Drinking Song leftovers

I just did a post this morning on Froogville about the 'leftover' candidates who hadn't quite made it into my 'Fantasy Girlfriends' series over there.

In similar vein (since these blogs of mine are going to end in less than a fortnight, even if the world isn't), I thought I'd offer you on here today a 'Top Five' never-quite-made-it possibilities for my Great Drinking Songs strand.

A Top Five Drinking Songs

5=)  Hank Williams Jnr. - Whiskey Bent and Hellbound

A special treat for my buddy The British Cowboy, who, after studying law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville a decade ago, has become a huge C&W fan - and keeps on trying to convert me. I am more susceptible than I usually let on to him. [Another good version here, where Hank's duetting with Kid Rock.]

5=)  Van Halen - Take Your Whiskey Home

Women and Children First is my favourite Van Halen album, and this is one of my favourite tracks from it. Here's a fun live performance from a gig in Baltimore in 1980 - but audio only, unfortunately. [You can try the album version here.]

4)  The Doors - Alabama Song

The Brecht/Weill show tune is a classic drinking song, but - despite Jim Morrison's notorious drinking proclivities - it was a quirky choice for a rock band. The Doors' version of it, though, has become one of my favourites. [Although I also have a weakness for Ute Lemper doing this, obviously.]

3)  Sam Cooke - Chain Gang

Not an obvious drinking song choice, perhaps, but I once sang it in the tiny back bar at the Bullingdon Arms in East Oxford, with an impromptu chorus of friends and strangers. I have such happy memories of that, I dream of repeating the experience some day.

2)  Chumbawamba - Tubthumping

I recall there seemed to be a reaction against this song at the time, or shortly afterwards, perhaps because it got rather overplayed for a while, or perhaps because the band's in-your-face style got a bit too uncomfortable for most people. Me, I never tired of it. I think this is one of the best singles of the '90s; though it is also, curiously, one of the less impressive songs from the eponymous album, which I think was my 'album of the decade'.

And what am I saving for the No. 1 spot this time?

1)  John Otway - House of the Rising Sun

Of course, I like The Animals' version too (it is one of the only things I have ever been induced to sing at a Chinese karaoke session), but it is stalwart British pub entertainer John Otway's idiosyncratic interpretation that I have particularly come to love - through having seen the man live more times than I can count; some dozens, certainly, over the space of about 28 years. I've never got to the bottom of how he hit upon the idea of doing it like this, but I imagine that some time early in his career he genuinely stumbled over a lyric and was offered a mocking prompt by someone in the audience. It soon evolved into a necessary centrepiece of his stage show that this song would be delivered as a kind of call-and-response, with facetious questions from the audience interrupting the singer every half-line or so. I have myself once had the privilege of leading this audience interaction, when the great man turned up to play a poorly advertised and thinly attended gig in Toronto while I was living there - and I was the only person in the bar who'd seen him before. Here he is, supported - for once - by a full-scale band (most of the time he performs solo, or with his mate Richard playing the fancier guitar bits); it's from a great concert video shot at London's Astoria theatre (my all-time favourite gig venue, now sadly defunct) - some time in the early Noughties, I believe. [I've just learned the old bugger turned 60 a few months ago. And he's still gigging just about as fast and furiously as he ever did!  Happy Birthday, John!!!!!!]

OK, if you insist, you can have Eric Burdon and The Animals doing it as well (since it is a rather excellent HD video).

Top Five Dance Videos

I have been toying with the idea of putting together a list on this theme for a while. But, since I'm not a great fan of what is described as 'dance music' these days (understatement of the century!), nor have I ever been much of a dancer myself, I wasn't confident that I was sufficiently familiar with the field to come up with a strong 'Five'.

I received a little nudge the other day from my blog friend JES, whose latest post contributed the first of these selections.

A Top Five Dance Videos

5)  Saint Motel - Benny Goodman

This new-ish band from LA seem set to make quite a hit with this single from their first album, released this summer. JES's post on this explains the inspiration behind the arcane song title (apparently the great jazz band leader had a similar flirtation with obscurity and failure at a critical moment early in his career) and the video concept in some detail. The precocious little moppet playing a young Michael Jackson is apparently a viral video sensation called Miles 'Baby Boogaloo' Brown.

4)  Kings of Convenience - I'd Rather Dance With You

The Norwegian electronic duo have a way with a catchy tune (what is it about Scandinavians and music?), but their sound is a little thin (and bloopy-bloopy) for my taste. But this is an outrageously charming video. [I've posted it once before, actually, over on Froogville, all the way back in 2007.]

3)  OK Go - Here It Goes Again

The Chicagoan alt rockers make the best music videos in the world (really - just check out the selection on YouTube). But this gym treadmill routine for their 2006 single, in particular, won all kinds of awards and was immediately hailed as a modern classic. There's now a whole video sub-genre of American high school and college students replicating it for talent shows.

