The A-Z Of All Time Great Pop Singles: L

L is for...Louie Louie, by The Kingsmen

Because it contains my favourite moment in the entire history of recorded sound.

Whole books have been written about Louie Louie. Every garage band worth their garage have recorded a version of it. More than any other song on this list, my choice for 'L' was never in any doubt. If you want to understand what this A-Z is about, and by extension what I think all the best pop music is about, listen to this record. There's probably absolutely nothing I can add to Louie Louie-ology that has not been already said by many others a million times, but, if we are to learn anything from The Kingsmen, it is that a lack of having anything original to say, or even the talent to make a reasonably accomplished copy of something wholly unoriginal, should not dissuade you from Giving It Your Best Shot Anyway.

My Favourite Moment In The Entire History Of Recorded Sound

Throughout Louie Louie, drummer Lynn Easton has potentially sounded the most clueless and deranged of all the Kingsmen, clattering wildly, exploding crazed rolls and breaks underneath the melody apparently at random - it's unconventionally effective, but you definitely wouldn't be surprised if this was the first time he's ever heard this song, or sat at a drum kit.

At 1:58, following the middle eight guitar break, the singer, Jack Ely, comes in a line too early. Recognising the error, he panics, and cuts himself short after just one word. Up until this point, the performance has been as error-free as The Kingsmen are ever going to manage. They can't get this take again. This is THE TAKE. History has reached a crossroads. Planets stop turning. ...And then, as if suddenly possessed by the holy drumming trinity of Buddy Rich, Max Roach and Elvin Jones, Lynn Easton does something remarkable - he improvises, somehow cobbling together a stumbling, but absolutely crucial, fill, vamping out of his mind for the few crucial seconds until Ely can rejoin the song at the correct point. And They Left This Epochal Moment In Western Civilisation On The Actual Record.

Often when this moment is written about, it is from the perspective of Louie Louie being the godfather of Punk Trash Pop. By leaving the 'mistake' at 1:58 in the final recording, the band are perceived as exhibiting a lack of concern with getting the 'perfect take' - indeed, perhaps the Kingsmen were incapable of a perfect take. This establishes Louie Louie as belonging to a canon that is in opposition to the classical / jazz / prog rock canon of lifeless, schooled musicianship. And while I think that this analysis is entirely fair, it's also more than that. What's incredible about this moment is not the mistake, but the correction by Lynn Easton of it. It's about triumphing over the odds, and about people transcending their limitations, for the benefit of others. The drummer summons from nowhere the ability to do something contrary to everything else he's done throughout the song - the ability, presence of mind, and skill to do exactly the right thing, at exactly the right time. This moment isn't remarkable because it's unusual to hear such an obvious blunder in a pop record - it's remarkable because Easton, in a moment of true inspiration, snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, enabling his band mates to clatter their way successfully to the finishing line. It's the raw, exhilarating humanity of this moment that makes it special.

The Kingsmen's Louie Louie is an exquisitely charming and loveable record - it is the sound of a band struggling to achieve mastery over the world's most basic song structure, wailing and faliling, persevering, and ultimately succeeding. Succeeding not because they nail a technically perfect game, but because they make it to the end, together, and having absolutely stamped their own mark on a standard - infact, against all the odds, they have recorded the Definitive Version of that standard. It is a cinema verite recording bursting with humanity. It is Alive.

The A-Z Of All Time Great Pop Singles: K

K is for: 'King Tut', by Steve Martin & The Toot Uncommons

Or: The Novelty Disco Single, Post-Modernism's Black Hole And The Fall Of Western Civilisation

Or: Paul Thinks Way Too Hard About Something That May Not Justify The Analysis

So if The Avalanche's 'Frontier Psychiatrist' is an example of a great pop single that might be mistaken for a novelty song but definitely isn't one, Steve Martin's King Tut is an example of a great pop single that is absolutely 100% a novelty song...but it's more than that, too. Like much of Martin's best comedy work, it's both The Thing That It Is, and an off-kilter, deliberately dumb-ass, parody Of That Thing.

King Tut is without doubt, first and foremost, a quick-buck novelty single, released to make a dollar on the back of two coinciding late 70s phenomena - the King Tutankhamen exhibit which was touring the globe at the time, and the rapid escalation of Steve Martin's own immense, football-stadium-filling popularity (see video above). It's in a grand tradition of faddy pop-trend cash-in singles, from The Chipmunk Song to Rastamouse's (rather brilliant) 'Ice Popp'. It's also genuinely, laugh-out loud funny.

Precisely because King Tut is a Novelty Fad Cash-In Single, it cannot function entirely successfully as a parody of Novelty Cash-In Singles. King Tut was a commercial product, people made money from it, and its major selling point was Steve Martin's contemporary pop-culture currency. This, as far as I see it, is the gaping, soulless, black hole at the centre of post-modernism's universe - "we know this is trash, that's the joke, it's ironic, but we're going to make a definitely non-ironic profit off of it anyway, which is almost part of the joke too, right..." It's a difficult position to defend, and leaves King Tut - like much 'ironic' pop culture product -almost fatally compromised and conflicted.

While King Tut's general parody the Novelty Fad Cash-In Single sort-of-doesn't-quite-work, King Tut's specific parody of The Novelty Disco Single is hugely enjoyable, and executed in a smart and imaginative manner. The disco era was proved particularly fertile for the novelty-hit pop single; (the entire disco genre was regarded by many as a mere novelty, a, ahem, flash (dance) in the pan), and for a short period in 1978, whacking a four-to-the-floor beat behind something and sticking the word 'Disco' in front of the title was considered legitimate hit-making methodology. King Tut's best 'joke' is the typically Martin-ish non-sequitur that occurs during the middle eight, when the song shifts for absolutely no discernible reason from a loping cod-Egyptian skank to an up-tempo, generic disco strut, complete with inane "Dancin' by the nile - Disco Tut! The ladies love his style - Boss Tut!" lyrics. Echoing the outrageously cynical and musically jarring attempts by multiple established Classic Rock acts to suddenly and unconvincingly 'go disco' (see: Kiss, The Rolling Stones, even the Grateful Dead), this is a pretty good gag, and a far more effective and incisive pastiche of that unfortunate trend than a straight disco track would have achieved.

