The Daily Planet

ZZ Top, ‘Gimme All Your Lovin’’

Strictly, we don’t own any ZZ Top records, but we appreciate them for the little things – the trend-defying boogie-woogie, the well-worn irony of Frank Beard’s name, the album titles that Bobby Gillespie would’ve dearly loved to have thought of first, that swinging pointy gesture they do and the Smash Hits interview in which Billy claimed that a dead vulture stank like Dusty’s boots.

However, when this song was requested, I remembered that I had it on The Hits Tape which still nestles in the Various section of the cassette library I’ve stashed under Junior’s changing table. The flat’s just not big enough to store all my records successfully. Anyway, The Hits Tape, eh? The ill-fated Now competitor. They shared a common format, you may recall: a pop side, a dance/soul/hip-hop side, a rock side and, well, a crap side. ‘Gimme All Your Lovin’’ kicks off the rock side of this one in fine style, a momentum sustained by Van Halen’s ‘Jump’.

Junior is a hitherto unsuspected ZZ Top fan. She boogie-woogies on the Winnie the Pooh mat with all her strength, stamping on the Tigger squeaker in time to the riffs. The arm waves and smiles are de rigueur. The traditional first Christmas panda is picked up at one stage for a spin around the dancefloor, and so immersed is Junior in the rhythm, she doesn’t even try to eat it. Otherwise, a girl of eclectic tastes.

The Kinks, ‘Picture Book’

I woke up at 9.16 this morning for my first day back at work. Good effort. Junior was asleep, having got her mother up for a feed at six, so she couldn’t review any songs. This, therefore, is carried over from a little extravaganza we did on Sunday while practising with the new i-Dog. The i-Dog was enjoying it, even though its little lights mark it down as a hip hop fan at the moment. It appears to think that everything that doesn’t sound like the Sex Pistols is hip hop. Maybe that’s right. Maybe 2006 will bring forth a breaking-down of all barriers separating genres and styles. Yadda yadda.

You have to love ‘Picture Book’, and I bet it sold loads of photo printers. Junior gave it some whoops and handy dance steps. When she looks back at our picture books years from now, I don’t know how many pictures of her mama she’ll see. They nearly all seem to be of the little lady herself, and there’s a ludicrous number of them. She can’t help being so damned photogenic.

The Village Green Preservation Society was another Christmas present. I did pretty well.

The Fatback Band, ‘I Found Lovin’’

Welcome to Junior’s second year. At Christmas we learned that she’s a dab hand at ripping off wrapping paper, and then eating it. The presents inside were barely a distraction. She said goodbye to 2005 at about 7pm on New Year’s Eve, giving her parents the opportunity to tear into the alcohol that was still knocking around the house. We had Hoegaarden, buck’s fizz and of course champagne, and slagged off NYE telly. Jools Holland’s thing was ok, I suppose, if you like KT Tunstall, Goldfrapp and the Kaiser Chiefs. We can take or leave all that around here.

‘I Found Lovin’’ was an inspired present for me from Junior’s mum. A 1983 picture sleeve 7”, in fact. It’s an old favourite, and always the first record played in the pub after we’d come in from the football. Junior’s Uncle Paddy has been waiting for a re-release of it for some time, so he’s going to be all jealous.

Junior hums along to it, from the mat where she’s throwing around the toys, old and new. If I was starkly honest with myself, I’d say she was humming because the first signs of teeth are bothering her, but instead let’s say that she was getting lost in its rare groove and faint fragrance of Kronenbourg in plastic glasses.

The Go! Team, ‘Feelgood By Numbers’/The Arcade Fire, ‘Wake Up’

Who chooses the pop music that’s put behind TV trailers or features on Grandstand, or used as incidental music on Supernanny and House of Tiny Tearaways? And is it the only job they have? I reckon I could do it. Slap a load of Zero 7 or Lemon Jelly on the property programmes, a bit of Embrace behind ITV’s Sunday night drama, no effort required. 2005’s TV has been ruled by the Go! Team. They can do jaunty, upbeat, ecstatic and simple pottering about. They might not be quite so suited to the melancholy side, but “pottering about” is the clincher for most telly. ‘Feelgood By Numbers’ is a pottering song – our first instrumental – and would do well through the arched window. Junior used it as a soundtrack for wearing a flowery Reni-from-the-Stone-Roses hat and staring at the new Christmas tree.

‘Wake Up’ was the theme for the BBC’s autumn schedule trailer. Actually, it might just have been an advert for those slightly sketchy Shakespeare Retold things. I was a bit disappointed with them. I was disappointed initially that I managed to record Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth and then record over them without watching them, but The Taming Of The Shrew and Midsummer Night’s Dream both failed to keep me interested, or even unirritated. Anyway, ‘Wake Up’ worked as the trailer. It has a bit of magic and wonder, and drama too, and it added to the anticipation. The Christmas tree won again, mind.

Stevie Wonder, ‘I Wish’

Even Junior’s mum can only think of Stevie as a fat bloke in a bedsheet making sappy records, so goodness knows what the little one will think when she’s older. Or maybe those critics fanfaring a “return to form” will eventually hit the mark with their scattergun and Steveland will once more bestride the world like a blind, bead-sporting behemoth. 

