood for gloriously spasticated drumming.

18. Los Peyotes - Fuego!
Without doubt, this is the most impeccably crafted cover of an Arthur Brown song by an Argentinian garage band. And I don't say that lightly.

19. Zacherle - Happy Hallowe'en
Dude, it's so totally not hallowe'en anymore. I don't care how ace your voice is. Sweet.

20. The Fuzztones - D.O.A.
I love the Bloodstone original, but I possibly love this even more. As basic premises for songs go, the musings of a dying aircrash victim lying on a slab next to the corpse of his splattered girlfriend shouldn't really rate that highly. And yet, and yet. It's bollock-nibblingly fantastic. Rarely has a song suited Rudi's occasionally overblown voice so well, and rarely has a hammondy type organ been employed to such precisely affecting effect. Or something. I have little idea what I'm blarbling on about, but I do know that this is one of my favourite songs to wholeheartedly sing along with when I'm certain that no one is in earshot (i.e. in the house or in a five mile radius). Like the Earls of Suave song, it has you hooked more certainly than your own bodyweight in crack after five seconds (try it [the song, not the crack] and you'll see what I mean). Unlike the Earls of Suave song, it gets better and better from then on, with the opening bars merely serving as a taster for the rampantly overegged and resplendently entertaining melodrama to come. Or it might just be a middle-aged bloke with a stupid name covering songs in a style that went out of fashion twenty years before the rest of his band could string two words together. It really doesn't matter, and I care just a little bit less than that. I love it, and so should you. If you know what's good for you.

Yeah. Bye.


Oh, yeah, not bye. Hang on.



It's The Mummies, obviously. And it's wonderful. And so is JamieC for making me aware of it (he secretly loves them. And other rusty spoon music too). And for inventing the term "Rusty Spoon" music. And for sending me a beret. And rum. But I digress. Everyone should watch it, and marvel at how music should be enacted.

Really bye this time.

I LIED

More sPazAmping from days of yore, to fill the aching void between one Superbean calendar instalment and the next. Enjoy, landlubbers.

I did a sPazTune last week. The internets etted it. I've been in mourning for a week, but now I'm BACK, bitch!

Yes, I'm back, and I'm back in a beret, courtesy of JamieC. I'm wearing it now. So far in the last five minutes I've pretended to be Frank Spencer, Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot (off of Curiosity Killed the Cat), a mediaevel bishop sort of thing, a man wearing a massive flat cap (possibly one of the Goodies during the black pudding thingy show), a Royal Marine, Wolfy/Citizen Smith and a generic French stereotype person. Possibly an onion seller. So very versatile, the beret. How I love my beret.

Don't believe that I'm wilfully sPazTuning whilst wearing a beret? What do you want, blood? Huh? HUH? What? Oh, proof? Oh, yeah, proof, that I can do. Here's me enjoying my beret in a variety of ways (two). Except they aren't here, they'll be at the end of the post, won't they. So look down there, and gaze in awe, wonder, appreciation and possibly mild disgust.

In the mean time ...

1. Bruce Springsteen - Independence Day
In which Bruce grunts, groans, strains and poos out from his previously constipated musical anus a grittily wrought fraught ballad about Will Smith saving the earth from alien menace with the help of a the president. Played by someone or other. Who cares, it was a stupid cocklicking film anyway. Unlike this song which isn't a) a film or b) in anyway cocklicking. Unless, of course, you happen to believe that "cocklicking" in this sense means really pretty fucking good. In that case, it IS cocklicking, and mightily thus. So cocklicking in fact that it is Bill Clinton's favourite [s]intern[/s] song. Or at least it was before he went all haggard, grey faced, thin and eighty-years-old looking. He's gone off it since then. He's gone off the song, too. Ha and, to a lesser extent, ha.

2. Daniel Johnston - Love Enchanted
In which Daniel starts out as if he is intent on impersonating Alex Harvey, of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band fame. It really is quite uncanny, for about twelve seconds. To anyone else, this would be bare and stripped back and other annoyingly cuntish terms employed by cuntish people writing about cuntish music. For Daniel, it's limb-severingly over-produced and cram-packed with sweeping and lush orchestrations. Twice then I mistyped "lush" as "lusch" which is both the German outlet of seaweed and poo masquerading as bath products and an affectionate French term for drunken German soldiers, as everyone knows. Obviously.

3. Boogie Down Productions - 9mm Goes Bang (Instrumental)
In which KRS-1 waxes lyrical about his tiny exploding cock. Curiously, it's an instrumental on which there is a lot of singing. In Christopher-1's world, "instrumental" means "with all the words except quite a lot of them, the chorus in particular, taken out".

4. Elvis Presley - It's Only Love
In which Elvis opines that "she had no recipe for love". No, but she had the recipe for a deep fried tiramisu, nutella, lard and aubergine pie sandwich with barbiturate sprinkles. Which is why you died lardily on the shitter, Elve me old chum. He died as he lived - mystified that something so inordinately huge had emerged from something so small. And also on the toilet.

5. Tom Jones - Weeping Annaleah
In which Tom makes up names for girls he wants to sing to. It's quite good, as is a lot of the stuff that doesn't ever make it onto the three hundred and four bazillion best ofs released each and every month of every year. Unfortunately, the arse-melting majority of public awareness of Tom is limited to a) the same twenty or so songs cycled through on the three hundred and four bazillion best ofs released each and every month of every year, b) the fact he is Welsh and c) made of orange leather. It really isn't fair.