And if 'successfully quite funny parody of novelty disco' was King Tut's grandest achievement, that would be enough....but it has a far wider point to make. The central premise of the King Tut joke is that a novelty disco song about Tutankhamen is the natural end-game of a 20th Century culture in which everything, including the holy relics of ancient cultures, is fair game for the mass-production, mainstream capitalist-media-machine. I guess you could sum this up as "Nothing Is Sacred", or as Christian Slater observes in 'Pump Up The Volume' : "All the great themes have been used up, and turned into theme parks." History is dead, all that's left is novelty disco songs about history, and a wildly inaccurate version of history ("Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia!") at that. It's a bleak message.

Martin's stand-up shtick was a parody of stand-up, a commentary on it, and in this way King Tut ultimately works because releasing an awful novelty disco track is precisely the sort of thing that the type of buffoonish light entertainment personality he parodied would do. It's consistent with his act, and therefore, artistically, legitimate. On the other hand - it's still product, he still charged people for it, and there's something very difficult, impossible even, to reconcile about those positions. It's very easy to shout 'irony' in a crowded market place. Smart, but very compromised: King Tut.

The A-Z Of All Time Great Pop Singles: J

J is for...Johnny B Goode, by Chuck Berry / Marvin Berry & The Starlighters

"Woah...Rock 'n' Roll."

The very first line of Back To The Future. Can you think of a better first line in a movie? (Actually, The Wild Bunch's "If they move - kill 'em" is a close contender) For all the credit the Back To The Future movies get, they still don't get enough. Certainly not the first movie, which by my estimation is about as perfect a piece of popular art as has ever been produced by the Hollywood machine. Mind-bogglingly well-constructed, sublime lead performances, an endlessly quoteable script, a concept (time-travelling Delorean) so insanely, gloriously B-Movieish it's a wonder the movie ever got made, masses to say about the development of pop youth culture from the 50s Dawn Of The Teenager to the Mtv 80s, and with a love of Rock And Roll at it's heart, Back To The Future is the teen-adventure movie in excelsis. And smart? Like a fox.

.1. In 1985, the McFly family are enjoying a re-run of an old Honeymooners episode entitled 'The Man From Space'.

.2. In 1955, the Baines family are watching this episode's TV debut. Marty causes some confusion by stating that he's already seen this episode, calling it "a classic - Ralph dresses up as a man from space," and attempts to explain that he must have seen a "re-run."

.3. In the next scene, Marty and Doc are shown 're-running' the video camera footage Marty shot at Twin Pines Mall on a TV set. The notion of 're-running' situations, events and images is common to the whole trilogy, but finds it's purest expression here, where an earlier scene from the film is actually repeated on television, becoming a re-run.

.4. Marty, dressed in a radiation suit, is himself mistaken for a Man From Space earlier in the movie, and later dons the suit again to deliberately impersonate an alien.

I just think this is massively impressive; post-modern without being smart-alecy, it deals with complex ideas in a fun way, and totally integrates them into the story.

Uh...I was meant to be talking about Johnny Be Goode, wasn't I?

For people of a certain age, Marty's performance of this song at the end of BTTF defined their adolescent understanding of what Rock and Roll IS. "It's a blues riff in B, watch me for the changes, and try to keep up" is the only way anybody should ever introduce any song, regardless of whether it's actually a blues riff in B or not. The escalation of Marty's wild abandon as the spirit of rock and roll electrifies his soul, duck-walking, amp-kicking and Hendrix-wailing across the Hill Valley High School stage, remains one of the truly great celluloid evocations of pop music's almighty power. Lots of movies have great soundtracks, but few get pop music in the way BTTF does, or have done as much to engender a love of it in its audience. Like much of Berry's work, Johnny B Goode is a song about rock and roll, making it the perfect choice for this scene. From a film characterised by unparalleled attention to detail, you would expect nothing less.

The A-Z Of All Time Great Singles: I

I is for: 'I Think We're Alone Now' - Tommy James & The Shondells (1967) / Tiffany (1988)*
*And also Girls Aloud, but their version was uncharacteristically woeful and pointless. For shame, Girls Aloud.

(So check this out for inter-textual pop-geekery: My choice for 'H' (Heaven Is A Place On Earth) was knocked off the Number One spot in 1988 by my choice for 'I' (I Think We're Alone Now).You might - but probably won't - be interested to learn that the song that knocked Tiffany off Number One was another 'I' record, Kylie's 'I Should Be So Lucky', completing a remarkable triple-whammy of 80s Girl Pop chart dominance during this period.)

So, I have A Bit Of A Thing for 80s / early 90s Super Pop; The Bangles, Pat Benatar, Go-Gos and Ex Go-Gos...and yes, even Tiffany. Well...not really Tiffany. But this song at least, and one good song is all that matters. I've dug Tiffany's version on some level ever since I was a kid, but only I only found out that it was a cover-version a couple of years back. I like pretty much both versions equally. They have different things going for them, but they fulfill the same remit in their respective eras, that of being Definitive Bubbblegum Pop.

Tiffany's video for this, if you recall, was filmed in a mall. If you want to know what US teen-culture looked like in 1987, watch this video. It tells you everything you need to know. If you want to know what US teen-culture looked like in 1967...go buy the Doors first album. But also take three minutes to listen to The Shondell's original version of I Think We're Alone Now, because although it couldn't have less to say about the Woodstock Nation, it's certainly a very enjoyable slice of MOR Apple Pie pop-rock, and has the edge on 'Light My Fire' in that it's like about a fith as long, and has a chirrping crickets sound effect on it, and no matter how much acid he gulped, Jim Morrison never thought to put insect sound effects on his records.**

**Tiffany had the good sense to repeat the crickets sound effect at the beginning of her version, a pretty cool nod to the original. Thus ends the nerdiest A-Z post so far.

The A-Z of All Time Great Pop Singles: "H"

H is for: "Heaven Is A Place On Earth", by Belinda Carlisle

Few pop-music related things seem as wrongheaded to me as the concept of the "guilty pleasure". Nobody should feel guilty about the pop music they take pleasure from, at least not if the cause of guilt is simply the perception that the music which pleasures them is not Cool. For the pleasure someone derives from listening to a pop record to be found Guilty, we must accept that somewhere there is a judge and jury passing sentance on what is the Right Sort Of Music and what is The Wrong Sort Of Music. This sort of joy-killing fascism is the antithesis of everything pop music should be about, and is largely a construct of an entertainment industry which, in order to market it's product effectively, divides it's consumer demographic into managable sub-sections and pitches them in opposition against one another in an eternal battle of My Scene Is Better Than Your Scene.

