Boss Radio

I was listening to a documentary on the radio whilst I washed the dishes. It was on the subject of Surviving the Pressures of Modern Day Living.

This is something which I personally feel that most of us manage to do quite well without any need of a documentary on the subject. If anyone wants to make a documentary on how to survive the pressures of modern day living they could do no better than to simply follow me around with a camera. I am the very model of survival in the modern world.

Not so the guy they were interviewing. He was a TV writer and he had traded in his London pad for a family home in the Chiltern Hills. Sounds idylic, and indeed it was, the writer was hard pressed to think of anything bad about it, but when pushed he said the mobile 'phone signal was very bad out there. He had to leave his 'phone leaning against the back door and if it rang he had to speak to people while walking around the garden.

Have we really reached the stage where people don't realise that there is an alternative to mobile telephones? It's called the home 'phone and it's plugged directly into a network of telephone cables so it doesn't need a signal to work. It's also a whole lot cheaper and more reliable.

I used to wonder why people like that earned more money than me, but now I know. They need it to pay their mobile 'phone bills.

Yup, it's true. It seems like later today it will be announced that we really are finally in a state of depression, which may come as a shock to all those convinced that we already were. Gosh, maybe it's the way they calculate what a depression really is that's wrong. What I don't quite get is all these people broadcasting that Britain's depression is going to be soooo much worse than anyone else's, yet most of the rest of the world is already in depression and we're only just getting there. Sort of like flogging a dead horse without telling the horse it's dead...

What I want to know is, where is all the money? The amount of dosh that's disappeared from the world's economy can't just be stored under anyone's matress, not unless they're really really big people; it must have gone somewhere, who's been seen wandering around town with several large heavy suitcases? I suspect the 2nd world have it. I've often wondered who and where they are and now I know, they're right there where all the money's gone.

You know how I hate to say "I told you so", but I do believe that I told someone at some time that if you let idiots like Thatcher destroy your manufacturing base you're only asking for trouble, never mind that other idiot, Digby Whatever, saying that now we can do what Britain does best and add value to products brought (Maybe that should be 'Bought') in from abroad. If we do that our money goes out of the country and none comes back in, and it doesn't take the foreign manufacturers long to work out what value we're adding and start building it in for themselves.

Surely any idiot can work out that if you buy all your goods from China and India there's eventually going to be no money left in the country?

Is it time for the revolution yet?

...or so I am led to believe having been told so 4 times recently. By my television.

Let's take reality talent shows, and straight into one of my world famous (This is the internet after all) tangents. Weren't talent shows always reality? I've seen artificial talent shows on various comedy, soap, and drama programmes, but they weren't talent shows any more than a man flying a 'plane in a Bruce Willis movie is really flying a 'plane, real talent shows are, by definition, reality, so calling them reality talent shows is something along the lines of tautology, but not quite. I don't think the word actually exists in English, I'd invent a word to cover it and get myself into the dictionary only I can't be bothered. Someone help me, is there a word which means 'stating the obvious'? If there is I'll shout it the very next time I hear some lame-brained MC shouting "And now, live on stage..." It wouldn't be much of a show if they were anything less than living, would it?

So about a quarter of an hour ago, on a TV talent show, I heard one of the judges saying "What people don't realise is that that is a very difficult song to sing...". Yesterday I heard Simon Cowell say almost exactly the same thing, and that was just channel flipping, Heaven only knows how often he actually says it. But he wasn't the first.

Somewhere in the region of two years ago on yet another talent competition, albeit this one was a pro-am talent show where all the contributors were stars, a contestant had just made a complete pig's ear'ole of a song and an overly generous judge promptly awarded her more points than she'd previously got for singing almost in tune, on the grounds that she had chosen a particularly difficult song to sing. No it wasn't. You're an idiot. Stop annoying me.

Ah, I hear you remembering to ask, but what of the fourth occasion?

That would be the world famous Ausie soap opera, Neighbours. Two weeks ago, unless you happen to live in Australia in which case it was a couple of months ago, a character was told that his songs were a little difficult to sing and could he make them easier for the new vocalist to perform? He reluctantly, soap-wise, agreed, but since the music is all prerecorded anyway the songs weren't actually changed one iota, who cares? It's only a soap.

What got up my nose was the suggestion that these songs were especially hard to sing.

If you can sing then no song is especially hard to sing. The human voice is the easiest instrument in the world to play. You just think the note and out it comes, heck, most of the time you don't even have to think it, just just know what the next note is and you sing it. Scat singing, which I really don't like very much, does at least require the singer to know something about chord structure, absolutely everything else just requires you to open your mouth and hit the right note. If you can sing you can do it and if you can't: you can't, it's as easy as that.