2)  The Avalanches - Since I Left You

A charming, surreal, and finally very moving little fable from the Aussie cut-and-paste masters best known for the fabulous Frontier Psychiatrist.

But in the top spot this time, what else could it be but....

1)  Fatboy Slim - Weapon of Choice

I really don't like this kind of music at all. But Spike Jonze's video is fantastic. Watch it with the sound down, if you have to. Walken dances!

Watch this space

Or rather, the space before this post.

I had promised you a 'Music Week' - music posts every day! - this week, and I have been remiss.

I managed a couple of  posts on Monday, but since then intermittent problems with my VPN and my Internet connection speed have sundered me from YouTube. A further problem is that I have been unexpectedly busy for most of this week, both socially and on the work front.

I finally have some free time today, and my Internet link seems to be behaving itself rather better (touch wood!), so I will begin trying to catch up. I have all the posts planned - it's just a case of hunting down all the YouTube clips for them (rather a time-consuming process, even with a fast and stable Net connection).

I'll insert these music posts retroactively into the earlier days of this week - serially over this weekend. So, keep your eyes peeled for the appearance of some goodies soon.

Thank you. That is all.

HBH 314

Now that winter's come,

The impulse to drink returns -

Proof against the cold.

Well, I say the cold - the idea we often call 'the beer coat', alcohol reducing your sensitivity to  cold. (Doctors, of course, always insist that in fact alcohol increases your susceptibility to hypothermia; but one of the cooks on the Titanic famously survived for hours in the icy water despite - or perhaps because of - having got himself blind drunk in the last minutes before the ship went down, which seems to argue against that theory.)

In fact, I think it's the dark that gets to me more. Having the daylight disappear at 4.30 in the afternoon stokes my depression, and it's solace or distraction from that that I seek.

Great Love Songs (39)

Mention this morning of the Skatalites reminded me that I first came across this great version of I'm In The Mood For Love on a ska anthology twenty or so years ago, and was instantly smitten with it.

Here's the original recording, by Lord Tanamo and The Skatalites.

And here they are still tearing it up live at Glastonbury in 2003, which is some 38 years after they first recorded it.

Great Drinking Songs (38)

I don't know quite why I think of this as a potential drinking song. I don't think I've ever actually sung it, drunk or sober. But Shame & Scandal In The Family is a song I remember happily from my very early childhood (it was quite a big hit in England in the late '60s - for The Skatalites, I think). And it has such a great tune, such a simple structure, such fun lyrics (I must have been deeply confused and embarrassed by them when I first heard them!) that I've always thought I'd like to sing it one day....

It is one of the great standards of Caribbean music these days, and has been covered by everyone from Madness to German ska band Dr Ring Ding and The Senior All-Stars to the great Peter Tosh to - bizarrely! - the rather fruity British comic actor Lance Percival. I gather the very first recording was by a Trinidadian calypso singer who called himself Sir Lancelot. There's also another rather good early version by a performer called Shawn Elliott, who I've not been able to find out anything about.

Most of these YouTube postings, unfortunately, are audio only.

So, here's the Skatalites version - with a completely unrelated clip of the great tap dance duo, the Nicholas Brothers.

If you don't know the Nicholas Brothers, check out this clip of their show-stopping number in the 1943 musical Stormy Weather. Their speed and precision, and their exuberant, seemingly efffortless athleticism are quite astounding. This is one of the handful of best dance routines ever filmed.

Top Five Embarrasing Admissions

I have always maintained that I hated the Eighties musically. It was the decade where I passed through my teens into my early twenties, so it should by rights have been the peak period of my life for exposure to contemporary music. Many people in their forties - especially Americans - seem to have a huge nostalgia thing going for the Eighties these days. But I'd been a precocious brat: I turned on to music early in life, and was already perhaps starting to get a bit blasé about it by my late teens. And the preceding decades seemed to have produced far more worthwhile music: my childhood in the Seventies had seen the exuberance of glam rock and the iconoclasm of punk; the Sixties, which I'd experienced a little vicariously through my parents and my older brother, had seen things like protest folk, the blues revival, psychedelia, and... well, almost everything good that ever happened in rock music, really. And then in the Eighties the music business (re)discovered that there was more money to be made selling records to teenage girls than to teenage boys, so androgynously good-looking male vocalists became the vogue. Somebody thought it was cool that you could use a computer instead of a drummer to lay down the beat. And people started playing keyboards more than guitars. Yep, the Eighties SUCKED.

And yet, and yet, much as I deplored the general trend of the times, I have to admit that in amongst all of that synth-pap and New Romantic bollocks, there were a few really outstanding artists at work, and some fantastic tunes being written. Much as I would like to write the whole decade off as a musical aberration, I do find myself getting sometimes quite wistful about a lot of the stuff we listened to back then - even some of the synthy stuff.

So, here is my shame-faced confession of....

The Top Five Eighties Tracks That Froog Really Likes (Despite Himself!)

