Brother Paul's Review of the Year - Albums of the Year

Album of the year by an embarrassingly large distance...

Kanye West- My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Totes amazo...

Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

Hot Chip - One Life Stand

The Divine Comedy - Bang Goes The Knighthood

Bubbling under...

Avi Buffalo - Avi Buffalo

Belle & Sebastian - Write About Love

Robyn - Body Talk

Janelle Monae - The Archandroid

Ash - A-Z Vol 1

Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening

Take That - Progress

Best Coast - Crazy For You

Well, it's okay...

The Futureheads - The Chaos

Field Music - Measure

Manic Street Preachers - Postcards From a Young Man

Approach with caution...

Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

The Magnetic Fields - Realism

Not bothered listening to yet...

The Walkmen - Lisbon

Jonsi - Go

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

I think it's been a good year, better than most. Well done to everybody involved.

I wrote a massive long thing about how amazing the Kanye West album is, but all you really need to know is that it's amazing. Well done Kanye!

Buying Music

KANYE WEST has got a new album out this week. It's called My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and by all accounts it's very good. In fact, the internet has practically wet itself over how good it is, most notably with horribly-po-faced-and-pretentious-but-I-still-read-it-every-day music website www.pitchfork.com giving it a virtually unheard of perfect 10.0. That's not just ten out of ten, that's 100 out of 100. Oooh!

Always one to be swayed by media hype, I decided I'd quite like to own this record, so I set off to buy it. Now, being stuck in an office somewhere off the M60 for most of the week, there aren't many opportunities for buying records. The only shop near the office is a massive Morrisons, so I tootled in on Monday lunchtime, but Kanye's latest opus was nowhere to be seen. Thus followed a week of me visiting various towns and supermarkets to try and get hold of the album.

As well as Morrisons in Chadderton, Kanye's album was nowhere to be found in Tescos in Halifax and Haslingden, Asda in Rawtenstall, the whole of Accrington town centre and the whole of the Rossendale Valley.

Now, I know I didn't visit any actual music shops. But that's because they're not there. Accrington doesn't have a music shop. Rossendale doesn't either. Kanye West is one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, so it's fair to assume that some of the biggest supermarket chains in Britain might be stocking his album. But they're not. And when did WHSmith stop stocking music?

I know I could have ordered it off the internet, but I thought buying it from a shop would be easier and quicker. What a ridiculous idea.

And I don't do mp3s or illegal downloading. Sorry.

Having adopted and 'I've started so I'll finish' attitude, it looks like I'm going to have to go into a town centre that isn't dying on its arse to try and find the new Kanye album. It's a bit of a sorry state of affairs, whichever way you slice it.

In the meantime I've been whetting my appetite for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by listening to it on Youtube, specifically the track Monster, and even more specifically, the verse by Nicki Minaj, where she lays waste to everyone else on the track. When 'everyone else on the track' includes Kanye, Jay-Z, Rick Ross AND Bon Iver, that's no mean feat. It's incredible. Go find it NOW. Go Nicki Minaj!

A New Northern Soul?

Northern Soul is pretty much one of my favourite things ever. The music itself is amazing, obviously, but the whole story around it is brilliant too. If you broke the history of Northern Soul down into a timeline, it would look like this:

THE SIXTIES - Some people in America make some brilliant pop songs that for one reason or another get completely ignored on their release and are largely forgotten about.

THE SEVENTIES - Some people in Wigan discover said brilliant pop songs and start playing them in nightclubs in Wigan. Everybody in the north becomes obsessed with obscure long-lost American pop music.

How amazing is that? You literally couldn't make it up. Men used to sprinkle the dancefloor with talcum powder and then go and do ridiculously complicated dance routines. DJs would go over to America to find 'new' tracks, bring them back and then to stop their rival DJs from seeing what they were called and stealing them, they would cover up the names of the songs on the records when they were playing them. Amazing.

My favourite Northern Soul song is either Out On The Floor by Dobie Gray or The Snake by Al Wilson. Or Sweet Talkin' Guy by The Chiffons. Or the original version of Tainted Love by Gloria Jones.

Anyway, it got me thinking, it would be incredible if something similar happened these days. I would love it if all there was a club playing all the best overlooked pop gems from the last few years. I'd be there with a whole bloody vat of talcum powder.