The consequence of this tactic is that pop music becomes a tool of exclusivity, of elitism, a way of establishing who's Out and who's In. When you're a kid, this has it's uses. Maybe it's even a healthy part of growing up. But there comes a point when you're meant to out-grow that shit, and it strikes me that Babyboomer culture, with a premium placed on Cool, and Youth, and Being Hip To The Latest Groove, has prolonged the period of somebody's life where this sort of mentality is acceptable, or smart, or healthy, pretty much indefinately. I think that's a shame, because it means that people are more uptight, for longer, and feel less empowered to stand up and say "You know what. I think Gang Of Four are OK. But it's really more of an intellectual thing. What really gets my blood pumping is Heaven Is A Place on Earth by Belinda Carlisle, and Uncut Magazine can Go To Hell."

(Note: I DJ'd at the wedding of my very good friends Lee & Jud, and 'dropping' this record during my 'set' still stands as the most fun I've ever had behind a pair of decks.)

(Another Note: Belinda would have been one of two ex-Go-Go Girls to make an appearence on this A-Z, had 'R' not already been over-subscribed. Jane Wiedlin's unbelievably great 'Rush Hour', unfortunately, won't quite make the cut.)

The A-Z Of All-Time Great Pop Singles: "G"

G is for 'Green Onions' by Booker T & The MGs



Simply because it never gets old, which is remarkable, because it's, like, really old. 1962, man, and those Onions sound just as fresh today as they did when Booker T first cooked 'em up.

While lacking the lyrical themes, vocal stylings and Flute Solo that California Dreamin' has somehow managed to overcome in it's avoidance of not being an irritating Babyboomer nostalgia yawnfest, this Hammond Organ instrumental (surely the most famous organ instrumental of all-time) is still Typically 60s enough, and recycled as a 60s Soundtrack Shortcut often enough, to make it astounding in itself that it hasn't become a tiresome relic. But is Absloutley Hasn't. It falls into the same category as Louie Louie - put Green Onions on in a club, any club, anywhere, and People Will Dance. I DJ'd at a Sixties Night for 5 years, and played all sortsa obscure nonsense - but not playing this was simply never an option. It has The Vibe. It creates a whole scene. It's Three Dimensional - it transports you. Smoky, slinky, COOL.

Green Onions is an example of the Good Will Out, of The Cream Rising To The Top. Of popular culture Getting It Right. Why is this the most famous Organ Instro? Because it's the best one. There are loads of other great organ instros, thousands of 'em infact, but if we gotta pick one, let's all just agree on this one. I like Jimmy Smith's Root Down pretty much more than any record on earth, but it doesn't have the whole package like Green Onions does. This is a pop record. It has hooks. You can sing along. It hits the ground...well, not running...it hits the ground grooving. And that guitar...Steve Cropper's guitar...might just be my favourite guitar part ever. SHRAK! SHRUK! He play's next to nothing, and get's it absolutely right.

Finally, Booker T. He was like 17 years old when he played on this record. How insane is that? 17 years old, and you're on a record that people will still be digging for centuries to come. The video above is simply one of my all-time fave pieces of video. Booker T's expression at 2.52 makes me laugh every time; mugging to the crowd, grinning his ass off as he plays the most insane, juddering, outrageous organ solo, like "I KNOW, RIGHT? I'M AWESOME! THIS SONG IS AWESOME! Check out what I'm doing on this organ! It's RIDICULOUS!"

The A-Z Of All-Time Great Pop Singles: "F"

F is for: Frontier Psychiatrist by The Avalanches



John Lennon said of Revolution #9, the cut & paste sound collage piece regarded by many proponants of "Proper Music" as Not Being Proper Music, that he had expended more time and energy on the creation of that White Album epic than he had on much of his back catalogue, the inference being: 'I can knock out tunes on my acoustic guitar all day. It's stuff like that which is throw-away and lazy and inconsequential, not this. This took real effort. This was the challenge. And it's valid.'

But as much as I like Revolution #9, and could spend all day defending it...it sure ain't funky. It took hip-hop, maybe 7 or 8 years later, to marry the avant-garde cut-ups of postmodernist art as exemplified by Revolution #9, and the dancefloor filling RnB sensibilities of James Brown. Revolution #9 was self-conciously anti-pop - it was designed to shock and disturb and shake the squares from their bourgeois slumber. Grandmaster Flash's The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel was super-pop, designed to amuse and move and get the squares to shake their tail feathers.

And as far as bone fide hit records go, few have ever taken the model of imaginative collage + humour + grooviness and done anything with it nearly as joyfully, danceably, delightfully brilliant as Australia's The Avalanches did on their 2000 Top 20 sampledelic smasheroo, Frontier Psychiatrist. I Love This Record. I probably wouldn't have even bothered doing this list if I hadn't wanted a reason to write about Frontier Psychiatrist. Alphabet Of Pop aside, I'd still put this in my all-time Top 50 singles. Wikipedia states that it contains 37 samples; I'm gonna say I think it's higher than that, but even if it's just 37, I'm pretty sure this must be a record for a Top 20 UK single. Best of all, one of those samples is from The 'Burbs, one of my all-time favourite movies - and I'm damn certain that Frontier Psychiatrist is the only Top 20 UK hit single with a 'Burbs sample in it.

I dig the Wild West, spaghetti-western, Morricone sorta vibe; I dig how daft it all is...it's really a comedy record, and certainly The Avalanches spoke in interviews around the time that they feared being percieved as a novelty act. Now, there's nothing wrong with novelty songs - I like Doctorin' The Tardis as much as the next man - but this isn't a novelty song. It's funny, sure, and fun, and definately unusual - but nothing this artfully constructed can be called a novelty. I'm a real sucker this sort of sample-heavy fare; it appeals to the record-geek in me, the crate-digger mentality that has you thinking "Ohh - where'd they nick this bit from, and where can I find it?" As a pop-culture junkie, a song composed entirely of pop-culture junk is just right it my street.

Oh, and the video is potentially my favourite video of all time.

The A-Z Of All-Time Great Pop Singles: "E"

E is for "Everybody Loves Somebody" by Dean Martin

This was the first song I heard as a Married Man. It played as I walked back down the eisle hand-in-hand with my new wife, and it will forever bring back memories of that magical, snow-blesssed day in late December 2009. My & my wife chose it as the day's We Just Got Married Song because it makes sense lyrically, because it set the tone for the Wedding's evening party theme (50s cocktail party), because I'm a big Dean Martin fan, because it's a great freakin' record, and because when those drums kick in after the opening spiral of strings and Disney-esque female choir, it meant we had a cue to start walking. So yeah - I guess you could say this song is sort of a Big Deal for me.

