Wham – Blood and Porridge

September 10, 2026September 15, 2026

More musical genres I don’t like

From wikipedia.org / © Michael Spencer

It’s time to put poison pen to paper, or poison fingers to keyboard, and release more bile about more types of music I can’t stand. Having poured scorn on jazz, country and Irish, prog rock and disco music in my previous post, I’ll now address another four musical genres that I’d sooner poke a sharpened stick into my ear than listen to. And first up is…

New romantic

Just into my teens, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I naively thought it was a great time to like music. Punk had recently happened and on its heels had arrived the new wave bands. Even on mainstream outlets, such as the BBC’s Radio 1 and its flagship TV music-show Top of the Pops (1964-2006), you regularly heard the likes of Blondie, the Jam, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, the Boomtown Rats, Talking Heads, the Undertones and Martha and the Muffins. Some of these artists ranked highly in the singles and albums charts and a few even made it to number one. Thus, frequently, the period had a nice correlation between what was popular and what sounded good.

It couldn’t last. Indeed, I remember the moment things changed. Early in 1981, I was watching an episode of Tiswas, the anarchic Saturday-morning kids’ TV show, when presenter Chris Tarrant said words to the effect of, “Here’s a video of a song by a great new band called Duran Duran!” Then I found myself staring at my TV screen in bafflement, trying to make sense of the figures of Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and Andy, John and Roger Taylor, wearing puffy and frilly shirts, sporting floppy fringes and slathered in make-up, while they cavorted to the strains of Planet Earth. The new romantic craze had begun. The horror!

From wikipedia.org / © Ben Aris / Capitol Records

Thereafter came a flood: Spandau Ballet, Culture Club, Wham, Visage, A Flock of Seagulls, Classix Nouveaux, Kajagoogoo, the Thompson Twins, Tears for Fears, all of whom drove me up the walls. Vacuous songs. Production qualities that might have sounded hi-tech in the 1980s but just sound dated now, all dinky drums and plinky keyboards. A smug dedication to style over substance, with the performers lavishly dressed and expensively coiffured. Maybe I’m giving them more social significance than they deserved, but they seemed to personify the flash-your-cash, greed-is-good ethos of the Thatcherite 1980s.

Now you can reply to my moaning by saying, “Well, if you didn’t like them, you didn’t have to listen to them!” But actually, back then, you did. For a couple of years, the new romantic bands were everywhere, On the radio. On TV. On the covers of glossy new teenybop magazines like Smash Hits and Number One. In the newspapers – never more so than when the Sun famously ran the headline, ‘BOY GEORGE’S BIG SECRET: I PREFER A CUP OF TEA TO SEX’.

Things got particularly bad in 1984-85, during my second year as a student at Aberdeen University, when to make ends meet I worked in a nightclub called Ritzy’s three or four evenings a week. I was a member of its floor-staff and the club’s DJ liked his new romantic records. It was truly gruelling to have to collect glasses and empty ashtrays whilst being blasted by Spandau Ballet crooning their way through True (1983), and then Wham chirping Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (1984), and then Simon Le Bon conspicuously failing to hit the high notes in Duran Duran’s Wild Boys (1984), and then, oh joy, Boy George ruminating, “War, war is stupid, and people are stupid…” in Culture Club’s The War Song (1984). Happy memories… Not.

Honourable exceptions: David Sylvian’s outfit Japan were sometimes called a new romantic band and I thought they were pretty good. And I liked Adam and the Ants, at least, up until Adam Ant turned into a dandy highwayman. And though I’ve just given Duran Duran a kicking, I’ll admit that their late-career hit Ordinary World (1992) is a lovely song. In fact, Ordinary World has featured in not one, but two textbook examples of how to use pop music effectively in movies – Matthew Vaughan’s stylish gangster film The Layer Cake (2004) and Nia DaCosta’s superb zombie flick 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026).

From wikipedia.org / © Capitol Records

Hair metal

During the first half of the 1980s, it wasn’t easy being a heavy metal fan, as I was. Heavy metal had a serious image problem then. Both conservatives and left-wingers regarded it as music made for disreputable, juvenile, sexist, dumbly hedonistic louts. It didn’t help that metal’s most visible sub-genre at the time was all of those things. There’s nothing wrong with being disreputable, but hair metal was also juvenile, sexist, dumbly hedonistic and loutish. (And at the same time, kind of lame – I’ll get to that in a minute.)