Here are some songs that would be playing.

Scooch - More Than I Needed To Know

Annie - Chewing Gum

Aly and AJ - The Potential Break-Up Song

Robbie Williams - Rudebox

All Saints - Chick Fit

Girls Aloud - Graffiti My Soul

Rachel Stevens - I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)

Natasha Bedingfield - I Wanna Have Your Babies

Paris Hilton - Stars Are Blind

Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Today The Sun's On Us (This would have to be the last song of the night, during which everyone would cry themselves to death)

Ok, so not all of these songs are desperately obscure, and some of them were even actual hit singles, but I have never heard any of them in a club and I'm never likely to and that makes me a bit sad. I might even have to start it myself. I'll look into it.

I'm sorry i haven't a glue.

Apropos of nothing, we're talking about glue. Not the drugs kind. Just glue for sticking stuff together. It turns out that the Plague Doctors have had some pretty harrowing glue incidents over the years. Here's some glue nostalgia.

BROTHER PAUL
On my first day of primary school, when I was three, I ate some white PVA glue. I don't remember why. I don't remember what the effects were, but I imagine I was sick.

The best thing about white PVA glue was the weird little spatulas you used to spread it on stuff. It was also fun to put it on your fingers and hands and play with it so it went tacky and you could peel it off and roll it into balls. Very satisfying.

When I was in Mrs Hickson's class we had moved on to using the glue gun. I loved the glue gun, especially the weird burning smell and the sense of danger. I managed to glue gun my hand once and ruined my best orange jogging bottoms in the process. I had to run my hand under the cold tap for about an hour and it was well boring.

In the second year at secondary school, I was playing football in the tennis courts in my brand new shoes and the stitching came off, leaving the front section flapping about and my foot getting wet. Not wanting to admit to my mum I had broken my new shoes, I bought some Bostik and glued them back together. This didn't work very well, so I had to buy a lot of Bostik. My mum then found all the tubes in my bedroom, arousing her suspicion.

Mum: Are you sniffing glue?

Me: No.

Amazingly this answer sufficed, as she didn't seem to care what I was actually using the glue for.

That was my last major glue incident. Over to John.

BROTHER JOHN
At the age of nine I was a pupil at a very nice little countryside school in Cumbria.

One day during some sort of crafts lesson one of my little friends was using the much revered glue gun to create a peg-gun (a gun that fires pegs). While waiting patiently to use the glue gun myself I noticed that my shoe lace was untied, bending down to tie it I put my head into the line of fire, resulting in a large unsightly white blob in my hair. Mother cut it out for me on return to the Kastle Inkredible.

My dad would occasionally refer to “The Knackers Yard” throughout my childhood. He would tell me with a big smile on his face how if next door’s horse didn’t get better soon then it would end up being made into the glue that I use to make airfix models. Thanks to wikipedia I can reliably tell you that horse glue is only used for pipe organs, antiques and stringed instruments nowadays. So you can get glueing those model planes without images of melting horses spoiling your enthusiasm.

We're still alive – promise.

First blog update since the beginning of the summer. I kept on starting to write things and then not finishing them. Sorry.

Anyway, here's what's happened this summer:

- The World Cup was rubbish.

- Glastonbury was amazing.

- The Plague Doctors went on holiday to the Yorkshire Dales and Brother John gashed his head open on a toilet door and had to have it glued back together.

- The Plague Doctors played at a festival in Wales at 11 o'clock in the morning and scared some children and learned about alternative culture from a nice man called Phil.

- Latitude was rubbish.

- The Plague Doctors played at a festival in Preston to a crowd of precisely no one, then declared it to have been their best ever gig. Mind you, they do that after every gig.

- Brother Paul went camping for four weekends in a row and started to think he was Ray Mears.

- The Plague Doctors played their last gigs for a bit.

With regards to this last one, fear not! We haven't split up, all that's happening is that one of the Plague Doctors is moving somewhere else. We're contractually obliged to keep quiet about the ins and outs of everything, but what it means for YOU, Plague fans, is that we'll be playing around town a bit less.