While I am a big Dean Martin fan, I'm happy to admit that the dude didn't make hundreds of Great Records. But he did make some - and this is one of them. Mainly it just has more OOMPH than alotta his stuff. Dean couldn't have cared less about recording "serious" music, or trying to be an "important" "artist". Not like Sinatra. For Dean, the whole song & dance thing was a hustle, and anybody who thought it was anything more than that was a shmuck. Part of me really likes that. I'm a big believer in irreverence, especially when it comes to pop music (a medium I've always understood as being essentially irreverent by nature, but which babyboomers have managed to turn into something which has deified more holy saints in 50 years than the Catholic Church have managed in thousands), and nobody had less reverence for Pop Music than Dean Martin. Even here, with the benefit of having an Actually Good Song to Sing, he gives up really trying after about a minute and a half. This careless, sloppy-drunk half-assedness didn't hurt the song at the Cashbox of course - careless, sloppy-drink half-assedness is precisely what he was paid for. Irked by Beatlemania, legend has it that Martin promised his Fabs idolising 11 year old son that ELS was "gonna knock your pallies off the charts", which is exactly what happened when it went to #1 in August 1964, 10 years since his last chart topper. Again, irreverence: screw The Beatles. I'm Dean Freakin' Martin. And I can still get Number Ones the same way I always did - without even trying.

On a personal note, there is another story connected to this song which makes it a favourite of mine. My stag do was held in the wilds of the Peak District, and at some point during the Saturday night we (about a dozen middle-class lads from various parts of Yorkshire) wound up in a very dodgy Buxton pub which had Bad Idea written all over it. They were showing WWF on the widescreen TV, and Nu Metal was thundering from the sound system. The crowd was an ugly gallery of muderous, dead-eyed goths, local Straw Dogs types and tooled-up teen hooligans. Total Mos Eisley cantina vibes. We hussled our way to the darkest corner of the pub we could find, and while my friends busied themselves avoiding eye contact with the other patrons and nervously peeling strips from their beer bottle labels, I started pumping cash into the jukebox. By this point in the weekend two days of near constant low-level drinking may have thrown my intuition off somewhat, but quite frankly my ability to "sense the tone" has always been suspect; the Australian's have a word for The Guy Who Always Picks The Wrong Record To Put On At A Party - I forget what the term is now, but I definately have a tendancy in that direction. I found the first track I wanted. "Nailed it," I thought, supremely confident of the awesomeness of my selection, the song that was gonna blow everybody's tiny minds and unite the pub in some epic, spontaneous dance sequence. The harsh Nu Metal ground to a halt. A pause. The opening, saccharine strings of "Everybody Loves Somebody" drifed surreally through the musty, dead air. "Everybody....loves somebody....sometime". I span triumphantly around to my stag party, expecting to be greeted with manic Stag whoops and a sea of raised hands desperate to High Five this act of genius. Instead, I turned to greet 12 open-mouthed, ashen faces starring back at me, frozen in abject terror and nauseous disbelief, expressions which collectively stated one thing: "We're gonna die."

Fortunately, the Buxton Massive must be slightly more tolerant of mushy, campy old lounge music than my friends feared, because as it turned out we weren't actually murdered. Infact, we weren't even murdered when the next song that came on, chosen by my friend Wardy, was some Bon Jovi song nobody has ever heard before that was about 15 minutes long or something, which is probably about 12 minutes longer than any Bon Jovi record should be, I mean, I like Livin' On A Prayer as much as the next guy (unless the next guy is Wardy), but seriously...that said, I guess the insanity of Wardy's choice did distract attention away from the insanity of my choice, so really I should thank him for this act of Stag Party heroism. This post, then, is for Stephen M Ward.

The A-Z of All-Time Great Pop Singles: "D"

D is for "Dance To The Music", by Sly & The Family Stone

Like Funkadelic, I guess Sly & The Family Stone act as a gateway funk band for rock orientated teenagers - they've been fulfilling that role ever since their show-stealing performance at Woodstock 40 years ago, when they got thousands of peacenik long-hairs up on their feet and grooving in the mud. The footage of the Family Stone at that concert is simply mind-boggling; a firestorm of full-throttle funk. Takes no prisoners. KICKS. ALMIGHTY. ASS.

The Family Stone were the first "cross-over" act; their music an explosive cocktail of white rock and black soul - but, unlike so much (good & bad) soul-does-psyche experiments, there is nothing remotely self-conscious, artificial or exploitative about this fusion. I love a lot of psychedelic soul, but even the very best stuff, at least the commercially successful stuff, (Norman Whitfield-era Temptations, say) has some element of "lets give this whole hippy thing a go". (To be fair, that's often a big part of it's charm.) But The Family Stone's sound works because it's totally natural, and, crucially, it was their idea first. And it wasn't just their sound that was "integrated". Consisting of men and women, white folks and black folks, The Family Stone lived the Woodstock Nation ideal of interracial, inter-gender harmony, where so many others just talked a good game.

Dance To The Music, their break-out hit, is an example of how a big single can be used by a band as a calling card, a statement of intent - everything you need to know about the Family Stone philosophy is here. The phrase "melting pot of influences" is a cliche, but it applies perfectly here - it is a bubbling gumbo of Doo-Wop, Motown pop, and fuzzed-acid rock. It has one of the all time great first lines - the exhortation to "Get up - and dance to the music!" is impossible to refuse, and I dig how it makes their music The Music, the definite article, the only music that matters. From thereon, it's just your regular arrangement of accapella doo-wop, drum solos, fuzz bass solos, about five different vocalists, introductions to the band members, and an instruction for "squares" to leave. Dance To The Music: the sound of somebody spiking King Curtis's Memphis Soul Stew with LSD.

The A-Z Of All Time Great Pop Singles: "C"

C is for: "California Dreamin'", by The Mamas & The Papas

When me and my kid sister used to holiday with our folks, we'd go in the car someplace like Northumberland or Norfolk or wherever, and our parents would take the opportunity of having a captive audience to educate The Kids about The Popular Music Of Their Youth. The syllabus was largely defined by whatever cheapo 60s cassette compilation my Dad could find in the first petrol station we came to, tapes called things like 'Music Inspired By Easy Rider' or 'The Best Of The Sixties'. The real mainstay, however, was a double-cassette called 'Psychedelia', 40 tracks of late 60s wig-out magic, including White Rabbit, 8 Miles High, See My Friends, and even Beefheart's Electricity. Undeniable, timeless pop records. And I heard 'em a lot. But there was one song that, despite the fact that it only apeared on the album once, just like the rest of those songs, seemed to be on in our car the whole time, every time I looked up from the Beano Summer Special, or the NME, or from playing Top Trumps with my sister - The Mamas and The Papas' California Dreamin'.

