The new Mister Fusty single has been unleashed! “All Seeing Eye” from the forthcoming album, “The Waiting Room” is available now, it’s b-side is a non-album track “Arthur’s Apothecary”.

You can listen and download an mp3 version here at Soundcloud.

Or if you want a lossless version (and to support the artist!) You can download using the player below, it’s only 99p for two songs –a bargain!

If you don’t see the player click here

I also made a video, it’s shot on my phone although don’t let that put you off.

“All Seeing Eye” – Mister Fusty from Mister Fusty on Vimeo.

Mister Fusty – “Chemistry” from Mister Fusty on Vimeo.

Here’s a great article about John by Bob Stanley

John Grant – Queen of Denmark.

Backed by Midlake, whose own album I found disappointing (sorry chaps), this stunning album evokes 1970s soft rock in the best way imaginable. For once a MOJO album of the year I agree with.

http://www.myspace.com/johnwilliamgrant

Paul Weller – Wake Up the Nation

“Return to form” is such a cliche, but I can’t but help using in Mr Weller’s case. He’s returned from his “return to form” album, 22 Dreams, with a leaner (and better) album. There’s still life in the old mod yet.

http://www.paulweller.com/

Beach House – Teen Dream

Victoria Legrand has such a unique voice and uses it to great effect in this languid and delicate album. Dreamy.

http://www.beachhousebaltimore.com/index.cfm

Field Music – Measure

A lot, if not most, double albums could do with a lot of pruning. Not so in this case. This album takes a while to get into but rewards repeat listens. It’s about time more people listened to Field Music because they are one of the best UK bands around and deserve big success.

http://www.field-music.co.uk/

Gorillaz – Plastic Beach

For me this is the best Gorillaz album so far, Damon All-Bran knows his way around a good tune and this is full of them.

http://gorillaz.com/

Josh Rouse – El Turista

Since he moved to Spain I’ve read that some fans are disappointed he’s moved away from his more country-folky roots. Those fans are buffoons, I say, because you’ve gotta move on and with this album he has beautifully.

http://www.joshrouse.com/

Teenage Fanclub – Shadows

The world is a better place with Teenage Fanclub still around. One of the most dependable bands out there. They may not be prolific but when they do release an album it’s always bloody excellent.

http://www.teenagefanclub.com/

Pernice Brothers – Goodbye, Killer.

Although it lacks some of the production sheen or the lush strings sections of some of Joe Pernice’s other albums it’s still full of great songs – as ever.

http://www.pernicebrothers.com/

The Divine Comedy – Bang Goes the Knighthood.

This album is brilliant, witty, tuneful and contains my favourite middle eight of any song this year on “Assume the Perpendicular”.

http://www.thedivinecomedy.com/

The Roots – How I Got Over

Until the last few years I was never a big rap/hip-hop fan, but it’s albums like this that make me realise what I’ve been missing out on.

http://www.theroots.com/

The Coral – Butterfly House

Definitely their best album so far. A classic sound with wonderful harmonies and production. Get the bonus edition if you can because the 5 extra songs are as good, if not better, than some that made it on to the ‘official’ release.

http://www.thecoral.co.uk/

Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest

I’m always put off by hype but slowly but surely I came around to this album. The track “Helicopter” alone warrants it’s place in this list.

http://www.myspace.com/deerhunter

John Cunningham – 1998-2002 Homeless House/Happy-Go-Unlucky

This is a compilation released this year by The Pernice Brother’s Ashmont label of two albums by John Cunningham, a English singer-songwriter. The latter Happy-Go-Lucky album is the better of the two, containing my favourite song of the year, “Losing Myself Too”. (You can hear this song on his myspace page, couldn’t embed it here – thanks myspace)

Blitzen Trapper – Destroyer of the Void

I’d not heard of this band before so it was a delight to discover them, “Lover Leave Me Drowning” is probably another contender for fave song of the year.

http://www.blitzentrapper.net/

And finally, even though I’m on this album, (on a track called “Fitness Suite”) I must mention Expo’s She Sells Seashells, a wonderfully woozy slice of psychedelic Americana.

http://www.myspace.com/expoh

For those who have Spotify here’s a playlist of these albums (the ones that are on Spotify anyway) plus a couple of other ones I forgot to mention.