5)  Depeche Mode - Master and Servant

These guys epitomised the synthy sound that I hated, but damn, they produced some good songs, particularly on the Some Great Reward album which came out shortly after I started at university. Atheist that I am, I liked Blasphemous Rumours best, but this is unquestionably catchier. And it's hard to resist a song about BDSM (the only other one I'd ever heard was Tom Lehrer's Masochism Tango). [Also quite a good live performance here.]

4)  Thompson Twins - We Are Detective

I don't think I liked anything else this band did, but this was one of the best singles of the decade for me. The warped, witty lyrics, and the odd, lilting, folky feel of the tune - somehow evocative of Viennese café culture (I wonder if they were consciously seeking to conjure reminiscences of The Third Man?) - really made it stand out from the crowd.

3)  Big Pig - Breakaway

Australian Oleh Witer put together this drumming collective towards the end of the Eighties, and their debut album, Bonk!, briefly made quite a splash. Alas, it took them too long to put together a follow-up, and the project fell apart. But they had a really unique sound, and some very solid songs on their first album - and an outstanding vocalist in Sherine Aberaytne. I'm disappointed we haven't heard more from her in the last twenty years. [You should also check out their Devil's Song from the same album: not as catchy, but an even better song.]

2)  The The - Infected

I loved the dark intensity of Matt Johnson's lyrics, and he was one of the few artists of the early Eighties still emphasising guitars over synths (Johnny Marr played with him on a couple of his later albums). His 1986 album of the same name was a strong contender for album of the decade, in my view.

And there's a great live performance of this song here.

But my No. 1 this time, somewhat inescapably (since I was myself unable to escape it throughout my student days: it remained permanently lodged on the jukebox playlists of student bars for at least four or five years after its first release), is....

1)  Soft Cell - Tainted Love

Despite the underlying bounce of the tune, it was hard to credit that this song had started life as an early, unsuccessful Motown single (you can hear that original version by Gloria Jones here). Marc Almond made it completely his own. I'm always surprised to read that his version was released in 1981: I didn't really hear it until a couple of years later. And it wasn't until some years later again that I bought the album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (one of the GREAT album names!); I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a lot of other good stuff on it - not least Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, which somehow passed me by when it was first out as a single. These days, it's hard to conceive of a song becoming such a huge hit with such a terrible video; but video was very young back then.

PS:  I really wanted to include something by the Kane Gang here, but there's still not that much of them around on YouTube. Here are links to my two favourite songs of theirs, Gun Law and Losersville; but the former has rather dodgy sound quality, and the latter is audio only. Better than nothing.

A Top Five Jukebox Favourites

I'm not thinking about just any old jukebox here, but the wondrous contraption they used to have in one of my all-time favourite bars, The Black Swan in East Oxford - a principal hangout of mine in the early 1990s. As I described in that early post on here, one of its unique attractions was an old 1950s style jukebox that contained a record-player and a stack of 45rpm vinyl singles. The machine might indeed have been that old, a gorgeous vintage piece. And many of the records were too: personal favourites, I suppose, of the elderly Irish landlady. There was some fantastic stuff on there, though - records I remember fondly from my childhood, when, from a very early age, I was given free run of my parents' music collection for hours at a time.

One of my happiest discoveries here - the song that I probably used to play on that machine the most - was Roger Miller's King of the Road. But I've already done a post on that; so, here's a rundown of the next best songs from that marvellous selection.

Top Five 'golden oldies' from The Black Swan's jukebox

5)  Frank Sinatra - New York, New York

A great drunken singalong, almost as brashly self-assertive as My Way. This would probably have made it into my 'Great Drinking Songs' series one day, but... I've run out of time.

4)  Sam Cooke - Wonderful World

Which, of course, always calls to mind the cafeteria sequence in Animal House....

3)  The Bellamy Brothers - If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body (Would You Hold It Against Me?)
This cheesy Country classic was a favourite pick of my buddy, The Bookseller - who had a touching but entirely misguided optimism that if he used this line often enough, it would eventually work for him.

2)  Pérez Prado - Cherry Pink (and Apple Blossom White)

The Cuban 'King of the Mambo' has enjoyed a bit of resurgence in popularity in the last couple of decades through tracks like his Mambo No. 5 and Guaglione, but this has always been my favourite - for the exuberantly drunken lurch of the lead trumpet (not sure who's playing this [Pete Candoli, possibly?]; Prado the bandleader played keyboards).

And in the top spot this time (well, No. 2, behind Roger Miller) we have....

1)  Guy Mitchell - Singing The Blues

Not a blues song at all, but I forgive it - because it is the most absurdly perfect little pop song. It was a huge worldwide hit in 1956, a simultaneous No. 1 in the UK and the US - and a great favourite of my parents, from their young married life together, before my brother and I came along to spoil things for them.

Girl power! - A Top Five songs by female vocalists

To kick off the advertised 'Music Week' here on The Barstool, here's a varied roundup - possibly compromising my usual macho image??!! - of girly songs that I rather like.