6. Run DMC - They Call Us Run DMC
In which Run, DMC and (in a non vocal way) Jam Master Jay babble on for three wonderful minutes that "they" call "us" "Run" "DMC". Yes. Because it's your name. The name YOU chose for your band. That's why they call it you. What did you expect? That they were going to call you Stetsasonic? That's someone else's name, fools. You've made your Run DMC Name bed, you should be prepared to lie in it and pull up your Run DMC Name sheets up under your chins and sleep a peaceful snuggling sleep. Probably best not to include Jam Master Jay though, not since he got deaded. Ruin your sheets, that would.

7. Hal Blaine - Vibrations (August)
In which Hal Blaine (he's doing the drums, I think) makes up titles that bear no relation to the instrumental song that they are attached to and then tries to pass the hokey nonsense off as a concept album by putting a different month in brackets after each of them. He thinks it's psychedelic. He's wrong. It's twaddle, simple twaddle (although sporadically entertaining twaddle).

8. The Cramps - New Kind of Kick
In which Lux Interior makes the wild boast that he has found a new method of imbuing momentum in an object through the medium of his lower limbs. He also (with the aid of the rest of them) covers and improves someone else's song, as was his wont. And his will. And Nick Knox is still the best name for a drummer ever invented, and always will be. Until Sticky McHitter joins a band, of course.

9. Ministry - Burning Inside
In which Alien Jourgensen (you're fooling no one, Alain. You're from earth and we all know it) generously applauds the meritorious effects of the liberal imbibement of Gaviscon. Or possibly Preparation H. Or some mad anti-cystitis thing, perhaps. Although it's probably best not to imbibe the latter two. Topical application would be perhaps the order of the day. And he does it all in a live fashion, which is so much better than the studio version that it makes my feet ache just to mentally compare them. In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up (Live) has been scientifically proven to be one of the best albums ever recorded to drive to. If you want to end up driving at 100mph+ with wild staring eyes, a demented rictus of loathing plastered across your chops and angrily hunched over your steering wheel exuding waves of contempt and disdain for your risible fellow motorists, that is. What a great album it is. I'm going to listen to it all after this sPazTuning episode.

10. Man ... or Astro Man? - The Man from F.U.C.K.Y.O.U.
In which Man ... or Astro Man? (it's Man, not Astro Man. You're no more from space that Alain is) spell out rude words because they're a right bunch of nonces.

11. The Pretty Things - London Town
In which The Pretty Things babble on some verbal turdage about some tiny rat-infested hamlet down south over some thoroughly average semi-folky, three-quarter jangly, entirely plodding "music". Not their high point, all things considered.

12. Phantom Surfers - Besame Mucho
In which the Phantom Surfers say they have a lot of Besames. In a twangly surfoid stroke mariachi orgy of guitar fondling instrumental ecstasy. Whatever the fuck that means. Who cares when the shit is this good. Whatever the fuck that means.

13. The Jailbirds - Snakeskin Suit
In which eighties Garageists (the proper kind of garage that is, not the other, new kind. Let's not have that whole thing again) The Jailbirds bang on about how great their new snakeskin suit is. Yeah, great. If you're very long, thin and have no limbs.

14. The Move - When Alice Comes Back to the Farm (Stereo Version)
In which The Move laugh at Roy Wood's facial hair and contemplate an impending rural bestial orgy. In stereo.

15. Southern Culture on the Skids - Galley Slave
In which SCotS lament (in a jaunty, entertaining and above all mostly instrumental fashion) the plight of a poor soul condemned to trail around room after room of paintings and explain them to disinterested tourists. And, to top it all off, to really rub big grains of spiky, poisonous salt into the poor chap's festering metaphorical wound, they miss an "r" out.

16. Boris - Dyno-Soar
In which Boris dedicate a slice of their soul-improving, brain-pickling, toe-polishing, massively-rocking and vastly-wonderfulling heavy rock side to their favourite prehistoric beast, the pterodactyl. Possibly. I haven't got a clue, really.

17. The Who - Mary Anne with the Shakey Hand (Alternate Version)
In which The Who assert that someone called Mary Anne does better wanks because she has Parkinson's. Earth to The Who - there's a reason why this is the alternate version. IT'S BECAUSE IT'S NOT AS GOOD AS THE OTHER ONE. If it was, it would've have probably been the actual version. Wankers. And how!

18. Offspring - Self Esteem
In which the Offspring reveal another of my closely guarded guilty pleasures to a world filled with spite and ridicule. To which I say "fuck off!" and shake an angry fist, angrily and with much anger. It also quite wonderfully skewers the very people who latched onto to it as some sort of anthem for their own oh-so-dreadful and pain-filled cossetted, pampered and generally over-privileged excuse for lives. You haven't felt real pain until your wealthy, professional parents have ripped your soul in two and removed all reason for your presence on the planet by not getting you the Saab convertible with the heated leather seats for your 17th birthday. Go an write something pseudo-meaningful about it on your schoolbag in tipp-ex. Then fuck off and get run over by a big massive truck with spikey wheels. Then get together with your friends and form Radiohead. I feel I have wandered off the subject somewhat. I've spanned the genres. They call me the genre-spanner [/boosh]. Anyway, I like it and I like it a lot. So there.

19. Isaac Hayes - Never Can Say Goodbye
In which Ike proves himself to be a massive liar in the very first line of the song. Stupid big scientologist.

20. Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song
In which Robert Plant proves that wailing like a complete tart about some nonsensical vikings, ice, snow, hot springs and valhalla need not stand in the way of recording your second best song ever and one of the finest songs in the history of nonsensical tart-like valhalla wailing.

So there you have it. A lot of songs and me in a beret. I hope this one doesn't get etted by the internets. If it does, I may eschew sPazTuning forever more.

T'ra.

Yeah, so no pictures. Like the title says, I'm like Arnie in that film. I LIED.