Update!

As soon as I hit publish I realised I missed out the excellent Janelle Monae, whose album The Arch Android is a cracker. Rectified!

Paint Along With Nancy. Artist Nancy Kominsky presented this 1970′s show which, as the title suggests, taught people how to paint. It has a great breezy, jazzy theme tune which is quite hard to find online but I did find it..although you have to sit through 6 mins of testcard! (WHY?!!?) Just skip along to about 6.14 on the video above.

UPDATE: Hear the theme tune in all it’s glory here (Thanks Arnie!)

Farmhouse Kitchen. This series had another theme in later series but I prefer the original flavour. The track’s called “Fruity Flute” by Reg Wale and it’s bloody marvellous. You can get it on an excellent compilation CD of themes and library music called, “Girl in a Suitcase”.

Jim’ll Fix It. The best bit of this theme is the “ba ba ba”s backing vocals, I’m a sucker for “Ba ba ba”s. The show was, for those who don’t know,  a British Saturday tea-time staple – where a slightly creepy elderly DJ from Leeds would grant children’s wishes (“Your letter was only the start of it..). Best remembered though for the, still hilarious, clip where scouts are granted their wish of having a picnic on a rollercoaster.

Mr. Men. Kids TV show themes are usually the best so let’s hear some great examples. First up the Mr. Men (Original series) with it’s lovely theme, so good it makes me almost shed a tear. Couple that with the wonderful Arthur Lowe telling the tale and I’m 5 again. *sniff*

The Wombles. Written and Sung by Mike Batt, this McCartney-esque song is a 70′s classic, in fact the Wombles had quite a few chart hits in the 70′s, I think I had an whole album of Wombling songs as a kid, including the classic, “Remember you’re a Womble” which is actually a great pop song!

More great themes to come….(seriously).

The Avengers. My two favourite things about this theme tune are the ethereal strings that seems to float around the main theme and the “ding ding ding ding ding” bit, know which bit I mean? It’s at 0.37 in the video, you’ll know it when you hear it. Wonderful.

Are You Being Served? A classic from the late great Ronnie Hazlehurst, a titan in the world of TV themes, this is a classic piece of 70′s kitsch with cash register sounds possibly inspired by Pink Floyd (or was it the other way around?).

Grandstand. I’m not a big sports fan but this classic theme from the BBC sports show ran for many years. I’m not entirely sure why this particular video features a picture of a cake…Composed by Keith Mansfield, a library & production music giant, I found a great video of Alan Hawkshaw, another library music great, with Keith and the KPM Allstars playing this live at the Jazz Cafe, wish I’d seen that!

Dave Allen At Large. Speaking of Alan Hawkshaw let’s have one of his finest, “Blarney’s Stoned”, the theme to comedian Dave Allen’s long-running show. You can find a compilation of Hawkshaw’s genius on CD called Mo’hawk which is highly recommended. Strike up the Hammond!

More to come soon…

Pugwash – “Giddy”

Strictly speaking it’s not a ‘new’ album, it’s a compilation of the best bits from their previous 4 albums, but as it was released this year and it’s the first time their music been released officially in the UK I’ve included them. Without doubt this has been the best thing I have heard all year and a major discovery for me. There’s been few occasions in 2009 where I’ve got an album and love it so much I can’t wait to get to the nearest stereo to hear it. I’m frightened of playing it too much in case I get sick of it! Influence-wise it pushes all my musical favourite buttons, The Beatles, ELO, XTC, High Llamas, are all clear influences in there without the band being  sound-alikes or derivative. I’m seriously thinking of giving up because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write a song as good as “My Genius”. Pugwash are now signed to Andy Partridge’s Ape Label and all their previous Ireland-only released back catalogue , hopefully, will be re-released everywhere, so look out for them.