Not a very considered or definitive pick, just an off-the-top-of-my-head (and what I could find on YouTube) selection.

Froog's Top Five Girly Songs

5)  Lisa Loeb - I Do

Ridiculously hooky little song, with the hint of inner toughness and self-assertion that I always look for in my women (I can't stand drippy "I can't live without him" love songs!). And Ms Loeb is quite a compelling character: she has that librarian-sexy thing going on.

4)  Meredith Brooks  -  Bitch

A song that perhaps goes a bit far to the opposite extreme from the soft-and-fluffy/pathetic/can't-get-by-without-a-man image of femininity, but I've always found this sort of sassiness very appealing - even if it can be scary, vexing, and impossible to live with. I wonder if this song got under my skin so much because it came out just after the great break-up of my life (from a gorgeous Aussie academic I later jokingly dubbed 'The Evil One'): there did seem to be rather too much appropriateness in it.

3)  Sheryl Crow - Strong Enough

A similar stance to Bitch, but not so in-your-face, and with a touching overlay of vulnerability: not so much 'I will make your life hell just for the fun of it' as 'I will make your life hell because I'm a bit of an emotional basketcase'. This one is probably even more appropriate to that break-up, but not so contemporary.

I can't resist adding this duet with Stevie Nicks that I just found.

2)  Throwing Muses - Honeychain

I've mentioned a few times before that I'm a big fan of Tanya Donnelly and her subsequent band, Belly; but I wasn't so familiar with her earlier work with Kristin Hersh in Throwing Muses. My mate Ned introduced me to their 1991 album The Real Ramona, and this song really got under my skin somehow. That line Stare holes into the wall I find particularly haunting.

And at the top of this particular heap...

1)  Transvision Vamp  -  I Want Your Love

I believe someone - it might have been Malcolm McLaren - slightly snarkily dubbed Wendy James "the face of the '80s". It was a backhanded compliment because she and her band didn't break big until the late summer of 1988; and sadly prescient, because the band would soon fizzle and die in the '90s. But oh damn, their infectious pop-punk was tremendous FUN for a while, a late high point in what had been a mostly rather musically uninspired decade. And Wendy James might just possibly be the sexiest female singer Britain has ever produced: not just supermodel gorgeous, but brash, ballsy, smart as a whip - and she had a decent voice too. (Elvis Costello wrote a solo album for her, which suggests that I'm not alone in thinking she had some talent.) I remember the first time I heard this, I had just finished at university, and I was walking through London on a gloriously sunny day, the streets almost deserted on a midweek afternoon; suddenly, there was an open window on an upper floor, and someone had cranked up their hi-fi to full volume to blast out this song. "Damn," I thought to myself, "this is, um... bouncy!" And then I saw the video...

Bon mot for the week

"You never know when to call it day," she complained.

"Of course I do," he said. "It's a day when the sun comes back up again."

Another fragment of dialogue from the great unfinished drinking novel....  

Alas, I fear I've seen the last of my all-nighters. They were fun for a younger man; but I am not young any more.

New Picks of the Month

Delving back into the archives again... what was I wittering about in the run-up to Christmas '09?

Well, on Froogville, this post has a special place in my heart: Go out and buy! - an unlikely anecdote of my father's.

[However, in a brisk month of posting - essential catharsis, following on from a particularly anxious change of apartments - I also quite like Why my packing took so long, this observation on a strange and vexing kitchen accident, this Classical pun, and this grapple with a Latin motto. On a more serious note, I would also recommend revisiting The leaders leave first and Don't be a Chinese child - two posts marking the 15th anniversary of the Karamay theatre fire tragedy.]

On The Barstool, I have to nominate Little Frank (A Christmas Tale) - one of my most emotional China stories.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for November

Despite being away for two-thirds of the month, a splurge of writing at the beginning and end of November kept my posting average well up to its 'usual' excessive levels.

There were 34 posts and around 14,000 words on Froogville last month.

There were 30 posts and nearly 12,000 words on Round-The-World Barstool Blues.

And that is the last time I shall tot up my monthly figures like this - because I have decided to  use the alleged Mayan Apocalypse in 19 days' time as a pretext for closing down these blogs. It's been fun, but I feel I need a new hobby. Make the most of me while you can!

Watch out, in particular, for the 7 days of music posts  I have planned here on The Barstool this coming week.

Thank you all for reading, and occasionally commenting, over the last six-and-a-bit years. I hope we may hear from some of you elusive 'regulars' again one last time before I ring down the curtain.

The Shanghai bar scene

Does it have one?

Well, yes, obviously it does.

Just not one that I can afford.

And, even though there are exceptions to that affordability barrier (more than there were when I last visited 4 or 5 years ago, I think), I'm not sure that any of them would entice me into becoming a regular. I was in Shanghai the week before last, and in four days of walking the streets on the lookout for a promising bar, and four days of canvassing friends for suggestions, I drew a big fat blank.

