Be Excellent To Each Other

Cathedral - Ride


Duran Duran - Careless Memories


Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Senator


Suede - The Wild Ones


The Black Keys - Howlin' For You


Weezer - Buddy Holly

Spotify link: http://open.spotify.com/user/grim.../pl ... kvIO3JQgAC
Note that I couldn't find Senator.

Noes! Group too strong!

Hmm. If I had to sum up that Cathedral track, I'd go with "about as dangerous as you were allowed to be and still get on MTV in the 1990s". In short, the kind of song I'd be a bit pissed off if I had to wade my way through it at the end of a level in Guitar Hero.

Duran: way better than it ought to be, considering their reputation. Pretty bloody good, in short.

Stephen Malkmus - can I do a weak joke about getting Stephen Malkmus and former Manchester United goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar forever mixed up? No? Oh.

Suede - see, they DID used to be good. They DID. POP FACT: Spitting Image did a Brett Anderson puppet. I don't think it was ever used more than once.

Every time I see a track by The Black Keys, my addled thirtysomething brain gets them mixed up with The Black Eyed Peas, who are fucking terrible. Occasionally, I'll listen to a song that turns out to be by the Black Keys, and I'll realise how good they are for about two days before my brain resets to it's default Keys/Eyed Peas state. This is one of those moments.

Weezer: brilliant song, but everyone else has probably voted for it, so my points go to THE BLACK KEYS, DURAN and SUEDE. In summary: blimey, strong choices. Glad I'm not in Group E.

And in this group too!

I decided to follow the voting of Mark X because I largely didn't like any of this stuff much. I don't really like that Suede song but gave it one point because I don't like going for the obvious choice of Buddy Holly.

I hate voting for things I like as well

Man can't believe Malkmus was bottom before I gave it my 3 points.

This is generally the best policy, I feel.

The black keys get three, Duran Duran get two and weezer gets one. The senator song would have got the one point instead but it was a bit all over the place, the rest of the song wasn't as good as the first minute or so.

Cathedral - Rawwwwwkkkkk!!! Not my thing.
Duran Duran - Oh, fuck. Ah, who am I kidding - it's not bad at all.
Stephen Malkmus - This is not my thing (this is my mantra).
Suede - I think this has a lovely, lovely beginning. And then Brett fucking Anderson howls all over it. He can't quite ruin it, though. But he has a fucking good go. And he looks like an absolute fucking twat in the video.
The Black Keys - Hmm, it's kind of alright I suppose.
Weezer - It's Buddy Holly innit? My feelings for this one are pretty similar to how I feel about Birdhouse in your Soul - i.e. good, but not great.

Hmm... I'm really not sure on this one. I'm going to give it to Suede, with Weezer in second and The Black Keys third I think.

Suede - Simply wonderful - the best single of the 90s. 3 points! Terrible video though.

Cathedral - It's okay. My teenage self would have loved this.

Weezer -A great song. I recall watching the video several times when it was 'free' with Windows 95. 1 point.

The Black Keys - A nice enough song.

Stephen Malkmus - See above.

Duran Duran - Energetic, mostly in tune and pretty good! 2 points.

Nice to see a bit of love for Duran Duran (after everyone shunned Ladytron last week ).

I've seen them twice in concert, entirely thanks to Mrs AE, and they were brilliant.

Like most folks of my age (35+) I had Duran Duran pegged as an 80s band that had largely disappeared but were trying to limp on the best they could with the odd decent track (Come Undone) and still releasing albums on a periodic basis.

However, some time around 1999 Mrs AE properly got into them out of nowhere, bought up their entire back-catalogue, went away to Duran Duran conventions (hint - they are stacked with lovely women) and did the whole proper fan thing, so I got to listen to an awful lot of Duran Duran whether I liked it or not. (She also bought all their side-project stuff and books, the full package basically. Hint #2, Arcadia's album is fantastic.)

We then saw them twice in concert, once at the Manchester Apollo with the 'broken' line-up, only Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes from the original line-up, with the (very good) Warren Cuccurullo having become the new 'permanent' member and the other two I believe were basically session/tour musicians.

It was a fantastic show and we both thoroughly enjoyed it (Mrs AE perhaps more than me, who was down to the front as soon as they came on stage and was practically chucking her knickers at them).

However, we then saw them again in 2004, Mrs AE was pregnant with AE Jnr (visibly so) so we knew it was our last 'easy' trip away for a while. This was at the Birmingham NEC, and it was the reformed original line-up, pretty much playing the show that the video I posted above was taken from (including all that cool anime stuff).

And it was Absolutely. Fucking. Awesome.

Yeah I know, Duran Duran in 2004, it sounds shitter than shit, but it was one of the best nights at a gig/concert/whatever I've ever had. The energy of them all was amazing, the joy of the performance, putting on a sell-out international tour and filling up big venues the world over after so long away had clearly given them almost otherworldly powers, and the audience reflected it back at them, and they paid that back, and so on.

Plus they didn't play the cunts either, they had a new album to pimp and they had lots of 'newer' stuff they could have done, but they basically kept to the greatest hits and by fuck they rattled them out in stunning rock form, the video above catches some of the brilliance and energy of it, but unless you were there it's really impossible to explain.

Good long set, two encores, and I've never seen so many people with big smiles on their faces as I did coming out of that gig.

Stunning stuff, and I still really like Duran Duran now.