Mike's Bar

Being on the road, and trying out some new bars over the last few weeks, I've found my mind wandering back to past travels and fortuitous bar discoveries of years gone by. Perhaps I've also been subsconsciously fretting that there are certain subjects I really should have covered on this blog, and will now never get around to, because I'm closing it down next week.

This is what brought Mike's to mind.

Mike's Bar (now, apparently, styling itself Mike's Irish Bar, although I'm pretty certain the 'Irish' is new; and it's the kind of pointless affectation that would be likely to put me off a place), is a large British-style pub in the centre of Athens, and I spent a week or so there over Christmas and New Year, in the middle of the spell that I spent working in Toronto.

Yes, I spent pretty much the whole week in that pub. My hotel accommodation began to seem superfluous, because there were at least a couple of occasions when I stayed in Mike's all night, and only went back to the hotel at dawn for breakfast.

Now, in fact, there was a much smaller, darker, and cosier pub just a few minutes' walk away (whose name I have entirely forgotten, I'm afraid), which would have been my preference for an evening hangout, but Mike's Bar had the advantages of large size and convenient proximity to the hotel, ensuring that it immediately won broad popularity among the group I was part of. It achieved a critical mass which made it impossible to lobby for any alternative rendezvous, it became the essential default boozing option for the duration of the holiday.

The group I was with was large and aggressively sociable and - for the most part - very hard-drinking. I was there for the World Universities' Debating Championship - an event I'd had experience of judging when at Oxford some years before, and had become involved in again while at Bar School. Well, I had been President of my Inn's debating society that year, but had selflessly abstained from picking myself to attend glamorous overseas events as a competitor (a level of ethical restraint rarely displayed by other holders of this office, I discovered); however, I worked my butt off in that job, and by the end of my term of office I thought I had earned a small treat for myself. And since Athens - the next designated host of the 'Worlds' event - was a relatively inexpensive trip, I thought it would be reasonable to volunteer my participation as a judge and thus get myself a little expenses-paid winter holiday.

And so it was that I got to hang out for 8 or 10 days with 1,000 or more boozy students. But at least competition debaters tend to be amongst the brightest and best of the student population. And also, in fact, amongst the most mature: a good number of them, probably the majority in fact, are graduate students, or members of certain professional guilds or vocational training schools or institutes of higher learning that aren't strictly universities (like my own Middle Temple). I'd say the average age was at least 25, and I was still only in my early 30s myself at this time. So, it was a very convivial crowd. And after the first 4 or 5 days, when a mini-league system involving all of the hundreds of teams winnowed down the field to just 16 or 32 teams for the final knockout rounds, most of us were left with nothing to do during the day - except catch up on the sleep we hadn't had the night before. (I initially felt quite bad about not making more of being in Athens, but I had visited the city twice before, done most of the standard sightseeing; and everything was closed over the holidays, anyway.)

Greece is probably my favourite country in the world. I love the sense of openness and generosity towards strangers that you find everywhere, the notion of hospitality that has been at the heart of their culture for thousands of years. (A favourite example from a visit a few years before: I'd been drinking with a friend at a table beside the harbour for a few hours. When we settled up, the bill seemed rather high; I suspected they'd inadvertently added a few drinks that had been ordered on the next table. Anywhere else in the world, the customer might start feeling paranoid about the likelihood of a deliberate scam, and the staff would probably get exaggeratedly defensive, and it might end in a lengthy and awkward wrangle, at the least, perhaps a stand-up fight. In Greece, I knew it was almost certainly an honest mistake, and queried it as such. The waiter immediately acknowledged that he might well have goofed, and asked me how much I'd like to pay. I think I happily paid rather more than my actual tab, because it was such a delightful way of handling a dispute.)

I suspect this national emphasis on the virtue of hospitality explains why the Greeks are almost always so good at running restaurants and bars, even restaurants and bars of an alien kind. Most people make a complete pig's ear of trying to emulate another country's food or its bar culture (the Chinese interpretation of Thai food being my particular bugbear here in Beijing). But the Greeks, bless 'em, somehow they manage to do it right.

The eponymous owner of Mike's Bar is not English or Irish or American, but Greek through and through. And yet he has managed to create one of the best large-scale pubs I've ever been in. 

I suspect, though, that dear Mike never sussed out why all these young foreigners were suddenly flooding into his bar every night, or how soon they would depart again. He had a bonanza week or so, was ordering extra kegs and hiring extra staff to keep the beer flowing all night, every night. I hope the adjustment back to his regular level of custom wasn't too painful for him.

