we like "disco"

 

Fabulous russian disco album* I bought for half a euro (more or less, though the postage probably ended up making it $10, if you average it out with the other albums I bought) from a discogs person in Belgium. It has a version of 'Venus', and one of 'One Way Ticket' which I cannot believe is a Neil Sedaka song. Nobody ever mentioned this before! Anyway I bought this album as one of a bunch of very cheap and interesting records, primarily because I wanted this:

(it's actually an LP but I couldn't be bothered shooting the whole cover - too dull) anyway I can't believe it was 13 years ago that I wrote about the appalling so-bad-it's-worse Side by Side but apparently it was. The LP was available for almost no money and I just thought - whatever, shits and giggles maybe it's got something of interest about it, I mean the fact that there is a tie-in album is amazing enough, although the people that named/designed/marketed this thing were hedging their bets by saying 'it's a soundtrack album' but also 'yeah, it's just an album with these songs on it'. Anyway when it came, great, it actually had probably a good LP in the sleeve instead:

Fuckin' insane. Well, I don't know, and nor do I really care all that much. But hey, while you're here here's something that I find absurd and annoying, which I care about more. You will recall that I occasionally bang on about this band Huon that I used to have. I still like what we did, but I don't expect anyone else to (there is one guy in the UK who is a fan, ha ha, I'm serious). I'm sure that Huon on spotify is about the 5 millionth most popular act on spotify, to the point that the people at Spotify would only deign to include us as a thing on spotify because... actually, I can't imagine why, because it's easier to do it than not to do it? But for some reason the other day I was trying to fill in five minutes after a podcast finished so I thought I'd look Huon up on spotify (btw we have never sanctioned the use of our work on spotify, but hell, it's too much trouble to bother doing anything about it) and this bizarre image comes up, of some idiot praying in a mask. I feel like squawking like a bird, what the actual fuck? I am genuinely offended about the association, and if there's anything at all I'd like to have removed, it's this gross image. I don't know what it means, although I assume it is more or less generic, or one of a series of generic images. It both shits me the fuck off and fucks me the shit off. 

* Update a day later: surprised to discover 'песня' actually just translates to 'song' in google translate. So how does this distinguish 'disco' from 'song'? What was a 'song' prior to the advent of 'disco'? Obviously there is a story here but I wouldn't have a bastard clue how to dig deeper. Update later same day: I was wrong. The album is called We Love Disco, but there is a subtitle, 'via Hello Song'. I am not sure how I made that error but I really wasn't paying attention.