Actually, its practitioners referred to the music as ‘glam metal’ but, given the extravagant, backcombed locks they sported, and the amount of hairspray they used, I prefer the more dismissive moniker ‘hair metal’. The movement received other disdainful nicknames too, which is a testimony to how disliked it was. The bands – Mötley Crüe (who added umlauts to their name not because they liked listening to Motörhead, but because they liked drinking Löwenbräu), Quiet Riot, W.A.S.P., Ratt, Poison, Warrant, Dokken, Cinderella – were sneeringly called ‘poodle-heads’. Their sound was also described as ‘butt rock’.

Clad in spandex, caked in make-up, jangling with accessories and balancing on their bonces the aforementioned ‘big’ hair, whilst singing songs whose lyrics sounded like they’d been written by Frank Kelly’s Father Jack Hackett character in Father Ted (1995-98) – see Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls, Girls (1987) – they were bloody awful. To my ears, they weren’t even that metal. They used poppy guitar riffs and harmonies and churned out an ungodly number of power ballads.

A decade earlier, God had put an end to the foolishness of prog rock by creating punk music. Thankfully, around 1988 or so, He again decided enough was enough and created grunge. Once kids started listening to Kurt Cobain and co, the poodle-heads became history. Incidentally, there’s a 2005 song by the surreal English indie band Half Man Half Biscuit called Upon Westminster Bridge whose lyrics sum up my feelings about hair metal. It goes “Oh help me Mrs Medlicott / I don’t know what to do / I’ve only got three bullets / And there’s four of Mötley Crüe.”

Honourable exceptions: Guns n’ Roses. That’s it.

From wikipedia.org / © Mercury Records

Thankfully, after hair metal’s demise, heavy metal couldn’t possibly produce another sub-genre that was so horrible. Could it? Well…

Nu metal

“I’d rather have my eyelids pulled out than listen to nu metal,” David Mustaine, the frontman of Megadeth, once remarked. Which is ironic, considering that the one time I saw Megadeth play live, in Chicago in 1995, the support bands included Korn, an outfit credited with helping to kickstart nu metal in the first place.

Mustaine’s disdain for nu metal is typical of many in the traditional heavy metal community, who thought the music of Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, the Deftones, Disturbed, Alien Ant Farm, Papa Roach, etc., sucked because it incorporated influences from hip-hop while neglecting the established staples of heavy metal, such as guitar solos. Mustaine was particularly sore about nu metal’s absence of guitar solos: “I’m talking about the bands that wouldn’t do guitar solos. Guys who get out there and they’d do rhythms and stuff but they’d never do a guitar solo…”

Well, I don’t mind heavy metal music not having guitar solos and certainly don’t mind it being influenced by hip-hop. Indeed, I love some of the bands who tried to fuse the two genres before the existence of nu metal (and inadvertently became the inspiration for it): Faith No More, the early Beastie Boys and the mighty Rage Against the Machine. In fact, RATM’s Tom Morello has stated: “For better or worse, Rage Against the Machine seemed to have planted the seeds for the genre that sprung up known as nu metal. My apologies.”

But I found most nu metal music to be a pain in the arse, a crime against the ears and an affront to the intelligence. The first – and by far the worst – negative about it was the toxic, misogynistic, bro-y energy it seemed to generate in its heyday. As Tom Morello observed, “the ethos of it tended to be… anti-woman and fratty.” This reached its nadir at the Woodstock 1999 festival when, during a Saturday evening performance by Limp Bizkit, the crowd erupted into an orgy of vandalism, violence and sexual assault.

From wikipedia.org / © Ruzov Dimitry

Add to that its fashion sense, or lack of one. Every nu metal band looks a nightmarish collision of chin beards, frosted tips, dreadlocks, shaven scalps, piercings, tattoos, baseball caps, beanies, cargo pants, baggy shorts, hoodies, sports tops and white socks. Plus the lyrics which, when they aren’t being misogynistic, are being whiny. The New Musical Express once summarised them as: “I hate my daddy wah wah I’m drowning do you know how it feels to be face down in a rotting corpse drownin’ in blood so ashamed of who I am… wah wah wah wah.”

Honourable exceptions: I like some stuff by Korn, Slipknot and System of a Down.

