Happy Now?


There’s an old song by Burt Bacharach - I almost typed Deacon Blue, for my sins, before common sense surfaced and realised that equating Deacon Blue with being the forerunning memory of anything other than the aural equivalent of drinking marmalade, all day, every day for the rest of your life, is a fate worse than death - in which Burt - or Ricky Ross, singer of Deacon Blue, declares He’ll Never Fall In Love Again.

Far be it from me to declare that Ricky Ross, singer of Deacon Blue, should regard himself as extremely bloody lucky that he would even be given the opportunity to fall in love - after all, and since I’m no Oil Painting (if I were, it would Picasso’s Guernica rendered in the visual style of a tribute band lead by Shane McGowan and heard briefly through a passing car), I know full well what singledom is like. I’m still in touch with my inner virgin, those hopeless years frantically masturbating the skin off my turgid and redundant penis as if I were trapped in an prison cell with only a dogeared copy of National Geographic’s Women With Plates In Their Lips Showing 2mm Of Breast 1973 special for company. Nonetheless, Ricky Ross, the singer from Deacon Blue, should count himself lucky his saccharine voice has enabled even to talk to a female of the species. It must be his singing voice : which to me sounds like what being forcefed sugar until you die must be like.

In the same breath, whilst my brain is hopelessly fighting against certain things, like, for example, remembering my endless stream of PIN numbers, my home phone number, the password for my Monster Account - apparently it’s poor form to use the same password of “Big Dogs Cock” for everything - my brain can conjour up, seemingly at will certain things that I absolutely cannot forget no matter how I desperately want to. For example, my brain can tell you that Ricky Ross is singer in Deacon Blue. That You Have Killed Me, by Morrissey, was, in fact, a bigger hit than any song by The Smiths. The cheat code for original version of Doom is IDDQD. That the shot in Return Of The Jedi has the biggest number of separate plates ever shot for a non CGI special effects show (159) - and that during the same shot there’s a continuity error of false perspective where a Tie Fighter doesn’t disappear from frame when the Millenium Falcon appears in front of it.



In the meantime, my brain is busy forgetting important stuff. Like, for example, what to do when attached by teenage kids, how to cross roads, what I’m meant to be doing at work. But ask me the catalogue number of New Order’s original Confusion 12” single (FAC93), and I’ll gladly tell you that not only did Peter Saville design the cover to feature one single overlaid piece of text, but also that the concept was later recycled for a tour T-shirt in 1998, and that Confusion has never seen official release as a 7” single, despite being reissued 4 times in a variety of around 15 remixes, in 1983, 1990, 1996, and 2002.

Happy Brain? Happy? When I die at the hands of an alligator attack because I didn’t know how to punch it in the eye to release its 300lb per square inch death grip, the last thought that goes through my head will not be anything important, but relatively simple… I wish I’d got to hear Chinese Democracy. And then it will all go black and I will be digested inside a crocodile’s lizard guts in redneck America. And that’ll teach me a lesson.
- posted by Mark @ 7:04 pm