I probably shouldn't blame Shanghai, as such. At least it has some bars, whereas most cities in China, even quite large ones, still don't, really. Even in Beijing, surely China's Western bar capital, a place that seems to have a much greater frequency and diversity of bars than Shanghai, there are only about half a dozen or so to which I would give my custom, and only two for which I have a real fondness (12 Square Metres and the Pool Bar). I'm picky: there probably aren't that many bars in the world - and increasingly few, it seems, even in the UK and the US - that would appeal to me. But in Shanghai, alas, it would appear that there are NONE.

It probably didn't help that I was mostly conducting my reconnaissance by day, when even bars that were supposed to be open often appeared in practice not to be - or, if they were, had not yet managed to draw in a single customer.

I cruised by Judy's, for example - a place that appeared to be divily cheap (a good thing!), at least by Shanghai standards, but had the most vile decor, and gave off the vibe of a Chinese bar that is desperate to attract a foreign clientele but has very little idea how to do so. (Maybe I'm wrong about that. I can imagine its prices alone, however bad the service or charmless the ambience, could draw pretty big crowds in the evenings. But I noted that its entry in the listings on City Weekend had only attracted a solitary user review, and that shortly after it opened 18 months ago. Not promising.)

I cruised past nearby Oscar's, my usual default bar on previous visits, but the place seems to have become even more charmless, and perhaps to have migrated just a little upmarket (I don't remember the fenced garden area out the front being so big before, or them having such an extensive food menu).

I cruised along Taikang Lu, where my friend Ruby had told me she thought she remembered there being a rather good bar. I found a large-ish event venue sort of place, The Melting Pot, which might possibly be worth a look in the future - but it was clearly not a homely boozing spot. (Turns out the directions may have been faulty. She claims there's decent 12 Square Metres clone on some little alleyway just off Taikang Lu. Next time...)

There was a gaggle of vaguely promising-looking bars along Hengshan Lu - but again, I was too early in the day. And I was put off by their undifferentiatedness. I liked the dim lighting and the preponderance of wood, but... I found a spot where there were two or perhaps three almost identical bars side by side, and it really was pretty much impossible to tell whether they were a single interconnected venue or not. It was also impossible to tell what they (it??) were called, because, although festooned with promotional signs for various beers, there was no obvious indication of a bar name, either in Chinese or English. Well, no, there was one sign that said, in English/pinyin, Dun Di Bar, I think. I wondered if they were trying for Dundee. I couldn't find any online listing for that name.

The only place to lure me in for a drink during this rather dull and lonely spell of wandering around the city was the Shanghai Brewery. Another American-style craft brew company! These places are spreading like Giant Hogweed! I gather it won the 'Best New Bar' gong in City Weekend's Shanghai Bar Awards this year - but perhaps only for want of competition. Decent barebones American sports bar sort of ambience, decent staff, a smattering of patrons already drinking in the mid afternoon - and a two-for-one deal on the burgers on a Tuesday (unfortunately, these are 70 or 80-kuai burgers, and I was on my own). More importantly, the home-brewed beer, at least on the extended happy hour (3pm-8pm, if I recall correctly), was only 28 kuai, which would be cheap for Beijing these days, and is virtually giving it away in Shanghai. On the downside, though, the TV picture for the sports wasn't much good (I think I've observed on here before that big-screen TV is a waste of time unless you've got an HD feed, and that's still a rarity in Asia), and the beer was... well, all right, but unspectacular, compromised by the excessive fruitiness that American brewers increasingly seem to feel is de rigueur. (You have to applaud them for making an effort, though: they've built quite an impressive website to promote this bar. That's still not something you often see here.)

The only place in Shanghai where I really quite enjoyed a drink on this last visit was Windows Too (apparently one of a fairly extensive chain of affordable dive bars) - although I wasn't really lured in, more goaded into it by JK's recommendation, and despairing of other options as the penetrating drizzle I'd been putting up with all day began to get even heavier. Upstairs in a mall, which is a very bad start for bar appeal; and hence pretty inconspicuous, pretty much unfindable unless you have detailed directions (mine weren't, but I got lucky). It had a similar problem with its large space lacking atmosphere, and its TV picture being shit, but... the staff were good, and the drink - at least on happy hour - was very, very cheap. 

I encountered this place in a receptive mood, when, after a gruelling and vexing few days, I suddenly felt like I needed to get off my face as quickly as possible, and not have to spend very much money doing it. When you find a place that will conspire with you in your self-destruction at a time like that, you get the warm fuzzies for it, however lacking it may be in every other kind of positive quality.

Forgive me if I seem to be too harsh on poor old Shanghai. I can well imagine having an equally shit time in Beijing if I came here as a stranger, not knowing where the handful of good bars are. In fact, I very often have had equally shit times here, especially out around Sanlitun.

