Transference Valence

Four favourites from the week, four absolutely a-grade tracks too.

Horace Ferguson – Tranquilizer

Reissued on the excellent Death is Not the End label, a track off the 1987 album Sensi Addict. Produced by Prince Jazzbo, this cut has the sweet-voiced Horace Ferguson riding that compulsive Sleng Teng riddim.

Skeng – Elvis Presley

Track of the year so far, no question – that bass! And ok, I accept Skeng isn’t exactly the most wholesome role model for young people, but he’s got a way with the lyrics and delivery, and the burberry ofc. London was everywhere and was a track of the year last year, as I expect this one will be. Good video too. V thin. Do you think he gets enough to eat 😐

Som.1 – Ultimatum

Coming straight out of Montpellier, hefty, buzzsawing breakbeats, dark and lowering bass and a driving ’don’t stop, gooooo!’ catchline. Killing it.

Bree Bree – Eva Bless!

Clean, catchy and direct. Confidence in the skill and the song. Great riddim too, that little shuffle that Bree Bree rides to deliver the momentum.

YouTube playlist link:

Reading Janet Malcolm The Impossible Profession at the moment, hence the playlist title.

col tocco d’arrosto

May Day leftovers

I’ve written about pasta col tocco d’arrosto before. ‘With a touch of the roast’: pasta cooked and thrown in to the roasting pan with a little of its water, swirled around on the gas with some parmesan, until the ‘sauce’ is somewhat but not entirely reduced and sticking to the pasta, and the roasting pan is almost entirely clean.

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May Day Food Post

I’m pleased to say I’ve been doing more cooking again recently. Maybe it’s the bank holidays, maybe it’s the lengthening evenings.

First up, hake and salsa verde from Claudia Roden’s The Food of Spain. It’s supposed to be with asparagus, but it hadn’t quite made its appearance in my grocers by this point, so I did it with peas and the water the peas in which the peas had been cooked. By moving the hake slowly around in the pan, the hake releases gelatin, which further thickens and binds the salsa verde. Will be doing this with asparagus this week I think. It’s very simple and fresh tasting.

fish, in a green sauce with peas and new potatoes, on a white plate, on a walnet table, books and magazines in the background

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Like Any Horse Rider

Missed a couple of weeks. It’s like I always say, with blogging it doesn’t matter how frequent it is, you just gotta make sure it’s out consistently.

An incoherent set of four this week. That’s fine. I dreamt I dreamt that someone gave me a big presentation set of Cutty Ranks cd singles.

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Las Vegas #2

A post from years ago , from before When the Screaming Stops, so the derangement is better known now. Still fantastic ofc. His face was just everywhere in the hotel I was in. V odd.

image

I’d missed all this Matt Goss being a thing in Vegas. 

Here in the Nevada Desert, Goss has reinvented himself as a new Sinatra. A Peckham boy updating the moves Ol’ Blue Eyes invented. And rather than running him out of town for the cheek of it, the Americans have fallen for Goss in a way they never did before.

This feels like the sort of place Vegas is. Producing weird Gatsbys out of the desert.

For a while he had no money at all. ‘All our assets had been frozen. I was down to the wire, I’m talking only being able to buy one cheeseburger a day.’

Now he can afford many cheeseburgers a day. But he hasn’t forgotten his roots.

Not everybody is impressed. As Goss walks through the casino, flanked by bodyguards, on his way to the show, a lone voice from the card tables shouts out: ‘Douche bag!’ The singer spins on his heels, outruns his guards and goes close up, face to face with the offender. 

‘Just because I’m on the billboard doesn’t mean I won’t sort you out.’

And this 

Underneath that tux is a tattoo he calls The Mark: a circle pattern worn by a close group of friends, all sworn to loyalty, including his father and his stepbrother Adam.

It’s a strange picture of a man, who went through a fame-loss-fame cycle, and it’s shaped him in some weird ways. But, again, Vegas feels right for that sort of thing. He may not be ‘Britain’s Answer to Frank Sinatra’ as the billboard has it (it’s a quote from The Sun), but he maybe he is this version of America’s Frank Sinatra.

Five o’clock in the morning, and as the sun rises Goss is standing in the bay window of his suite, black tie hanging loose, with a tumbler of Johnnie Walker Black Label in his hand, looking down on Vegas.

‘Look at this. It’s not a fantasy. This is real.’

(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1310130/Matt-Goss-How-went-Bros-Las-Vegass-new-Frank-Sinatra.html)

Unfinished Letter to a Friend: Las Vegas #1

It’s about this time of year that I leave the soft skies of this damp, north-western archipelago of the European continent, just as spring starts to unfurl, with its gusts and constant showers and wild extravagant clouds and head to Las Vegas, with its diamond hard desert skies, unforgiving landscape, and total artificiality.

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