Three Postscripts:

I may perhaps have been driven to drink more self-destructively than is usual for me because I was still smarting from a painful breakup six months earlier - and, as Fate would have it (Cruel Fate!), she was there. And having a fling with someone else, I soon learned.

My principal drinking companions on this trip were a daffy pair of Belgian accountants (it remained obscure as to how they were eligible to be taking part in a student competition), who introduced me to the useful term liquid sandwiches - to describe beer consumed in lieu of lunch.

These two Belgians caused some consternation to the hotel staff, when it appeared that they had consumed the entire contents of their heavily - and, of course, expensively - stocked mini-bar in a single night. In fact, they had merely transferred all of the miniature bottles of spirits and so on to a sock drawer, so that they could pack their fridge full of beer.

The Guiyang bar scene

Last month, I spent a few days in Guiyang, the capital city of the southern province of Guizhou.

On my first evening, I discovered a strip of three bars side by side, and joked by SMS that I must have stumbled upon the city's equivalent of Sanlitun - Beijing's sleazy central nightlife hub. One had a bizarre jumble of titles I can't quite recall now: I think Top VIP Club was at the heart of the mix, but 'Brand New' and 'Superior', or something of that sort, were in there too. It looked horrendous, but fortunately it was not yet open at 6.30pm. The nearly identical joint next door appeared to be called Temptation, and seemed to be going for a Xinjiang flavour. Well, it had a rather sexy photograph of an Arabian belly dancer on its sign; but that may have been a cheap attention-getting ploy that bore no relation to the theme of the bar or the entertainments it provided. It was also closed, so I couldn't investigate. On the other side of the Top VIP Club was a place called something like Trade Winds (or Tea Time... or Tea Wind? my memory is getting very wobbly of late!), which was at least open. More of a café, though. Decent cup of coffee and a pretty waitress, but altogether too bright and cheerful - not a bar feel.

So, not exactly Sanlitun.

But I had jumped to the conclusion that this would be it, because Guiyang is a lower-tier city, tiny compared to Beijing or Shanghai: you could fit the whole of it quite comfortably inside the Beijing's 2nd Ringroad (in fact, probably inside the area north of Chang'an Avenue). And even in the more advanced second-tier cities, like Nanjing or Hangzhou, foreign-style bars are still rare as hen's teeth. Many quite large cities in the less developed parts of China have no bars at all, god bless 'em. I don't think there were any in Kaili, Guizhou's second city, which I'd visited the week before. 

Moreover, you expect the development of a Western-style bar scene to be largely led by tourism, or a resident expat population. Guizhou is a popular destination for Chinese tourists, but is pretty much off the radar for foreigners. And tourism is mainly centred on Kaili, anyway. Guiyang is drab, polluted, lacking in any obvious attraction for visitors. I don't think it draws many foreign business travellers either. I stayed in the Ramada for 4 days, and saw only 2 other foreigners there; I didn't see ANY out and about on the city's streets. And the keenest adopters of a Western-style drinking scene amongst the Chinese tend to be university students. Of course, as the provincial capital, Guiyang has a university; probably several, in fact; but its student population is a tiny fraction of that you'd find in a major city.

But something weird is happening in Guiyang. They seem to be experiencing a Bar Event Horizon. I saw dozens of bars there; and not confined to a few narrow districts, but liberally scattered all over the city centre. And plenty of new ones seem to be springing up: I saw several premises that appeared to be undergoing restaurant-to-bar conversions. I'd guess this place might well have more bars than Beijing. It's not very far behind, anyway; and it's barely a quarter of the size, and has only a fraction of the income, and virtually zero expat population.

What is driving this extraordinary boom?? I really can't imagine. It is one of China's great mysteries.

At the remote prompting of JK, a mate who owns a bar here in Beijing, I went to check out out a bar called SOHO, which he told me had received a number of good write-ups on TripAdvisor (actually, only two not particularly convincing ones). Yet again, it was not open during the day, or even in the early evening. When I got there at around 5.30pm, the doors were open, so I wandered in for a look around. The staff were all seated in a row on a long bench seat, apparently awake but in a state of such complete catatonia that you fancied someone had taken the batteries out of them. They did not challenge my intrusion. When I asked when they were open for business, one of them grunted that it would not be until 8pm... "or maybe 9." When they say 'nightlife', it seems they really mean 'nightlife' in Guiyang!