So, sorry, Shanghai. I did at least find a few glimmers of hope for you this time, a few places that I'm actually curious to check out further on a return visit - something I'd failed to do in several previous visits to the city. Maybe Shanghai is slowly becoming LESS SHIT, just as Beijing is becoming MORE SHIT; and perhaps Shanghai's bar scene will be better than Beijing's before very long. Now, there's a depressing thought - at least, if you live in Beijing.

Howdy, pardner!

Blue Cowbie - a very palatable local brew with which I quenched my thirst down in Zhenyuan - on my trip to Guizhou province last month. The logo is a crude rendition of John Wayne. 

Ah, Chinese advertising!

Toronto locals

The other day, I was reflecting for a moment - for reasons which now escape me - on the time I spent in Toronto about 15 years ago, working as a legal intern.

My scholarship programme provided quite a nice apartment for me, down near the waterfront on Queen's Quay. And I had a bar in my building. One of the strangest bars I have ever encountered - the Purple Pepper, a bar chiefly notable for its name: a deeply naff but undeniably very memorable alliteration. The Pepper, alas, didn't really feel much like a bar, since it was in a mall. Well, in the middle of a rank of shops along the ground floor of this block (the dry cleaners and the 24-hour supermarket and, especially, the great little takeaway pizza joint on the corner were all very welcome facilities to have within 5 minutes of home, but the Pepper was nothing but a disappointment). And hence it was a bit of a goldfish bowl, with floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows along the front. At least it was quite cosily dim inside - after nightfall - and the 'purple' motif was quaintly underscored with a purple lava lamp behind the bar (I'm a big fan of lava lamps: I could watch them for hours!).

There was also a rather beautiful Eastern European (Croatian, possibly - I forget) girl who worked behind the bar there a few evenings a week. But even this was not enough to entice me into becoming a regular. The place lacked atmosphere. Nor, indeed, did it have very much custom. It was a little expensive. And the service - from the gorgeous Croatian, and everyone else - tended to be a bit offhand and surly. [It seems the Pepper is still going after all these years, but is now promoting itself more as a café/restaurant.]

That, I found, was a more widespread problem in Canada, or certainly in Toronto. Canadians have a rather gratingly self-righteous pride about their supposed superiority to their American neighbours: they seem to believe - with overbearing earnestness - that their country is better in every way than the USA, and that they are a fundamentally nicer people than the Americans. And I'm afraid it just ain't so - not in the country's service culture, anyway. Whereas the almost ubiquitous "Have a nice day!" attitude you find in America usually seems genuine, or at least well faked, in Canada serving staff mostly seem as if they are just going through the motions. There's no perkiness, no breeziness, no friendliness. It wasn't just in the Pepper, but every bar I went in during that year in Toronto (and a fair few in other places I visited, too: Montreal, Ottawa/Hull, Quebec City, Edmonton, Vancouver). Even worse, bar staff there used to aggressively demand their tips, rather than just accepting that tipping was ultimately a matter for the customer's discretion. In America, I don't mind tipping, and tipping heavily - because bar staff give value: they're pleasant and friendly to you, they make conversation if you're on your own, they introduce you to other people at the bar; they'll quite often give you a complimentary drink every once in a while; and they almost invariably slice a big chunk off your tab at the end of the evening, if you've been a good customer. In Canada, they give you your drink, and ask for a tip. That's it. No smile, no chit-chat, nada. I soon grew to hate going to bars in Canada: it was more expensive than in the States, and not nearly as much fun.

Insofar as I did have a local in Toronto (the severe winters are a serious deterrent to going out; and I was away travelling a lot, anyway), I came to favour the Acme Bar & Grill, just around the corner. It was about a 10-minute walk away, but that's no bad thing. (A 'local' can be too local. There's not really any extra convenience in having a favourite bar only 2 minutes away rather than 5 or 10 - and 'convenience' is overrated anyway! - but the reduction in daily exercise can become significant.) Of course, it was the Wile E. Coyote reference that initially attracted me. And it did seem like a very promising venue: long, narrow, essentially windowless - nice and dark, lots of wood; almost the paradigm of the perfect (North) American bar. It had a pretty decent food menu too. Again, it was the frosty demeanour of the staff that let it down. If this place had been over the border in Michigan, I'm sure I would have enrolled it amongst my favourite bars of all time; but my experiences here were always undercut by irritation and disappointment with the service. [I learn that the Acme was relaunched as the more British-sounding Duke of Argyle in the early Noughties, and closed altogether a few years ago, when the area was redeveloped. I would like to summon up a little wistful regret, but I find myself unable to.]

Perverse and bizarre as it may seem, my 'local' during that year became the wonderful T. Hogan's - some 300 miles away in Philadelphia!

That's how much Canada's bars SUCKED.

What kind of probe?

Oh, that's all right, then.

I can't think how this can have escaped my attention for so long, but... it wasn't until I visited Guizhou (way down in the far south-west of China) a few weeks ago that I discovered that Yanjing, Beijing's local beer, is an official sponsor of the Chinese effort to reach the Moon.