There are very few songs awesome enough to withstand the sort of maximum over-exposure that the Western World has had to this record. It's wheeled out every time a movie, TV or advert director wants to evoke 'The Sixties'. It's a shortcut, short-hand for a whole era. It should, by all rights, have become a terrible cliche, synonymous with yawnsome babyboomer nostalgia. Everybody, everywhere, should be bored to death of this song. And yet, somehow, California Dreamin's spooky, chilly glory remains entirely undiminished. Partly I think this is because, unlike, say White Rabbit, California Dreaming isn't a "hippy" record, or an "acid rock" record - it's not a record about living in sixties LA; it's a record about dreaming about living in sixties LA. This puts the protagonist in the same position as the listener, and provides the sense of longing, of yearning, for a mythical other place, which defines this song.

Beyond that , there are so many great things about this record that it's impossible to list them all here. I like how dramatic it is, and how short it is, and how it packs so much briliant stuff into those two minutes and 39 seconds that it makes you wonder why more pop records can't do it, and I love the outrageously loud backing vocals "well I got down on my knees (GOT DOWN ON MY KNEES!) / and I pretend to pray (I PRETEND TO PRAY!)", and the final, rushing "DAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY" (six seconds long!).

Maybe most of all, I love the flute break, a pristine, ghostly, yearning little melody which send shivers down my spine still. It's just one of my very favourite moments on any pop record. Bud Shank played that flute solo. Bud was a West Coast jazzman who played with Stan Kenton, and on pioneering indo-jazz fusion tracks with Ravi Shankar. Most people who've heard California Dreamin', and that's pretty much everybody everywhere, probably don't know the name Bud Shank. Truth be told, neither did I until I was reading about this song recently. His music can be heard everyday on radio stations around the globe, but his name remains a quiet footnote in the pop history books. So this post is for Bud Shank.

The A-Z Of All-Time Great Pop Singles: B

B is for: "Boom! Shake The Room" - Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince

What, no Be My Baby? My choice for "B" presents the perfect
opportunity to confirm an essential aspect of this A-Z, which is that I intend to compile it instinctively, in a first-thought, best-thought sorta way - this is a list of pop songs that matter to me personally, which spring immediately to mind because they're heavily playlisted on mybrain FM, rather than an exercise in advertising what refined taste I have. So I coulda chosen the undeniably wondrous Phil Spector / Ronettes girl-group classic, and almost did...but the truth is what I always really wanted to pick was Boom! Shake The Room, by Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince. So I have.

"The f-f-f-f fresh p-p-p-prince is who I am: so tell my mother that I never wrote a wack jam."

Should an alien race ever require the people of earth to provide a sample of our best work, we would bundle William Smith up onto a rocket ship and send him hurtling off into the cosmos, with a suitcase containing the Fresh Prince of Bel Air DVD box-set, Men In Black, 'Summertime', 'Miami' and this record on 12" vinyl, and a note stapled to his t-shirt saying "Now show us what you've got." Will Smith is about as bankable a celebrity as it's possible to imagine, and B!STR is a Very Commercial Record. It's essentially LL Cool J's Momma Said Knock You Out, already a relatively pop rap single, with every pop hook turned up to 11, an explosion for a chorus, and a lead vocal performance by the most charismatic man on the planet. If hip-hop heads wanna grumble about how "sanitised" Will & Jazz's version of Rap Music is here, let 'em. One of pop music's roles is as a gateway drug to harder, more adult kicks. B!STR was a sneaky toke behind the bikesheds for a generation of Fresh Prince teens, who the very next year were probably nodding out in their bedrooms to the sounds of Cypress Hill and Snoop Dogg.

The A-Z Of All-Time Great Pop Singles: "A"

A is for "ABC" - The Jackson 5

As near as dammit, the perfect pop-song, and a most appropriate place to begin my 'ABC' of all-time great singles. The Jackson 5's ABC is 2:54 of pure, unbridled, unselfconscious fun -it is a song that exists to remind everybody what pop music is. Exuberance, vitality, sheer youthful joyfulness - ABC is conceptually patterned as a lesson in love, but the real lesson here is in pop-ology. It is the York Notes of sweet soul music. Musically, it's as arresting as anything Motown ever did. ABC has the good sense to kick off with a fat, buzzing fuzz-bass line, before dropping into a steady pimp rollin' funk groove 5 seconds in; the mix is packed with loadsa conga, tambourine and jangling piano, and at some point around the 1:40 mark the J5 strip it all back to a breakdown like a kindergarten Temptations. Vocally it's just on another level; every line is delivered like it's the hook, and wildly creative things are done with the phrasing and arrangement throughout. I wonder what ever happened to that kid with the high pitched voice?

2010 Review: A Year In Stuff I Liked

Album Of The Year
Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers - Wu Tang Vs The Beatles / Tom Caruana
Conceptually a weaker effort than Dangermouse's Beatles breakbeat benchmark 'Grey Album', but for my (admittedly Wu Tang fanatical) dollar this mash-up is a far more entertaining listen front-to-back. The tracks that work far outweigh those that don't, and a handful (the bludgeoning, 'I Am The Walrus' sampling "Run", a re-make of "C.R.E.A.M." almost as smooth as the original, & the centre-piece, show-stopping "Uzi (Pinky Ring)") have remained heavy rotation heavyweights on my ipod all year. Precisely the sort of post-modern irreverence that Lennon woulda loved.

Book Of The Year
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams - Nick Tosches
Everything you need to know about mid-20th Century US pop culture is here. A serious - but never remotely dry - book, packed with punchy, profane prose, placing the vacant, solitary anti-hero figure of Dean Martin at the centre of a wide ranging cultural discourse on pop music, film, showbiz, television, sex, money etc etc...and however black the oblivion of Dino's empty megastardom gets, you still wind up with the impression of Martin as the Rat Pack's true hipster - a dispassionate, untouchable, grade-A bad-ass - "the cool guy's cool guy".