Spotify

Bill Callahan – “Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle”

If it wasn’t for my recent Pugwash conversion I probably would’ve said this has been my favourite album of the year.  Although I’ve heard of Bill and his Smog moniker I’d never heard much of his music until I came across this. It was the opening track Jim Cain that drew me in, it was very reminiscent of Lambchop’s album Nixon, which I love. The closing track Faith/Void is one of the best songs I have heard all year and I’m totally behind it’s sentiment.

Richard Hawley – Truelove’s Gutter

Much as I’d liked his previous album, Lady’s Bridge, this was Richard doing what he does best, mining that rich seam of melancholy and melody he does so effortlessly. This is up there with his wonderful previous albums such as Late Night Final and Coles Corner. It’s takes a while to get into but once it has you – it never leaves you. Beautiful.

We7

Spotify

Super Furry Animals – Dark Days/Light Years

Never ones to make a bad or even weak album the Furries returned this year with a stormer. Perhaps it’s a little more experimental and strange than their previous (underrated IMO) album Hey Venus! but still packed with great tunes. One of the most consistantly great UK bands. Cherish them while they are still around!

We7

Spotify

The Cribs – “Ignore the Ignorant”

I’d never really took much notice of The Cribs until I got hold of a couple of their previous albums this year and was bowled over. I’d wrongly lumped them in with a number of so called ‘landfill indie’ bands but in fact found out they are really rather good indeed. Now, with the addition of the legendary guitarist Johnny Marr, their sound has more texture. Perhaps Johnny’s best collaboration since Electronic or, dare I say it with Morrissey in The Smiths?

We7

Spotify

BEST OF THE REST

Other honourable mentions include… Manic Street Preachers – “Journal for Plague Lovers”, Joe Pernice – “It feels so good when I stop”, Wilco – “Wilco (the album), and M. Ward – “Hold Time”

DOES CHILDREN’S TELEVISION MATTER?

Certainly, when we started in 1957, the TV Company I was hoping to work for clearly didn’t give a toss about children’s television. Well, no, it did, just. It tossed about a hundred pounds a programme to spare programme directors and told them to cobble something together. So when Peter Firmin and I made our first film series about a Welsh railway engine who wanted to sing in the choir, we received about ten pounds a minute for the finished films.

Today, on the rare occasions I watch children’s programmes on television, many of which cost more than a thousand times as much to make, I can see how profoundly lucky we were.

Lucky?

Yes, for two reasons. One was that because the TV Company looked on children’s television as small-time stuff, it sensibly gave a free hand to the very sensible head of the children’s department whose sole purpose was to get programmes that were fun, interesting and cheap. The second reason was that because we didn’t have the money for elaborate equipment we had to rely on the basic hand-writing of animation, laboriously pushing along cardboard characters with a pin. Thus we were thrown back on the real staple of television: telling and showing a good story, carefully thought out and delivered in the right order for stacking in the viewer’s mind. Come to think of it I must have produced some of the clumsiest animation ever to disgrace the television screen, but it didn’t matter. The viewers didn’t notice because they were enjoying the stories.

Also we were lucky enough not to have time or money for lengthy conceptual Meetings. All we could do was try to turn out two minutes a day of film that was fun to watch and hope to pay the bills. It was a happy time.

Then, in 1987 the BBC let us know that in future all “programming” was to be judged by what they called its “audience ratings”. Furthermore, we were told, some U.S. researchers had established that in order to retain its audience (and its share of the burgeoning merchandising market) every children’s programme had to have a ‘hook’, ie, a startling incident to hold the attention, every few seconds. As our films did not fit this category they were deemed not fit to be shown by the BBC any more. End of story – not only for Peter and me – we had had a very good innings – but also for many of the shoe-string companies that had been providing scrumptious programmes for what is now seen as ‘the golden age of children’s television’.
Those days are long gone. Today making films for children’s television has become very big business requiring huge capital investment, far beyond the reach of small companies, and that has inevitably brought with it a particular poverty from which we never suffered.

Poverty?

Yes. In our time we had been able to found great kingdoms of mountains, ice and snow in our cowsheds. In Peter’s big barn we commanded infinities of Outer Space, starred it with heavenly bodies made from old Christmas decorations and made a moon for the Clangers.