Does this mean astronauts will be taking beer on the spaceship with them???

HBH 313

Songs from long ago

Music unleashes memory

Memory opens wounds

Strange how powerful music is in opening up long closed pathways in the brain. Strange, and terrifying.

Great Love Songs (38)

Some years ago, I stumbled upon in a DVD store here in Beijing The Best of The Old Grey Whistle Test, Volume 3.

I never got around to watching it. Partly, I think, I was distracted by my vexation at never being able to find any of the other volumes of the series. But mostly I was a little afraid of the tsunami of nostalgia that it might unleash in me - I was waiting for a 'special occasion' to revisit this highlight of my 1970s childhood, one of the best TV music shows ever (I've mentioned it on here before; it used to be on BBC2 on Sunday nights, after M.A.S.H.), and to wallow in the melancholy that this was likely to induce.

I finally found such an occasion a couple of months ago - and the selection did not disappoint. Well, there was a noticeable falling off in the standard of the last few entries from the 1980s (although it was nice to see the great comedy band Half Man, Half Biscuit included, with their warped childhood anecdote All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit), but the 1970s stuff was pure gold.

And in amongst this consistently high quality (Steppenwolf, Humble Pie, Supertramp, David Bowie, Jackson Browne, Stealers Wheel, Freddie King, B.B. King, Janis Ian, Joe Jackson, The Jam - gobsmackingly good stuff), the absolute standout - a shivers-down-the-spine revelation for me - was this acoustic performance of the exquisite love song, A Heart Needs A Home. 

Richard and Linda Thompson, I now learn, have been giants of the English folk scene for over 40 years - but they had completely passed me by. I am belatedly quite smitten with Linda; not only does she have a compelling voice, but she is here just radiantly beautiful too (the hippie headscarf notwithstanding). This performance (introduced by the notorious 'Whispering' Bob Harris, an inspiration for John Thomson's Louis Balfour character, the low-talking host of the Jazz Club segment in The Fast Show) is from early in 1975 - a year or two before I started getting into the show, I suppose.

Chinese hotel breakfasts

The poverty (almost total absence) of bar facilities in most hotels in China is by no means the greatest hardship visited upon the Western traveller.

No, the winner of that prize is surely the breakfasts.

Many hotels surreptitiously slip a wad of breakfast vouchers into your keycard holder and levy an additional charge - anything from 15 to 100 RMB per day - without telling you. Check. Complain. Refuse. Even 15 RMB is not worth it.

One of the problems is that Chinese cuisine doesn't seem to have much in the way of specialised breakfast foods: apart from zhou (a very runny rice congee, usually completely tasteless),  youtiao (fried dough-sticks that, alas, rather too often taste unpleasantly of the very old and contaminated oil they've been cooked in), and a few types of mantou (steamed buns: inoffensive, but stodgy and desperately bland), you just get the same old stuff you'd eat for lunch and dinner. I love noodles and dumplings - but I can't face them three times a day.

Another problem is that Chinese hotels will almost invariably try to offer a few token Western breakfast dishes (to pander to the fetish-with-the-foreign of their Chinese guests; most of them don't see a Western visitor from one month to the next), without having any real understanding of or sympathy for this genre. Chinese 'breakfast sausages' are peculiarly disgusting, and best reserved for possible emergency use in the poisoning of a dangerous dog.

The real problem, though, seems to lie in the perennial deficiencies of the Chinese service culture - and the associated lack of quality control or effective management supervision. Large-scale buffets are rarely much good, anywhere in the world. But in China, where the staff very often quite evidently don't give a flying fuck, they attain spectacular levels of AWFULNESS. And the breakfast service - where presumably the kitchen staff resent having to be at work so early in the morning and so do a particularly half-assed job - is the nadir. The hotplates and warming trays, of course, never function very well. But Chinese chefs on the breakfast shift seem to take a perverse pride in cooking everything at least half an hour before the service begins, just to make sure that even the early bird guests who arrive on the stroke of 7.30, or whatever, won't be able to find any food that's anything more than tepid.

To set the seal on the unpleasantness of this start to your day, you usually also encounter at least one of those mindfuck oddities of Chinese taste - like mystery fish (fried to the point of carbonization), or fruit salad presented with a selection of mayonnaises.

The only consolation I found on my recent travels (particularly valuable on the morning I was to run a marathon!) was that - presumably in response to this ubiquitous shortcoming of hotel catering - there's almost invariably a very good noodle shop almost next door to a Chinese hotel.

Exceptions prove the rule. At the hotel where I stayed in Shanghai last week, the breakfast was included in the basic room charge, and was really pretty good. The Western options were a particularly pleasant surprise (apart from the sausages, which were the standard-issue condom-filled-with-E-numbers): self-made toast (disappointingly pale; but at least it was good, plain bread, not the sickly sweet stuff you're commonly given in China), decent and very plentiful bacon, and eggs fried to order (though I couldn't persuade the server to add some cherry tomatoes to her pan, so I had to eat those uncooked). A nice experience to end my trip, except... well, the one fly-in-the-ointment on this occasion was that the dining room provided no cutlery. Bacon-and-egg-on-toast is really NOT a chopstick-friendly meal!