Emo

The journalist Gavin Baddeley described emo in his 2015 book Street Culture as ‘punk for kids not ashamed of being smart or showing their feelings… The look was a blend of preppy punk and geek chic… the attitude one of angst, unabashed awkwardness and frustration, making it a powerful draw for smart teenaged misfits.” He also detailed emo fashions: “…tight black jeans and skinny-fit band t-shirts, sneakers… piercings and tattoos… plenty of black hair-dye and eyeliner…”

Well, I have difficulty telling the difference between emo and another, equally black-clad sub-culture, goth. Yes, I know emo is supposed to have its roots in the American hardcore punk scene in the 1980s, whereas goth was a melancholy offshoot of an older punk scene, the UK one in the late 1970s. But all the same… I can’t help but think of a 2013 episode of the TV cartoon-show South Park in which the Goth Kids try to explain the distinction to a child-protection officer: “A goth believes that, deep down, the world is totally f*cked up, but an emo believes that, deep down, they are totally f*cked up… Emos are more prone to suicide but goths are more prone to be depressed that so many people commit suicide… Goths’ darkness is nihilistic whereas emos’ is cynical… Wait, I thought we were cynical…”

Anyway, I’ve nothing against the sub-culture of emo and its adherents. My beef is that emo bands – like My Chemical Romance, Funeral for a Friend, Fall Out Boy, Jimmy Eat World, Paramore – simply do nothing for me. Sorry.

Honourable exceptions: I’ve seen Death Cab for Cutie described, in their early years, as an emo band, and I like them.

From wikipedia.org / © Jezebel Parker

And now I have all that worked out of my system, I’ll hopefully return to writing about nicer subjects shortly.

October 6, 2023October 19, 2023

Du Maurier, du merrier (Part 1)

© Penguin Books

As Halloween is approaching, here’s a reposting of something I once wrote about the novella that inspired one of the greatest horror movies of all time – Daphne du Maurier’s 1971 tale Don’t Look Now, turned into the Nicolas Roeg movie of the same name two years later. And there’s mention of some other disquieting stories by her too.

I have a tiny sliver of a connection with Daphne du Maurier, the popular 20^th century English writer responsible for novels like Jamaica Inn (1936) and Rebecca (1938) and short stories like The Birds (1952) and Don’t Look Now (1971). When I was at college in the 1980s, I knew her great-nephew very slightly. Actually, I was better acquainted with her great-nephew’s flatmate and a few times, because of him, I visited their apartment. Its walls were slathered with pictures of George Michael and Andrew Ridgely from the then-massive pop duo Wham, cut out of popular teen magazines of the time like Smash Hits and No 1. I assume the young du Maurier and his flatmate had stuck up these pictures in an attempt to appear ironic. Unfortunately, it meant that thereafter when I saw his great-aunt’s name on the cover of a book, I couldn’t help but hear, by way of association, the irritatingly bouncy strains of such Wham pop-dance numbers as Club Tropicana (1983) or Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (1984).

For a long time the only thing by Daphne du Maurier I’d read was The Birds (1952), a story that because of its remote Cornish setting feels even more claustrophobic and desperate than the North America-set film version directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963. However, a while back, I got a chance to familiarise myself with more of her fiction when my partner gave me a copy of du Maurier’s 1971 collection Don’t Look Now and Other Stories as a present.

A novella about a grieving English couple who’re taking a break in Venice when they’re approached by two strange women – one of whom claims to be a medium – and told that their dead daughter’s spirit is trying to warn them against danger, Don’t Look Now has been filmed too. Nicolas Roeg directed a movie version in 1973 and it’s now regarded as a classic, both as a horror film and as an example of Roeg’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, which combined fragmented and elliptical narratives, haunting and recurrent images and scenes of violent and sexual intensity to unforgettable effect. Having seen the film several times over the years, I was keen to read the piece of fiction that’d inspired it.

My first impression when I started reading Don’t Look Now was that film and story felt like they belonged to different eras. The couple, John and Laura, seem more modern, liberated and chic in the film, though that may be because they were played by 1970s icons Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. On the page, John and Laura have an old-fashioned English starchiness and they try to get over their loss with stiff upper lips and a strained Keep Calm and Carry On cheerfulness. Also, the literary John and Laura are in Venice as tourists, so they seem less confident and more vulnerable. Their cinematic equivalents are there for work reasons – John is helping to restore a Venetian church – and thus know their way around better.

Then there’s the presentation of the story. Du Maurier’s novella is a briefer and more economical account of the events I was familiar with from the film. As it stands, it could easily have been made into a 45-minute TV play. (The film clocks in at 110 minutes.) It begins in Venice with John and Laura encountering the medium. The death of their daughter, by meningitis, is mentioned retrospectively. And the suggestion that the dead girl’s spirit is urging them to leave the city before something terrible happens feels like a simple device to kick-start the main story – wherein John doesn’t leave Venice, through a series of mishaps, misunderstandings and further supernatural shenanigans; and then, when he tries to intervene in what he thinks is the mistreatment of a child, something terrible does happen.