Now there are those out there who are right now probably getting most upset about finding something hard to sing when they are convinced that they can sing and here's me saying they can't.

Try changing the key.

With Christmas time upon us now seems the right time to bring this one up. Have you ever noticed that Christmas carols are always in the wrong key? That's because although almost nobody has a vocal range that ties in with the 'rules', music, until very recently, was always written with a particular vocal range in mind. Tenor, contralto, baritone, it doesn't matter which, it was written and arranged for that vocal range and if you weren't one then you either squealed it, rumbled it, jumped up and down an octave like a yo-yo, or you didn't sing at all.

Nowadays we choose the key to sing in. If you're singing 'My way' and you want to finish on Tom Jones' last note rather than Sinatra's but your voice won't do it, you lower the key of the song until you can. If you have a massive upper register and can reach notes that Robert Plant has to screech for, you up the key a bit until you have to screech for them as well. In the right context screeching is good, I've tried it, people applaud it, I don't know why but I like applause so I always try to stick a screech in somewhere near the end of a song.

OK, so not everyone can match the pyrotechnics of Little Richard, Aretha Franklin (Actually her sister Carolyn was even better at it but let's not have too many tangents in here...), or Rance Allen - Strangely I can't think of anyone more current who shares their vocal skills - but those guys are singers plus something else, your basic singer just has a voice that sings in tune and that's it. You may like one more than another, you may respect one more than another, but the bottom line is they are all singers and nothing they perform qualifies a hard, difficult, or... well OK, I won't say 'impossible' because some things are impossible.

But they're impossible for everyone.

Trust me, these songs do exist. I should know. I wrote some of them. In fact I probably wrote all of them.

I saw a burning car on the motorway today. 'Worth a blog' I thought and set to. Somewhere near the punchline I suddenly thought I should maybe save what I'd written - Just in case.

Before I could do it I suddenly had a brilliant idea for a title and without thinking I clicked on the 'title' box.

You know what happened next.

We need auto-save!!!!!

...before I kill someone...


Oh yeah. That punchline. As we drove away I suddenly realised something.

The car's doors were closed.

Whether our ancestors knew something we didn't or not I'm not sure, but it seems that the human brain finally finishes 'connecting up' when we reach 21. This means that as far as guys are concerned we're two years past our sexual peak already. Girls on the other hand still have 14 years of knowing just who they are and what they want to wait before they reach their peak. I'm not sure who God was laughing at when he was going over the designs.

What this 21 thing also means is that in most countries of the world we get to vote long before we really know what we're going to want, we can marry years before we know for sure that our partner is the one we're going to desire for the rest of our lives, and girls get an added bonus. They get to get pregnant years before they actually know if they want children, which results in their either having an abortion which they will wish forever that they hadn't had, or give birth to child that they'll blame for ruining their childhood for the rest of the poor sprog's days.

This also explains hippies. No really. Back in the days of the draft all guys spent a couple of years having army, obedience, and the rightness of killing into them. The end of the draft in the UK resulted in a new generation who had nothing to fill those hours with, so they made music. DIY music was big in the UK from the late 50s when UK skiffle just sort of happened, finally reaching a peak of a kind when the former Quarrymen skiffle group became The Beatles and proceeded to conquer the world. Up to this point US kids just accepted that you formed a band, then it broke up while you did military service, came home, got married, and joined the rat-race. This paisley coloured music revolution from over the pond suddenly demonstrated a new direction and the 'Hell no - We won't go' generation was born.

You know what? That's so convincing I almost believe it could be true... If no one comes up with a better explanation in the next 42 minutes I'm going to adopt it.

Meanwhile back at this 'brain becoming fully functioning at 21' thing. I'm thinking this might go some way towards explaining this peculiar seismic shift that we get over here in politics every generation or so. The Conservatives led by the Thatcher sweep to power and can't be shifted for about a decade and a half, apparently supported by a generation of people who just plain don't remember the last time the Cons were in and all the power cuts during 'the winter of discontent'. Then 'New' Labour sweep to power and can't be shifted, supported by a generation who don't remember the last time Labour was in and the raging inflation (Or the offshore radio stations... ). Now it seems the Conservatives are about to be swept back into power by a new generation who don't recall the almost endless depressions, slumps, and burgeoning unemployment under the previous Conservative reign.

The only problem with this whole thing is, I can quite distinctly remember changing my mind about all sorts of things since I was 21. If I've just written a whole blog based upon some stupid theory that's about to be disproved I shall be less than really pleased. I might just have to go out and kill someone.

But don't worry. I'll probably change my mind about that.