Film Of The Year
Toy Story 3 - Dir. Lee Unkrich
In which everybody is forced to recognise the shocking frailty of thier own mortality via a fiery pit-hell incinerator scene where Woody, Buzz and the Toy Story Gang take one another's hands and accept their own imminent and certain doom with quiet, heart-breaking dignity. Peerless popular art, bursting with imagination, and with an emotional depth of resonance greater than any number of the "serious" middle-brow movies with which Pixar will compete - I suspect fruitlessly, mores the pity - for a Best Picture Oscar come February.

TV Show Of The Year
The Office (An American Workplace) / Curb Your Enthusiasm
I'm gonna have to chicken outta making a definitive call on this one. Overall, these are very different shows; the former has a warm, beating heart the size of a watermelon and gets slushier by the episode, happily embracing it's position as the closest any post-Friends sit-com has come to reconciling the briefly un-cool merits of A Bunch Of Likeable People Who Actually Like Each Other mainstream comedy with the edgier, taboo-trampling brinksmanship of Gervais / Merchant's British original, while the latter is characterised by a no-holes-barred barrage of mind-boggling "WTF" moments that re-invents the Seinfeld formula of jaw-dropping social awkwardness + astonishingly tight narrative structures + self-reflexivity + people who hate themselves and everyone the know, on an operatic scale, making Gervais / Merchant's efforts seem conservatively quaint by comparison. I admire and enjoy them both equally. A dead-heat, then - The Office, for the sheer number of hours of pleasure it has given me this year, and CYE, for those spectacular, fan-pleasing Seinfeld reunion episodes.

Songs Of The Year

.1. In Tha Park - Ghostface Killah Crunching, distorted, heavily fuzzed, block-party rockin', psyche-soul, old-skool flavoured hip-hop ticks every one of my boxes. With deliberate nods to P Diddy's "Bad Boy For Life" and MC Shan, In Tha Park stands proudly along side the strongest Wu releases from any era. This is how that BlakRoc LP shoulda sounded.

.2. Groove Is In The Heart - Crocodiles Pure, unadulterated nostalgic 90s kid indulgence - shoegazing indie-rock fetishists covering a 'contemporary' 1990 pop masterpiece. About as authentic an impresssion of an ealy 90s John Peel session by some B-list sub-Chapterhouse outfit as one could possibly imagine. Smart, funny, trippy, and undeniably groovy.

.3. Boyfriend - Best Coast I guess basically like a gazillion records sounded pretty much exactly like this in 2010, but for whatever reason Best Coast's particular take on the year's ubiquitous early 60s girl-group + slacker 90s indie formula lodged itself in my skull like no other.

TheTurtles - Buzzsaw

TheTurtles - Buzzsaw by Paul 'Fuzz' Lowman
Have just discovered Soundcloud, which for those of you who are even lamer with this sorta stuff than I am, is just a very hip & user-friendly way of uploading and sharing music. To celebrate, here's The Turtles, with a stoopid-fresh fuzz instro, in a Booker T "stylee", as 90s kids TV presenters used to say in a postmodern ironic way. And which I'm now using in a post-ironic, ironic way. Or whatever. Enjoy!

Why The UK Should Hold It's Own Tea Party

So, The Tea Party movement. Another opportunity for liberal British commentators to 'play to their base' by taking lazy shots at white Americans. Our comedians and commentators are even more comfortable mocking Americans than they are mocking Christians. If they have a chance to mock Americans who are also Christians, as they do here, it's like all their secular winter solstice celebrations have come at once.

For what it's worth, I don't agree with the majority of what constitutes the Tea Party's incoherent, diffuse manifesto. Fuelled by a high calorie, low-brow diet of deep-fried fast food & deep-fried Fox News, most Tea Party activists seem misinformed & wrong-headed at best, deeply and dangerously bigoted at worst. But as dumb as their politics might be- and this is where the UK needs to think twice about knee-jerk reactions to the Tea Party - at least it proves that the American people remain fully engaged with their nation's political process. At least these people still care. They still believe that people have the power to alter the national political landscape. We shouldn't be sneering at a country that produces a movement like the Tea Party - we should be envious of a Western democracy whose citizen's are still motivated enough by politics to take grass-roots action.

The British public gave up on thinking they can make a difference through political action a long time ago. We are a compliant, jaded people. The coalition slice and slash away at public sector budgets, and we do nothing. We suffer, while City Bankers who caused that suffering continue to take mega-bonuses, and we do nothing. Thinking Obama is a muslim is stupid, but engagement with your nation's politics is admirable. Rather than ill, it would infact speak well for our country if we had our own UK Tea Party to ridicule.

A Few Thoughts About Toy Story, And That Incinerator Scene

Upon it’s release, the original Toy Story was applauded by critics for the way in which it “worked on two levels” – in addition to the content aimed at kids (adventure, larger than life characters, broad emotional themes), Pixar had woven into the film adult-orientated content (irony, pastiche, innuendo, cultural references) aimed at their parents. It was regarded (I think with some exaggeration) as a breakthrough, and the massive commercial and critical success of Toy Story meant that the ‘two levels’ formula immediately became the hall mark of most modern blockbuster animations, notably the Ice Age and Shrek franchises.

Even if intended as such, however, the observation that a film works on “two levels” is really not much of a compliment, and indeed if applied to any work in the The Orthodox Film Canon sounds immediately redundant - the analysis that “Citizen Kane works on two levels” is pointlessly blank – “only two?!”. Such an analysis of Toy Story is equally weak, and critics peddling the ‘two levels’ theory were always guilty of underselling the many nuanced levels on which that first film ‘worked’.

At the same, the ‘two levels’ analysis overemphasizes the value placed by Pixar on the adult content, on these films being being ‘knowing’ or ‘ironic’. It is perhaps inevitable that middle-brow film critics should focus on the element that allows them to feel like they’re ‘in on the joke’, the nods and the winks. Unable to find joy in the un-ironic, old-fashioned emotional intelligence which is truly Toy Story’s greatest strength, critics instead praised what they perceived as Pixar’s ambivalence about or detachment from certain aspects of the conventional kids movie material. The truth is that the content aimed at adults is never done at the expense of the family-friendly content – there is no criticism or commentary made by the former about the latter. Toy Story’s primary achievement is not – as many critics would have it –post-modern self-reflexivity, but in being an exceptionally emotionally literate series of films which delight children without patronising them and adults without undermining the values of the family-friendly content.

