Always love the songs that reference reviews in them, this one's an early one with some great lines, being an editor by trade, I can see bits in there he's alluding to that are familiar.
Song: Printhead
Album: Dragnet
Year: 1979
This song clatters along (in a worthy tribute to its title) like a dot matrix going mental. On this one, they sound very 70s punk, snotty, angry-sounding and MES's vocals are pushed very high in the mix, which is good, as this one seriously has some golden lines in.
To boggle the mind further and to make it even more obvious, he reads out lines from a review: "There's a barrier between writer and singer/Uh-huh he's a good man/ Although an easy one/ The singer is a neurotic drinker/ The band little more than a big crashing beat/ Instruments collide and we all get drunk" he then follows this with "The last two lines/ Were a quote, yeah/ When we read them/ We went to pieces" whether they did I highly doubt, but its a great piece of self-referential post-modernism at work. Deconstructing a deconstruction within a song that in turn, I'm doing the same to now and presumably countless people have done before. It's like ever-folding space.
Elsewhere he talks about his head 'increasing" which could be a portent to what followed a few years later when they chucked Mark Riley out and wrote "The Man Whose Head Expanded" which is another amazing one I haven't written about yet, can't wait (it's a doozy).
He also closes the song with a passage open to interpretation (cheers Mark, makes writing a lot easier!) which is thus: "You could substitute an ear for an extra useless eye" which to me sounds like he is giving the reviewer some gip, almost asking him if he was there and paid attention, or did he just write what was expected.
That's a personal bugbear of mine, reviewers who go a to a show, watch the band, then come back and write a review that gives nothing of the performance or the atmosphere away, reviewers that do this are lazy beyond belief. Yes we know they are probably playing stuff off their latest album, yes we know where they are from, yes we know they've caused some outrage unconnected to their music and we probably know who is there to see them.
Tell me about the MUSIC, what HAPPENED on stage? Reviewers working for the Guardian are particularly persistent offenders, often giving just one par to the music and a million to past glories or their reputation in the press (see recent reviews of Beady Eye, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Kylie etc), these aren't reviews, they are conjecture and guff. Even worse are the people commenting on these 'reviews' who haven't been to a gig in years and spout banalities like anyone else gives a hoot what they think. Nobody does, rarely do people even acknowledge each other on there, so filled with hot air are the posters that I doubt they check the replies again, simply presuming they are right.
There was an article about fried breakfasts recently, some snob posted "Why do people who eat fried breakfasts always need tea? I suppose the tannin gets rid of the grease from your mouth" a perfect example of these chumps in action, nobody asked his opinion, nobody cared, he answered his own question, amazing.
This has turned into a rant, good.
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