SOHO, despite the unwelcoming demeanour of the staff, was, um, intriguing. Not enticing, I wouldn't say, but intriguing. It was huge, and quite impressively decorated, with wooden bar and furniture inside and redbrick cladding on the exterior which gave it something of the feel of Manhattan's Meatpacking District. However, I suspect that those positive online reviews either came from people who were too easily impressed - pleasantly surprised! - at finding a bar in Guiyang at all, or were confusing it with the dangerously similarly named Soho Times (which is, I gather, much smaller, and upstairs in a hotel - but foreign-owned). The drinks list wasn't very cheap, and mostly priced by the bottle. The main area was crowded with tall, high tables and stools, designed for couples or singletons, which is, I think, a peculiarly Chinese - or Asian, anyway - idea. I can see that there's some sense in it, but it does tend to inhibit the sociability of a bar; indeed, it seems to assume that people who frequent bars have no friends (um, so, yes, I can see that it makes a lot of sense, actually; no, not really - I'm just feeling glum about my recent abandonment by all of my friends). "Entertainment" seems to come mainly in the form of a house band, who, I would imagine (it's a safe bet!), play cheesy Chinese folk-pop. Apart from the unexpected hint of class conjured by the decor, this looked fundamentally like your typical Chinese nightclub - to put it in Beijing terms, more Vic's or Mix than The Den or 1st Floor.

The major benefit of this abortive expedition was that it brought me to Kexue Lu, the street on which SOHO is nominally situated (although in fact it fronts on to the much bigger - but mysteriously unnamed?! - main road around the corner), and Kexue Lu is such a spectacularly grotty little enclave that I found it quite fascinating (the rather glitzy SOHO is glaringly out of place in this rundown locale): it's a short, narrow alleyway, barely 150 yards long, which winds between two large buildings which look like disused warehouses - both rather old and careworn, in advanced states of disrepair, and surely to be slated for demolition sooner rather than later. But for now, tiny, sleazy little bars seem to be blooming like mushrooms out of this dismal patch of inner city decay.

Of course, none of them were open when I cruised past shortly before 6pm. So, this, I'm afraid is why I am unable to comment more incisively on what is behind the apparent boom in Guiyang's bar scene: I didn't actually manage to go into a single bar while I was there, because I was on the lookout for an afternoon reviver or a pre-dinner drink, and the earliest any of these places seemed to open was 7pm.

One of those little bars on the Kexue strip was called Dear Life. As in "RUN for dear life!" Not the most positive associations for an English speaker, perhaps, but I rather liked it. If I ever go back to Guiyang, I think Dear Life is more likely to get my custom than SOHO.

Bon mot for the week

"Any idiot can face a crisis. It is the day-to-day living that wears you out."

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Unexpected tastes

For a final entry in this 'Music Week' (although I'm still playing catch-up after a week of problematic Internet access, hoping to insinuate a few more posts into empty slots earlier in the week - so keep an eye out lower down the page), I thought I'd review some of my slightly more left-field enthusiasms, the musical predilections that people tend to find a bit surprising about me.

A Top Five Unexpected Musical Weaknesses

5)  Early rock'n'roll

And the cheesier, the better! I'm not quite sure when I developed this vice. I suppose I must have had some exposure over the radio when I was a kid, but there was none of this good stuff in my parents' record collection (their tastes were very, very middle-of-the-road). I imagine George Lucas' American Graffiti must have been an important influence; that soundtrack album was probably one of the first (of many) '50s/'60s anthologies I acquired over the years. The Shangri-Las Leader of the Pack epitomises all that is so wonderful - and terrible - about this area of music: cheesy as all hell, yet an utterly irresistible singalong. Here's a 1964 TV performance of the song - ropey sound quality, but worth it for the visuals, especially the hilarious depiction of Johnny the motorcycle rebel. [You can listen to the album version here.]

4)  Henry Rollins

How can anyone not like Henry Rollins? He's so loveably crazy! But sensitive and literate with it. I like quite a lot of American music out at the more punk-ish edge of things (Dead Kennedys a favourite during my college days), but Rollins' work has more depth to it than most of these. Here's the Rollins Band doing Next Time. [Audio only, unfortunately. You can also check out a live video here: terrible picture quality, but a fun performance.]