(It should be noted an unfortunate consequence of the ‘two levels’ critical misreading is that it inevitably does produce rather two-dimensional and lop-sided movies when adopted by lesser filmmakers– the Shrek franchise being the case in point. While undoubtedly very funny in parts, these are entirely un-nuanced movies operating literally and strictly on two clearly defined levels - the angry, anti-Disney cynicism of the adult content, and the wacky, gonzo slapstick of the kid’s content. With the former essentially operating as a running criticism of the latter, the balance of power falls squarely with the adult content. Lacking entirely the heart or warmth of the Toy Story movies, the essential cynicism at the core of the Shrek franchise makes it impossible to love, in the way that audiences unquestionably love the Toy Story films.)

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As we join the Toy Story gang at the beginning of TS3, their situation is shockingly grim. Abandoned, un-loved, obsolete, their numbers massively depleted (we learn that they’ve ‘lost’ Wheezy and Bo Peep, amongst others), destined to a wholly undignified post-Andy life dumped in the attic - but labouring under the self-delusion that they may still yet recapture the glory years– the psychological state in Andy’s bedroom resembles that of a war veteran’s hospital. You’ll have probably read that Toy Story 3 is a much ‘darker’ movie than its two predecessors, but this pat description fails to adequately describe the pall of sadness and desperation which permeates much of the movie - and it certainly doesn’t prepare you for the brutal, disorientating left-turn that the tone of the franchise accelerates towards in its second act.

The Incinerator Scene in TS3 simply stands as one of the most harrowing pieces of cinema I’ve ever been witness to. It will go down in infamy. Both my wife and my kid sister were openly sobbing throughout it, and I was doing all I could to avoid the same. (In brief: after extended escape-from-evil-nursery sequence, with their situation increasingly dire – including the apparent death of the Squeeze Toy Aliens – the gang find themselves being dragged into the fiery pit-hell of a junk yard incinerator. Initial efforts to retreat are quietly abandoned. One by one, they take one another’s hand, and face their doom with dignity. The escalation of terribleness throughout the film makes this scenario seem wholly plausible at this point. Yep. It’s awful.) The Toy Story gang have entered Dante’s final circle of hell. The sequence takes the Toy Story franchise into a previously unimaginable emotional arena: 15 years after we met them, we are watching Woody and Buzz Lightyear die. Pixar sell the unspeakable horror of the scenario hard, and you buy it. The most devastating thing with the Incinerator Scene is that our heroes accept their imminent death. They stop fighting. In their abandonment of hope, in giving up on life, there is not just acceptance of, but complicity in, their own death. “You know what - we’ve given it our best shot, but it’s time we stop kidding ourselves. Most of our friends are gone, the Squeeze Toy Aliens are dead, and worst of all, life without Andy just isn’t worth living...” C’mon baby, take my hand – don’t fear the reaper. Frankly, I found this scene utterly astonishing, and I’ve been obsessing about it ever since.

The first Toy Story is pretty much a perfect 1hr20 of cinema, by my estimation. I have my reservations about TS2, but they’re really nit-picky things, and only a reflection of the high standards I hold these movies to anyway. The third film is mind-boggling in it’s emotional intensity, and in the sheer number of awesome ideas and gags Pixar pack into the 2 hours. Like many reviewers, I think it will probably come to be regarded as the best of the three films, though I’ll have to watch it again before I make that assessment for sure – it was certainly my knee-jerk analysis as I left the cinema. Pixar have topped themselves, and in doing so have achieved something neither the Star Wars or Back To The Future trilogies were able to do – finish as strongly as they started.

The Amazing World Of Star Wars Stuff Made Out Of Gingerbread

Whilst munching my way through a couple of delicious homemade ginger biscuits at work the other day I offered my colleagues the following bold, rhetorical question: "You can't beat good gingerbread, can you?" Nobody disagreed. Or, y'know - cared. There's something magical about gingerbread that puts it in a different league to other biscuits. I guess it's the whole gingerbread house / gingerbread man vibe...gingerbread has the flavour of fairytales and Christmas. Gingerbread houses are so appealing that there's an actual architectural school (originated in quaint ol' Victorian New England, predictably) that mimicks their highly ornate, storybook style. There are few things more desirable, more bewitchingly mouth watering, than a gingerbread house, frosted with snow white icing.

And then there's stuff like this gingerbread AT-AT, which perhaps doesn't have quite the same appeal, at least not as Actual Food. Making Star Wars vehicles out of gingerbread takes a particular type of genius, doesn't it? Imagine you call up your friend - "Aright mate, what you up to...uh-huh...you're making what?" I think you'd be impressed, to an extent. Impressed slash bemused. Elsewhere on the internet there are pictures of gingerbread Tie-Fighters, and a gingerbread Landspeeder. I guess if you wanted you could call it Folk Art, or Outsider Art...but the reality is people just dig making Star Wars stuff out of gingerbread.

TV Review: 50 Greatest Comedy Catchphrases

50 Greatest Comedy Catchphrases - 9pm, Sunday 17th Jan, E4

So this was pretty much the most pointless three hours of television ever conceived, a show whose singularly limited appeal can be summed up in one sentence:

"Oh yeah, I remember when that used to be funny."

Comedy catchphrases have an intensely short shelf life, and operate on two, and only two, settings: 'tolerably zeitgiesty' and 'hopelessly lame.' There's no middle groud, no grey area. One day they're harmlessly amusing, the next day they're obnoxious and outrageously uncool, and remain in that state for eternity. Nothing is more un-hip than the out-dated catchphrase. A drunk dad at a wedding party yelling "Yeah, baby!". A gaggle of science students guffawing at Monty Python lines. Your idiot mate who still answers the phone with a gargled "WHASSSSUP!" These are some of society's greatest ills. Ricky Gervais made two whole sit-coms about it.

The whole point of comedy catchphrases is that they're so fundementally Not Funny that once the novelty has worn off, you cannot fathom why you ever thought of them as being anything other than monumentally irritating. The only thing comedy catchphrases have going for them in the first place is their newness - consequently a three-hour TV show listing 50 old ones just made no sense at all. The regular cast of assembled talking heads had precisely nothing of value to say about any catchphrase, because there is precisely nothing to say about them. At most (Ali G's "Is it 'cos I is black?") they distill the essence of the character to whom they belong, and in most cases ("Watchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?") they're just some random phrase that for some reason struck a popular chord at a particular time.