Now, today, burdened with the search for the millions of pounds which they have to find to fund their glossy products, the entrepreneurs have to lead a very different sort of life. They must hurtle from country to country seeking subscriptions from the TV stations to fund the enormous cost of the films. Each of these stations will often require the format of the proposed film to be adapted to suit its own largest and dumbest market. They have to do this because, for them, children are no longer children, they are a market.With so many millions at stake the entrepreneurs know that the bottom line must be ‘to give the children of today only the sort of things that they already know they enjoy’. They have to do this because they fear that if they don’t the little so-and-so’s might switch channels and the Company could lose a bit of its share of the lucrative merchandising market.
They do have another difficulty. Because originality can’t be bought off the shelf, (and even if it could it would be too risky to consider with so much money at stake), the competition for quality-of-content, has gone by the board. In its place there has evolved what could be called a competition for quality-of-method. This requires small armies of technicians and artists to spend their time seeking ever more astounding ways for the heroes to zap their foes. That is where the huge money goes: on high technology and on the clouds of pundits who confer at length in costly comfort about motivations, targeting and market strategies.

Behind them, in the manner of mass-market publishers, the nail-biting money-people peer anxiously over their shoulders to try and locate some content, some past sure-fire formula that they can re-vamp and use again.

All this is perfectly ordinary – the demise of small companies and with it the elimination of integrity is just the predictable result of trying to turn a small craft into a massive industry. It is sad of course, because crud is always crud, however glossily and zappily it is produced, but that is just part of a general trend in human commerce, part of the way things are going today.
So does it matter?

Yes it does! The Head of Acquisitions at the BBC outlined the Corporation’s policy in a recent radio programme. She told us:

“The children of today are more used to the up-market, faster-moving things” and that “in today’s hugely competitive schedule we are up against about another twelve to fourteen children’s channels and we have got to stand out.”
As a policy that is, in my considered view, almost criminally preposterous.

Firstly because it isn’t true. There is no such thing as ‘the children of today’. Children are not ‘of today’. They come afresh into this world in a steady stream and, apart from a few in-built instincts, they are blank pages happily waiting to be written on.
Secondly because it simply isn’t true that children have to have what they are ‘used to’. They do want programmes that are new to them, programmes that are original and mind-stretching. They just aren’t being offered them.

Let me give you an example. As part of the same radio programme one of our old film series: Noggin and the Firecake, was shown to a primary school. It was heavy stuff, clumsy and slow by ‘today’s standards’, but my goodness how eagerly the children followed and enjoyed it! At the end they could gleefully recount whole sections of the story, and when asked if they would like more they shouted with one voice: “YES!”

Lastly, the policy is tragically preposterous because there is simply no need or reason for the BBC to ‘compete and stand out’. It is a publicly funded body and it should know that feeding the minds of young people is a seriousloving responsibility. We ourselves have passed this responsibility on to the BBC and it has no business leaving it to the mercies of a money-grubbing market.

Finally, let me offer you the following serious thought.
Suppose, if you will, that I am part of a silent Martian invasion and that my intention is slowly to destroy the whole culture of the human race. Where would I start?

I would naturally start where thought first grows. I would start with children’s television. My policy would be to give the children only the sort of thing that they ‘already know they enjoy’ like a fizzing diet of manic jelly-babies. This would no doubt be exciting, but their hearts and their minds would receive no nourishment, they would come to know nothing of the richness of human life, love and knowledge, and slowly whole generations would grow up knowing nothing about anything but violence and personal supremacy.
Is that a fairy-tale? Look around you.

Oliver Postgate 5 2003

Ps This article was commissioned and accepted by the Daily Mail immediately after the first showing of the radio programme. Unfortunately more important news of butlers and buggery in high places came up and they were, regretfully, unable to publish it.
Later somebody calling himself a ‘free-lance commissioning editor’ offered to have it published in the Sunday Mail if I would interpolate unspecified material of his choice into the text as if it was my own work! I wouldn’t, so he didn’t.

© Copyright Oliver Postgate 2003 – All rights reserved

http://www.oliverpostgate.co.uk/archive1.html

Here’s the song to be remixed…

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