However, hopefully the new situation means we'll be able to write some more songs and finally update the set that we've been peddling to general indifference for the last 18 months, and then when we do play some shows they'll be super incredible, because we'll be all hungry, like.

If you're still in need of some unsettling musical entertainment the Cabinet of Curiosity will be rearing its mangled head at some point soon, so you can always go and see that.

Also, Brother Paul is rumoured to be finally starting work on dentist-pop side project the Plaque Doctors.

TTFN!

World Cup Poem

There's a World Cup on, don't know if you've noticed. Lots of bands have decided to mark the occasion by recording their own World Cup song. The Plague Doctors are not like other bands though. We've gone all Carol Ann Duffy on your bum and we're marking the occasion with an actual POEM.

Also, most World Cup songs contain at least some sense of optimism about England's chances of winning the tournament. Our poem is a bit more realistic. Here it is people.

We're Going Out On Penalties (A Sonnet)

Take the flags all back indoors

We don't need them anymore

Take that novelty St George's wig from off your head

Rip the shirts from off your back

Tear them up or paint them black

Tell the bars with all their big screens to put the cricket on instead

Text everybody in your phone book

Football isn't coming home, look

There'll be no parade round London on an open top bus

There'll be no dancing in the streets

We might as well admit defeat

We should all have stayed at home this year and saved ourselves the fuss

Abandon all your idle daydreams, they have no chance of coming true

Because we're going out on penalties, just like we always always do.


Soz and that.

Manic Street Preachers

The Plague Doctors have an unashamed love of the Manic Street Preachers. The first gig John and I attended together was the Manics at the Manchester Apollo on the Know Your Enemy tour in 2001.

They were royally pissed off, making for an incredible gig. My main memory is of Nicky Wire in a pink tutu intoning “Brain dead mother fuckers” at the end of Miss Europa Disco Dancer. It was pretty amazing. He's a brilliant pop star, much greater than the sum of his parts, exactly how it should be.

I even quite like Know Your Enemy, but it's not classic Manics. They really lost their way after that, with a greatest hits and the so-rubbish-I -haven't-even-bothered-listening-to-it Lifeblood.

Everyone thought they were dead, but Your Love Alone Is Not Enough was a cracking single and they got half decent reviews for the album too. I've never bothered listening to that either, but John assures me it's quite good in places.

Then came Journal For Plague Lovers, a stonking great return to form as they used up the last of Richey's lyrics. It was hailed as The Holy Bible part 2, but it's a great record in its own right. However, the album's general amazingness was tempered by a niggling thought that here at last was absolute proof that Richey was the talented one.

Perhaps James Dean Bradfield only writes amazing songs when presented with amazing lyrics. And amazing lyrics have been few and far between since Richey disappeared.

So now there's a tour and a new album (Postcards From A Young Man) and James Dean Bradfield has said this: "We're going for big radio hits on this one. It isn't a follow-up to Journal For Plague Lovers. It's one last shot at mass communication."

Hmmm. Everything Must Go part 2 anyone? If they must put out a pop record, there's a few rules we'll have to put in place.

1. Shorter songs. Do not even THINK about starting the album with a ponderous 6 minute epic eg The Ever-bloody-lasting. Short songs work best, Journal for Plague Lovers if full of gnarled and twisty melodic nuggets and it's all the better for it. Verse chorus verse repeat ad infinitum will not wash here.

2. Better lyrics. That means no lyrics about being tired, Mr Wire. Nothing about doing the housework. And for God's sake nothing about Hillsborough. S.Y.M.M wasn't even about Hillsborough, it was about an ITV drama about Hillsborough! ARGH!

3. Get Steve Albini in again. The drums on Journal for Plague Lovers sound great, and I don't usually give a crap about that kind of thing. Get Albini in again, if only to keep military-obsessed mouse-man Sean Moore happy. Either that or give him some Dairylea, he'd probably be happy either way.

4. Bad Romance. I would LOVE to hear the Manics cover Bad Romance. They have a history of covers and this would be perfect for them. Imagine Nicky on the Ro ma, ro ma ma's and then James coming in with an anguished "Whoah whoah whooaaa!!" AMAZING.

Any more suggestions on what Postcards From A Young Man should sound like would be greatly appreciated.