The Fast Show's shock & awe approach to catchphrase comedy rendered the exercise utterly obsolete anyway - you could do a Top 50 of catchphrases from Fast Show alone, and you could fill another Top 50 again with sketches from post-Fast Show efforts like Little Britain, Bo Selecta and Catherine Tate. To top it all off, the Number One Comedy Catchphrase was..."Nice to see you, to see you - nice..." which isn't even a comedy catchphrase, any more than "I've started so I'll finish" or "I have a dream" are comedy catchphrases. It's a catchphrase, sure. But it isn't funny. It isn't the punchline to a joke, or part of a comic routine. This is the second time a Channel 4 Top 50 has ended with a dull, off-beat thud - the winner of the Top 50 Kids TV Shows was revealed to be The Simpsons, which, similarly, isn't a kids TV show.

In conclusion: "D'oh."

A Tale Of Two Offices - Why 'An American Workplace' Is Better Than 'The Office'

The Office: An American Workplace (Mondays, 8pm, ITV4)

"All my favorite comedies are coming out of America. Always have been, really." - Ricky Gervais

Rick Gervais & Stephen Merchant's 'The Office' remains a holy grail for fans of smart situation comedy, a watershed for British television, and a benchmark for all that came after it. Initial scepticism about how the show would translate across the Atlantic was an understandable, if depressingly predictable, response from the sort of Union Jack waving Brit-comedy fan boys whose knee-jerk to the mooted 'American Office' was generally "oh, but The Office is so dark and awkward and quintessentially British, it's exactly the sort of thing Americans could never make."

And, in the first instance, they were right. The early episodes of An American Workplace leaned way to heavily on the UK original, and they suffer in comparison to it. But as the US show has developed and moved further and further from the tone (if not the spirit) of the UK version, An American Workplace has turned into the one thing those nay-sayers could never have predicted it would do - a fundamentally better show than the BBC original. Four seasons in, An American Workplace has matured into The Office' warmer, livelier, better scripted, more consistently funny and emotionally complex cousin.

This should come as no surprise. Many Brit-comedy fans chose to understand The Office as a triumph of 'quintessentially' UK humour, a black-hearted antidote to bland, self-satisfied, formulaic US sit-comedy, and they hailed Gervais as their hero on this basis - but this reading of the situation was always fundamentally flawed. The Office is not 'quintessentially British' at all; its enormous - and thoroughly deserved - impact was due precisely to the lack of a precedent for it on British TV (except perhaps The Royle Family - discuss). If The Office was an attack on anything, it was on bad UK sit-coms (something Gervais took to nauseating, bewilderingly self-indulgent lengths with Extras). Gervais & Merchant's key influences for The Office - Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show, The Simpsons, and especially This Is Spinal Tap - were all American. Series-long story arches, the documentary style, the focus on social faux-pas and taboos, naturalistic & improvised performances - The Office was built on an American model, not a British one. This being the case, it makes perfect sense that the Americans should do The Office better than we did. They haven't just changed the British version (Americanised, godforbid) - they've taken it as a starting point and, with the resources, acting talent and writers available to them, improved on it. If anybody could have predicted this turnaround, it would be those all-time US comedy fan boys, Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant.

Steve Martin - A Wild & Crazy Guy (1978)

Steve Martin: A Wild And Crazy Guy

I guess my favourite NYC purchase would be a lovely vinyl copy of Steve Martin's height-of-his-powers stand up LP, 1978's 'A Wild & Crazy Guy'. A well over-used superlative applies here: the sleeve is iconic. The bleached white silhouette of Martin vamping in his bunny ears, he appears to be alive with light, the enormous speaker stacks to the left of the image hinting at the size of the arena...this beautiful B&W photograph sums up everything one needs to know about Martin's act, the juxtaposition of goofball stupidity and genuine ART. The picture is so serious, the subject so wonderfully, knowingly daft. It's perfect. Popular culture has produced a huge back catalogue of images I marvel at; this photograph I love so much that if I had a copy small enough I'd keep it in my wallet.

Oh, and the record is pretty funny too. The A side (small San Francisco comedy club gig) is way better than the B side (mega-sized enormo-arena gig); the second half is lumbered down with catchphrases and skits re-hashed from his Saturday Night Live appearances - the audience (tens of thousands of people) have come expecting "Well excuuuusssse meeeeee!", and Martin has no choice but to lay it on 'em, and when he does the audience go predictably mondo nutso, and it's all nice & interesting pop history, but it pretty meaningless to 2010 ears, and without context just plain ain't funny. Many comedy albums suffer from this built-in obsolescence, and in Martin's case the problem is exaggerated by the fact that his act was hugely visual. Contemporary audiences would have been hugely disappointed if this stuff didn't appear on the LP, and for this reason impossible to criticise its inclusion. The one big bonus for 2010 listeners is that we close with Martin rolling out an SNL skit which remains hugely entertaining - 'King Tut', Martin's deliberately dumbo-cash-in disco track (and bone fide semi-hit single) about King Tutankhamun.

The first side of the LP is sheer brilliance, however. As 'clever', and 'highly original' as Martin's dumb-on-purpose, Vegas-entertainer-gone-haywire shtick undoubtedly was, I've always thought it would be equally accurate to simply say that at some point in his career Martin decided he was going to find it easier to adopt a persona, and the persona he chose was that of an unhinged lounge singer. He wasn't Steve Martin on stage, he was 'Steve Martin', and 'Steve Martin' was something to hide behind. Something funnier. With a funnier voice, and a cool suit. There are some great lines on the first side of this LP, and it musta been a blast live.

So the first side is really funny, and the second side can be marvelled at as a piece of comic history, but there ain't that many yocks for the modern listener. Perhaps the real value of 'A Wild and Crazy Guy' sits between the two sides, in the transition between the small gig & the enormo-dome. The LP is quite deliberately set up for the listener to 'compare & contrast' between the two sets - "wow. How did he get from there to here? What a journey!" The segue between them is cinematic in scope; Martin walks off the stage of a small club, and emerges instantaneously from the curtains of a gigantic sports arena, with tens of thousands of people screaming for him. A story is told, or at least in implied, in this brilliantly effective piece of editing. For this reason I almost don't think it matters that the second side isn't hilarious. It works conceptually. Maybe the fact that it isn't that funny is precisely the point - certainly Martin felt his act had become stale, and that playing to audiences of this size had sucked the spark and spontaneity from his act...maybe it's impossible to be truly funny in a sports arena, and maybe this is the price a comedian pays for the level of success Martin achieved. Like all of Martin's best stuff, the LP gives you something to laugh at, and something to think about, and, again, like all Martin's best stuff, the something he asks you to think about is the nature of stand-up comedy itself. I don't have many real, lasting heroes. Heroes are for kids, really. But Martin comes closer than most.