This song used to scare the crap out of me when I was a kid. Test tube babies! Withered limbs! Judgement Day! It was nothing like the future I saw on Thunderbirds.
I picked up an old Zager & Evans album on vinyl a few years ago just for this track but my God the rest of it was rubbish, a horrible Folky-Psychedelic stew with social commentary lyrics that would embarrass your average pretentious Sixth Former. This is still a great record though, silly though it might be.
I went to see Ladytron on Friday night and they were bloomin’ marvelous. You know how you know what a band is going to play for the encore because they haven’t played that song yet? Well, this is Ladytrons, I imagine they’ll be closing shows with this one until the end of time.
The encore can sometimes seem like a bit of a phony ritual, unless the band is booed off stage you know they’re coming back and in the States I’ve never seen a band play more than one which makes it seem all the more rote and expected. I remember at concerts in my youth bands were regularly dragged back for second and even third encores by the enthusiastic noise of the audience. Now, no matter how well the band are going down, they do one and it’s lights-on-go-home-everyone. Is that only an American phenomenon or is it just the bands I go to see?
Well worth a read: Terrific article about the current nasty legal battle over the Keep Calm and Carry On poster (stylistic inspiration for the design of this here blog) and its origins in the Ministry of Information at the start of WWII.
The language of the original poster is an odd thing, it’s state propaganda with a particularly English tone — like 1984 written by PG Wodehouse — as if the bad thing they were urging us to get over was a broken teapot and not bombs raining down on our heads.
This is a rendering of what Zone One of the London Underground map would look like if it was geographically accurate (the whole thing is here). It’s not a new idea, the original Tube maps were done this way but the system had fewer lines back then and looking at the messy spaghetti above makes me appreciate the brilliance of Harry Beck‘s famous 1931 map even more.
Beck was an electrical draughtsman who based his map on circuit diagrams and his genius decision to ignore above-ground reality and strip it down to its need-to-know basics influenced the maps of almost everysubway/metro/undergroundsystem in the world. If you held a gun to my head and forced me to choose the single greatest piece of graphic design ever (but why would you do such a thing?) I’d probably choose that.
The design of the map has evolved over the years (and inspired several differentinterpretations) as the Tube system has got bigger and more complex, my personal favourite version is the 1986 map because it symbolizes my travels around the city during the time when I felt that London really did belong to me and I was taking full advantage of all it had to offer, especially at night. I should have a poster of this on my wall with the title “Good Times 1986-1992″ underneath.
One criticism of the Tube map is that it distorts the actual locations of some places in the city and the distances between them. Tourists can emerge from a station having no clue where they are or that they could have more easily and quickly have walked to get where they wanted to be — Leicester Square to Covent Garden for example. But I don’t care about the bloody tourists — serves them right for standing in the way everywhere — one of the best things about being a native of a big city is the feeling that you have some secret knowledge not available to outsiders (like where to get a drink after 11pm) and while Harry Beck might have brought logical order to the city’s unfathomable sprawl, London does not reveal all its beautiful complexity that easily.
The sentimental musings of an ageing expat in words, music, and pictures. Mp3 files are up for a limited time so drink them while they're hot.
Contact me: lee at londonlee dot com