There’s nothing new about praising his 70s output, but today we found a certain sort of context. This wasn’t the only one we played. Once Junior had bounced along to the rhythm and her mum had discovered where Will Smith’s “Wikki Wikki Wah Wah Wild Wild West Switch Hitch Turn Around Now” came from, we moved onto ‘Pastime Paradise’ and ‘As’ to marvel at how many of the album’s songs had been lazily regurgitated to form far bigger hits with a bit of mumbling over the top. So much hip hop is fresh and bright and shaking with invention, but the last 10 years have seen Puff Daddyfication sucking the life out of it. Why don’t the clever ones plunder Stevie?

Junior enjoyed ‘I Wish’ for a while until she was distracted by Roobarb on the television. As the tales of childhood high jinks came out of the stereo’s speakers, I remembered watching Roobarb and Custard as a boy and Junior looked forward to the day when she could write something nasty on the wall.

David Bowie, ‘Young Americans’

I was 19 when I decided that ‘Young Americans’ was my second favourite single of all time. I’d say it’s settled somewhere between five and nine now, and it still makes me feel like I’m the coolest catwalk model in south west London when I listen to it. Junior has no concept of cool, despite her natty pink Biggles hat and snow white woolly hoodie, but she understood the record the moment it started. The drums kicked, the piano and saxophone rolled by and she was right on the button joining the late, great Luther Vandross on backing vocals. She seemed to get a touch scared towards the end, possibly wondering what could make someone “break down and cry” apart from an unscheduled delay to the next feed. Maybe that haunted Dave as well.

I think she liked the barrel load of words streaming out. I think that’s what grabbed me back then when I was seeing that great pop didn’t have to be verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle eight-chorus. The song fits that loosely, I suppose, but Bowie saw how much more fun there could be in the “ad lib to fade”. When I was 11, my friend Neil and I used to laugh at Tom Robinson’s ‘War Baby’, scoffing at him trying to shoehorn as many words as possible into each line. We thought his scansion was rubbish, or that he was holding the wrong lyric sheet.

Sorry Tom.

Coldplay, ‘Talk’/Julie Andrews and children, ‘Do-Re-Mi’

So here we have an actual new single, Coldplay’s tilt at the Christmas No.12. More serious commentators than me have seriously pointed out that it’s a limp song hanging from Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer Love’ riff, and there’s a great big anvil of truth in that. In homage, Junior spends its five minutes 10 seconds trying to roll over and ends up looking like Ralf Hutter hunched over his handlebars, negotiating a Tour de France Alpine hairpin bend with cold German precision (there is no other form of precision, really). There’s barely a nod to Chris Martin’s influence, unless you count the puzzling fact that I had “Mojo” written in biro on the back of my hand.

Now, ‘Do-Re-Mi’ has always made her smile, perhaps incredulous at my note-perfect rendition. We tried the crackly old LP today, part of a job lot I nabbed off my mum when she and my dad embraced the CD age. Lorraine Kelly of television fame tells us that The Sound of Music is enjoying a mini revival, and I’m not one to snub a bandwagon.

Junior looked impressed that Julie Andrews didn’t get the “ti” and “so” lines mixed up like some people, but found the children annoying. Especially that Friedrich.

To recap then, a number twelve hit for ‘Talk’ and a timely festive repackage for The Sound of Music.

The Verve, ‘Lucky Man’/Kate Bush, ‘Wuthering Heights’

These were on the radio this morning while I shaved (bit of gritty bathroom sink real life drama for you there), so perhaps it’s a cheat. Junior was in her bouncy chair, singing along to ‘Lucky Man’. I’ve decided that it’s the song where it went wrong for Ashcroft, inspiration finally giving way to pomposity, after the poised and considered highs of ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ and ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’. Those two may have had a tinge of the overblown, but they carried it off by being totemic. We’ll hear arguments for earlier Verve, from the kind of hipster who’ll dismiss a band when they nuzzle against the bosom of the hit parade. I’m going to ignore them. ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ gets to be the totem. It had bells and whistles. Well, not whistles as such. Whistles and flutes. Suits. Lawsuits. It had a couple of them. Lawsuits that with one hand gave them a “The”, and with the other took away all their royalties.

By happy chance, Ashcroft’s new single was a Video Exclusive on Channel 4 last night. I’d had a couple of Hoegaardens, but it sounded to me as if it started off with some low-fi electronic burbling. “Hello,” I thought, “Richard’s had enough of self-parody, he’s branching out, pushing that envelope, cutting through the Blunts and Powters of our years to reconnect.” Don’t remember the rest of it.

Looking back, I think Junior was droning, not singing. The blossoming satirist was taking the mick.

‘Wuthering Heights’ had her transfixed. Sounds about right.

Antipop Consortium, ‘Ping Pong’

She’s only 20 weeks old so I’ll cut her some slack, but this isn’t the eye-catching, world-twisting start that I anticipated. How can I keep up the pretence that this fey theme is, well, not a pretence when the titular heroine’s not even awake to review the songs?

I think I’ve known Junior long enough now to guess her reaction to ‘Ping Pong’. Let’s face it, when her mum and I tried to play table tennis on holiday a few months back, she just burst into tears. Junior, not her mum. Her mum won. Anyway, after shaking off those dark memories brought on by the ping-pong backbeat, Junior would say that she was reminded of the Dreem Teem trying to sound moody. She’d wonder whether Antipop Consortium could make a decent fist of 606 on Radio 5. She’d raise a smile at the RuPaul and Scary Spice namechecks, and move off topic to muse on who’d win a fight out of the Spice Girls and Girls Aloud.

But that’s for another day.

So, that’s a smile and a muse. A hit for Antipop.