i just love the studs

I know there's a story to The Silver Studs/ The Studs but I have backwards negative fucking no idea what the hell it might be.

I went looking for information online and found something I'd written about their beginnings in camp rock theatre but it was a bit of a non sequitur let's be reasonable. Their biggest hit was 'Funky Feet' and they made a video for 'Dr. Bop' on, I think, the set of The Young Doctors. Seems like Chrissie Amphlett is in the video. 

I'm pretty sure Gino Latorre is dead. Lance Reynolds lives in New York, according to fb. I wonder what he does. 

andrew sachs

For precisely no reason other than, I suppose, the noble aim of procrastination, I have spent a lot of time on Wikipedia today updating Andrew Sachs' entry. I was particularly interested in Sachs' writing career which, until I came along, had barely any recognition on his entry although he had in fact written at least 14 (probably more) plays for radio and stage, one of which - bizarrely I now realise - I had actually heard when I was 13 or 14; it was a radio play with no dialogue. I remember my father telling me 'the man who plays Manuel on Fawlty Towers has written a radio play...' little did we know he had been augmenting his acting career with the same for a decade and a half. I don't think that one was typical, of his work or anything, but I don't know precisely.
I am surprised how much stuff can be lost, to be honest. My main primary source is newspapers, and I use Trove of course (invaluable but it mainly runs out at about 1955, with the exception of the Canberra Times and a few other things, and is in any case largely useless for things like Andrew Sachs, who is an English thing). I also like newspapers.com, which is however almost all American with two useful exceptions: the UK Guardian/Observer, and The Age/Sydney Morning Herald, up till about 2000. Tremendous stuff. However, I think Sachs' dramatic output (as a writer) was small beer from the Guardian's point of view and it tended not to discuss it much.
As usual with Wikipedia, women sit in the background producing children, but Sachs' wife Melody was in any case a bit of a mystery. She didn't help by sometimes being known as Melody Lang and sometimes Melody Sachs. Of course, the entry was about him, not her, so I just packed her in a little round the edges.
Spend any time with Wikipedia and you discover that nobody knows a fucking thing. I am still used to reading stuff and thinking 'oh, I didn't know that'. Wow I have to get over that habit, it's what babies do. So there was stuff in the Sachs entry about how Sachs recorded 'Shaddap You Face' in Spanish. No, you goof, he recorded it as Manuel - in a Spanish accent. Or at least I think that's what happened (I hope I'm not the goof).
Look, the weird thing is I have no special interest in Andrew Sachs. He sounds like a nice man, and in fact, I purchased his autobiography, published the year before his death, from AbeBooks, since I figured - going to be shut in here most of the time for a while now, might as well get some treats, like they do in prison. Of course by the time it comes I'll be like - huh Andrew Whochs?
But sometimes I get a bee in my bonnet. Nobody knows a fucking thing. They don't know how to research, or how to read what they find if they accidentally stub their toe on an unprocessed fact. The writing on Wikipedia is so shitful so often (particularly the music entries, Christ, I can spot the writing of someone who grew up reading the NME ten miles away). (Because I did too.) (But it's not the way people should write, now.)

the blow monkeys

So in 2020 I finally got to grips with the Blow Monkeys, and I have their first three albums. I am really enjoying them greatly. I am intrigued by Dr. Robert's formative Australian years and the claim that the group was initially inspired by the Laughing Clowns and also that their name came from a song by an 'Aboriginal group' that Robert Howard interviewed when he was a university student (I put that into their wikipedia article). I wonder how much they feel they were a victim of sound and style of the 80s; they seem to have had to bend in a number of different ways in response to the general mood (just like Joan Armatrading did I guess!). I think in the scheme of things the first album is my favourite, but I am keen to investigate their plunge into the depths of forgetting why they were ever in the music business in the first place as they twist and turn to the whims of their record company or whoever. Maybe, once again, I'm guessing about what happened and I'm wrong. I don't know. I do know they split up in the 90s and reformed this century and possibly are still really interesting I suppose I should also pursue that but I think my interest is partly just thinking of them fitting into the period in which they were a top 40 proposition. But their songs about hating Thatcher are cool maybe they have new political songs I wonder I should check.

joan armatrading

I can't remember why precisely but when I was in Sweden in October last year I watched a documentary on youtube about Joan Armatrading. It was an hour long, informative in a basic kind of way, series of recollections with JA and various producers, record company people and so on going through her career. I learnt about 700 times as much about JA as I had previously known, though there were still a lot of questions unanswered. 

Since then, I have bought almost all her 70s-80s albums (apart from the first and the third, which I haven't seen in shops). I love them all, although the copy of The Key I got is pretty scratchy so I don't play it much (I'll have to replace it). I don't want to name favourites, and I am personally of the opinion that they are a really fine bunch of pop records. Most of the album tracks - I'm going to say about 70% - could easily have been singles. At the moment I'm really enjoying Walk Under Ladders. It's stylistically diverse, some tracks very new wavey (Thomas Dolby and Andy Partridge play on it) and others more, you know, rootsy or whatever it's called. But it's solid. 

The thing I'm thinking about when it comes to JA is about her crappy marketing, then and now. It seems like half the singles she released in the 70s-80s, maybe more than half, didn't have videos made for them. She is notoriously introverted so maybe she didn't want to make videos, I don't know, but when she did do them she seemed to take to it. It just seems peculiar that A&M - a pretty decent, big vision record company in the scheme of things - weren't up for investing heavily in her promotion. What is even weirder to me is she hasn't had the 21st century repackaging/promotion treatment. I read an article from the 70s on her where she said she wrote many, many more songs for each album than she recorded. There must be a huge amount of demos, etc just sitting around waiting for JA to get the box set treatment. She's not some kind of limp pop star, she's a major artist and still has a lot of fans. Why isn't anyone ramping up the retro reissues? 

then...

So I am trying this new project which is really going to stretch my capacities. It requires me to draw and also to draw things again after I have already drawn them once, something that does not really suit my personality, let alone my instincts. Wish me luck. This frame is a reject by the way and I will have to start again. Not being able to leave the house (much) is a plus I suppose.

fighting with nancy

Nancy has three teeth (a mass tooth extraction a few months ago left her with four but one fell out). She is I am sure much more comfortable but oddly she has become food obsessed in a way she has never been before. The obsession is that of a gourmet as she begs for food but is very fussy about what she does and doesn't eat. Begs is the wrong word anyway. She bites my feet when I'm in bed and runs around the top of the bed and onto the floor to get what she wants, and we have arguments but eventually it is too charming to resist. I suppose I should get her into a timing habit - in which circumstance she would probably be more inclined to eat what she's given rather than try again in a few hours for something different.

*Update 24 March: This morning around 6 she was biting my feet to get breakfast and I did something I swore I would never do to Nancy, I got up as if I was going to feed her and when she ran out the door I shut it and went back to bed. She obviously took this in her stride and when I opened the door a couple of hours later she was so under my feet it was as if she had always been there. 

krazy ii

The early Krazy Kats are really intriguing because the strip was obviously for Herriman a bit of an extra responsibility/opportunity and he didn't see the need to be consistent... I had never really appreciated that, at least on some days, Krazy ate mice (although it's not clear here whether Krazy ate Doctor Hank or just chased him away and then thought fondly about what eating him would be like).

I could be wrong but I don't think once the Krazy Kat strip got up and running as a serious concern that there was much of a cast of mice characters, though I suppose there was no restrictions on this precisely.

But the other thing that I enjoy about this strip is that there's no real sense in which Krazy can be lurking behind the horizon like that. I mean that's really bizarre, even given the difference in size between cats and mice.