3)  Country & Western

I mentioned my susceptibility to this yesterday (although I try to keep it hidden around my buddy The British Cowboy, because he proselytises a little too hard). It can be trite and cheesy, yes. But accessibility is not a bad thing. And, thanks to its folk roots, it is distinguished more than most other genres by its tunefulness and its lyrical craft. Hey, beyond just liking C&W, I actually like Canadian C&W. Well, I had a lot of exposure when I lived in Toronto for a year back in the '90s. And the dedicated TV channel there (CMT, I think it's called - Country Music Television) is way better than its American counterpart GAC. This, She's Got The Kind Of Heart That Breaks by Chris Cummings, is one of those earworm songs that got permanently lodged in my head during that year of watching CMT (The Cowboy probably wouldn't even admit this to the C&W fold; too poppy for his taste!). And it's a lovely little video too - a bit of a Gregory's Girl thing going on, with the goofy boys bewitched by the pretty girl who also happens to have superior skills on the hockey rink (so Canadian: they really are all obsessed with ice hockey!). [It's a pity it's such dreadful picture quality (transcribed from a VCR??), but this seems to be all that's available on YouTube at the moment; and likely to be pulled shortly because the record company are such fascists about their videos. As a back-up, here's a nice live performance from 2008.]

2)  African music

Like most Brits of my generation, I got my introduction to this field through the wonderful Sowetan township sounds that Paul Simon incorporated into his Graceland and Rhythm Of The Saints albums in the mid-1980s. That led me to start checking out some compilations of '70s and '80s township bands, as well as, of course, the wonderful Ladysmith Black Mambazo choir who had performed with Simon. A little later, Peter Gabriel's Real World record label started introducing me to people like Youssou N'dour, Geoffrey Oryema, Daby Touré, and the Kenyan nyatiti master Ayub Ogada. And a guy I became friendly with while backpacking around Fiji in the early '90s later sent me a CD of Missa Luba, another tremendous choral record by the Muungano National Choir of Kenya. However, the fountainhead of modern African music - as I only started to discover in the later '90s, not long before his death - was Fela Kuti, the mercurial Nigerian who pioneered the 'Afrobeat' sound, a heady brew of jazz, funk and psychedelia infused with native African rhythms. Here's one of his great instrumentals, Expensive Shit.

And here's a live performance from some time back in the '70s. [You should also check out this great little excerpt from a 1971 documentary about him, shot by legendary drummer Ginger Baker.]

But the top spot today goes to....

1)  Michelle Shocked

I'm sorry - I'm an über-fan. I was completely blown away by her 1988 debut Short Sharp Shocked, and have bought everything else of hers I can get my hands on since. I saw her play live at the Apollo Theatre in Oxford (unaccountably renamed the New Theatre a few years ago) round about 1990, and it was one of the most enthralling shows I've seen (actually, not wonderful all the way through; she was experimenting with a 'big band' sound that didn't really suit her, and wasn't entirely winning over the audience; but then there was an interlude in the middle where the band left the stage and she played three or four songs solo on her guitar - and that was a shivers-down-the-spine experience). She is, I think, possibly the greatest female singer-songwriter of my generation - and certainly the ballsiest, the most politically engaged.

This song, Come A Long Way, is a particular favourite of mine, one that I often play to pep myself up before heading out for the evening. The beautiful tune gives it a very upbeat feel, although the subject - riding around the soulless streets of Los Angeles all day on her motorcycle to try to avoid having it repossessed - is actually rather downbeat.

An autobiographical anecdotal postscript:  In a bar I used to drink at quite a lot during my Oxford days, the student Beer Cellar in New College, they had an entire Shangri-Las album. This was just after CD jukeboxes had started to appear (so, I suppose it must have been during the early '90s, when I was working back in Oxford for a while, rather than when I was an undergraduate in the '80s). I wasn't a member of this college, but a mate of mine had been the elected student Bar Steward there for a while, and I'd hung out drinking with him so often that most of the staff had got to recognise me - and come to assume that I was a member of the college (it was stricter than most in trying to limit access to members only). I was still able to get away with this four or five years later, when I started hanging out there again - this time, in pursuit of a girl! On one occasion, I even managed to persuade them to grant admittance to two of my Oxford Union drinking buddies of the time, passing them off as my father and my younger brother - a somewhat implausible blag, since their ages were ten years either side of mine. But I digress....

Yes, I was fascinated to discover a whole Shangri-Las album - none of which I'd ever heard before, apart from Leader of the Pack, of course. I wasn't sufficiently fond of the group to check out many of the other songs, though. And other punters in the bar were apt to be intolerant even of my frequent selection of Leader of the Pack; I might have provoked a riot if I'd cued up any of their more obscure tracks. Once, I did a bad thing: I succumbed to a sudden mischievous impulse to feed pound coins into the machine until I could select the whole album, 10 or 12 Shangri-Las songs back to back. I never heard them myself, of course; I fled the scene of the crime as soon as Leader of the Pack had finished. And I didn't dare to go back to that bar for quite some time.

Bonus Treat  -  Henry Rollins on modern 'music'

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!