The movie opens with a harrowing sequence showing the death of John and Laura’s daughter – not by meningitis but by drowning in a pond in the English countryside. Roeg and his scriptwriters Allan Scott and Chris Bryant create a sense of a cosmic, all-encompassing evil at work. Even as the girl dies, everything that’s still to happen in Venice seems to be prefigured. We see John studying pictures of the Venetian church where he’ll be working and discovering a mysterious figure wearing a red coat in one of the slides. When he spills water onto the figure, its redness spreads across the slide like a bloodstain. John’s daughter is also wearing a red coat when she drowns and, later, so too is the child-figure John sees scarpering alongside the night-time Venetian waterways.

Indeed, in the film, John clearly makes a connection between the two characters thanks to the coat. Is the red-clad figure by the canals the ghost of his daughter? But this association doesn’t appear in the original novella.

Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now is efficiently gripping. But I think Nicolas Roeg’s brooding cinematic version, spinning a web of portents, visions and uncanny coincidences in which John’s doom seems pre-ordained from the start, is better – a work of art. That’s despite the fact that, by changing the girl’s death from meningitis to drowning, the film can be accused of illogicality. As the website British Horror Films observes pithily: “If tragedy has struck and drowned your daughter, why go to a place with an excess of water?”

Actually, with Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, I preferred a couple of those ‘other stories’ to the title one. And interestingly, nearly all of them share a similar theme, in that they deal with English people going abroad and coming unstuck as they leave their cultural comfort zones.

Not After Midnight is about an amateur artist taking a holiday in Crete to do some landscape painting. In a manner reminiscent of the hero of John Fowles’s novel The Magus (1965), he encounters a strange man and becomes embroiled in some equally-strange activities touching upon ancient Greek myths. However, while Fowles’s novel is an airy and exuberant affair where a Prospero-like figure orchestrates spectacular and elaborate ‘masques’, Not After Midnight is altogether grungier. The man putting the events in motion is a drunken, debauched brute and, accordingly, the myths invoked concern “Silenos, earth-born satyr, half-horse, half-man, who, unable to distinguish truth from falsehood, reared Dionysus, god of intoxication, as a girl in a Cretan cave, then became his drunken tutor and companion.” Du Maurier doesn’t say explicitly what bacchanalian depravities her hero finally succumbs to; but as he’s a teacher at a posh English boys’ school, we can guess.

In A Border Line Case, a young woman who works as a theatre actress tries to honour the dying wish of her father. She goes in search of her father’s long-lost best friend, to tell him that her father had wanted to “shake the old boy by the hand once more and wish him luck.” She finds the missing friend in the Republic of Ireland, living as a recluse on an island, mysteriously lording it over a cohort of local men, and engaged in activities that are probably illegal and possibly weird. Unlike the hapless protagonists in the other stories, the heroine here is a resourceful type. She uses her skills as an actress to improvise, hide her identity and talk her way out of tight spots. However, when at one point she suspects she’s stumbled across a secret society of homosexuals (“They were all homos… It was the end. She couldn’t bear it…”), you feel surprised that a theatre actress should be so wary and intolerant of gay men. Still, A Border Line Case is well-paced and balanced nicely between an adventure story and a mystery one. It builds up impressively to a nasty, if slightly predictable ending.

The book’s most humorous story is The Way of the Cross, about a group of disparate English tourists making their way to and then around Jerusalem. The characters and plot seem slightly contrived at times. It’s unlikely that a progressive left-wing lady who’s worried about the plight of the Palestinians should be married to a hard-nosed right-wing businessman. Also, a climax where two characters are stricken by unconnected illnesses and a third one suffers a serious accident stretches credibility. Nonetheless it’s an enjoyably satirical account of English folk abroad.

The final story, The Breakthrough, is the exception to the rule. Its engineer hero doesn’t leave England for another country, although he is posted to the desolate flatlands and beaches of East Anglia. There, an ambitious experiment is underway in a scientific / military laboratory, ostensibly involving computers, but really about capturing a psychic energy that surrounds people when they’re alive and escapes when they die. The Breakthrough’s blending of the scientific and the supernatural calls to mind the famously frightening TV play The Stone Tape (1973), written by Nigel Kneale. Bravely, du Maurier opts for a non-sensational ending that prioritises character over action or horror. Admittedly, some readers might find that ending a bit of a let-down.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed reading Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, because of the author’s precise and no-nonsense prose, her ability to pack a lot of incident into her narratives without letting them get too convoluted, and her determination at all times to tell a rattling good yarn.

Indeed, on the strength of this, I’m now starting to think of Daphne du Maurier as being in the mould of Stephen King – and not so much in connection with George Michael and Andrew Ridgely. Yes, better the author of The Running Man (1982) than the authors of I’m your Man (1986).

Expect more on Daphne du Maurier very soon…