I suppose I should have got another slice of toast and made myself a doorstep breakfast sandwich. But bloody-minded pride demanded that I show off my chopstick prowess to the Chinese guests. It got messy.

Recommended Posts, July-September 2012

A roundup of the best bits from my summer travels.

Guided Tour - recommended posts from the 3rd quarter of 2012

1)  Time is tight  -  5th July 2012

A great live performance of one of the classic instrumental numbers by Booker T. & the M.G.s.

2)  Hail to the Duck!  -  7th July 2012

A tribute to the great bass guitarist Donald 'Duck' Dunn, who had died at the age of 70 a few weeks earlier.

3)  Mongolian Drinking Song  -  22nd July 2012

Beijing's favourite folk-rockers Hanggai perform a traditional party song which has become a regular highlight of their sets.

4)  It's my party - or is it? -  26th July 2012

A particularly strange dream.

5)  Craft beer?!  -  27th July 2012

My return to England from America triggers some adverse reflections on the beer scene over there.

6)  A culinary 'Unsuitable Role Model'  -  28th July 2012

Fond reminiscences of Keith Floyd, one of the first and greatest of all TV chefs - and an unabashed boozer.

7)  The 3rd Avenue crawl  -  31st July 2012

One of my best nights out during my recent American visit. (A few others are described here and here and here.)

8)  Great Love Songs (33)  -  5th August 2012

Waves of nostalgia brought on by being back in the old home country remind me of The Beautiful South, a band I used to listen to a lot in the '90s. Their Song For Whoever is a typically warped and witty account of how a writer's urge to treat everything as raw material for his work distorts his experience of the world and compromises his relationships. Why do I feel such a connection with this?

9)  Conversions  -  7th August 2012

Some reflections on the difficulties of shifting between different countries and currencies... And the shocking realisation that Britain is now a cheaper place to drink than Beijing (in bars, anyway).

10)  Great Drinking Songs (34)  -  11th August 2012

Well, more of a smoking song, really - Afroman's splendid catalogue song about the hazards of over-indulging in weed, Because I Got High.

11)  Another nail in my heart  -  14th August 2012

Remembering The Carpenter's Arms, one of my favourite pubs from my days living in Oxford in the early '90s; one of the many small pubs in the UK that have closed in the last decade or two.

12)  A pocket full of moonshine  -  15th August 2012

As my return to China draws near, I reflect that erguotou - a particularly rough variety of the native white spirit, produced in Beijing - is NOT one of the things that entices me back. However, I am intrigued to discover the website of a chap who is trying to learn to love Chinese spirits. Rather him than me!

13)  The call of the wild  -  16th August 2012

Another 'Unsuitable Role Model', though really not so unsuitable this time: Les Hiddens, an Australian survival expert who had a superb TV series in the 1990s about how to live off the land in the Outback.

14)  Songs that make me weepy  -  19th August 2012

Some of the music that I find most self-indulgent cathartic when my depressions strike.

15)  The blues make it all seem better  -  31st August 2012

My first couple of weeks back in Beijing had been utterly miserable. But there's nothing like a dose of the blues to perk you up.

16)  Gosh, has it really been FIVE years??!!  -  2nd September 2012

The anniversary of my favourite little bar, 12 Square Metres, is upon us. I celebrate with another dose of The Beautiful South - the rather too appropriate Liars' Bar.

17)  Something new  -  7th September 2012

I discover an excellent new barbecue place down in Shuangjing - and try a couple of dishes I've never had in China before.

18)  Great Love Songs (34)  -  8th September 2012

A serendipitous discovery during my travels was April Smith and The Great Picture Show. Here's their bouncy, saucy little love song, Wow and Flutter.

19)  Our 'theme song'  -  15th September 2012

My 'local' has become a bit of an '80s timewarp just lately: they seem to be constantly playing Twisted Sister's We're Not Going To Take It. Not that I'm complaining. Not at all. It chimes with my present mood very well.

20)  Bon mot for the week  -  17th September 2012

A particularly good one - from Noah Baumbach's great film Kicking and Screaming.

21)  I have often walked down this street before...  -  21st September 2012

The return to familiar Beijing stomping grounds cues some reflection on the territoriality of my life here (strictly a Gulou boy!), and some reminiscences about my early days in the city (when I enjoyed it far more). This, of course, was soon a pretext for a song or two - a pair of favourites from My Fair Lady that I have often been known to sing on the streets of Beijing.

22)  After-love  -  26th September 2012

I am told that the Russians have a single word to describe the feelings that you have for a former lover. I express my scepticism - rightly, as it turns out.